In honor of the Obama’s campaign’s decision to adopt a creative commons copyright license over a traditional copyright, I’ve added a video of the Health Care Transition Team responding to calls for citizen feedback on how to address the health care issue. The video includes former Senate Majority Leader and soon to be Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Daschle (BTW — I dig the red specs).
Matthew Burton is underwhelmed about the whole thing. I’m definitely whelmed (which apparently means the same as overwhelmed). While the clip fails to uncover the magic bullet solution to the health care crisis, it does something perhaps as important — it brings thousands of people into the conversation about the health care issue. The participatory potential for the web is not that it will turn every American into a policy wonk. God forbid! Seriously! The promise is that it will democratize the process of elite selection. All the participatory tools in the world are not going to yield more that a subset of Americans to be engaged in most policy issues. But having an additional 4,000 voices in a discussion can help policy makers identify blind spots that a handful of “experts” might overlook. This video has amassed 3,700 comments in 36 hours. The big question for those of us who think and write about stuff like this is what happens to those 3,700 after they have watched the video and posted a comment? Do they read the other posts? Are they promoting their own blog? What results from this semi-structured, popcorn popper of ideas, insults, and negotiations? Citizens!?!?!
Comments 2
andrew m. lindner — December 4, 2008
In my Media and Society class, we've talked a lot about the potential of the Internet for deliberative democracy (thinking about things like wikis of proposed legislation, comments on newspapers articles, etc.). Most of my students are enamored with the possibilities that such ventures offer, but are concerned about the low level of civility in Internet-based debates where anonymity allows people say nasty things without repercussions. My own concern is that many of these opportunities for debate only attract extreme partisans. I'm not sure if that's empirically true though.
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