I’m currently working on a project exploring Facebook and public deliberation. In this project, I’m asking questions like: What does Facebook portend for deliberative democracy? When, where, and how do Facebook and its users invite or obstruct the development of public argument/s? How does Facebook’s very form and content promote or impede opportunities for argumentation? Rosen (2007) asks some parallel questions:

What cues are young, avid social networkers learning about social space? What unspoken rules and communal norms have the millions of participants in these online social networks internalized, and how have these new norms influenced their behavior in the offline world? (p. 23)

We know very little about the potential for social networking sites to help or hinder public deliberation, and what kinds of norms are involved in these processes. As the site draws an increasingly large user base, this would appear to be a critical subject for argument studies. Overall, I’m exploring the idea that Facebook has created civic spaces for a new kind of networked argumentation, which leverages the trust of anchored online identity and offline friendship toward social issues. Subsequently, I’m wondering if some of the communication that occurs on Facebook could be viewed within the framework of what I term diasporic-virtual publics. Users create a diasporic-virtual public on Facebook by threading together central and peripheral friendships from the past and present. Despite the wide geographical dispersion of these friends/acquaintances, each is moored in a past/present relationship that carries implications for arguments and arguing online. At the same time, my current analysis is trying to figure out whether various facets of Facebook are anti-deliberative, in both content and form. I invite your critiques or extensions on this subject. . . .  – Don

Given Jose’s post below, and some of our previous discussions about entertaining politics on Thick Culture–here’s a link to my new article on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in the Southern Communication Journal. You may need to go through Google Scholar or another university search engine to access it:

www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a910538638~db=all~order=page

If anyone has a chance to read or skim through it, I’d welcome any critiques, additions, random thoughts growing out it, etc.–as I’m planning on extending this research over the coming years (the next step is an article I’m currently writing on The Onion News Network). — Don Waisanen

Ken has an intriguing post below exploring issues relating to technologies like Twitter and their impact upon communication competence and media ecology. While many of these technologies are here to stay, I think that we’re all going to see many of them peak soon. Just as the car gave us traffic jams, Twitter and Facebook are probably going to hit their points of maximum capacity in the not-too-distant future, given their rapid diffusion. Yet I’m also not that concerned, at least for now, about these technologies being “minimalist” forms of communication. As Kathleen Hall Jamieson argues, “I love you” is a sound bite. This isn’t to denigrate developed analysis; I’m a big fan of book-length manuscripts and all the fruits of the printing press. But we might need to move the discussion more to one of “meaning” rather than linear quantity, to better understand the limits and potentials of new forms of social media.

There may be one trend to celebrate for now. Twitter appears to be opening up a space for more direct democracy (or at least a strengthened representative democracy) between elected officials and their constituents (see “Twitter and its Impact on American Governance,” www.communicationcurrents.com/index.asp?bid=15&issuepage=157&False). There is some evidence that, despite the limits of the channel, it is being used by officials to bypass mainstream media filters and framings. If this development continues, we’re going to have to rethink entire theoretical edifices created in the last few decades (such as McCombs & Shaw’s “agenda-setting theory”—which describes how the media sets the public and political agenda).

 How this will all work out remains to be seen. I’d like to know how much of a one-way or two-way communication channel Twitter will likely become. Right now it seems more of a one-way blast of advocacy than a considered interaction. Or, more troublingly, perhaps the form of this technology will foster a new age of assertion, rather than argument. On the other hand, it’s now well-known that the move from typewriting to word processing freed us all up to “overwrite,” being less careful about sentence by sentence constructions or the constraints of white-out and laborious re-drafting. Maybe Twitter is a countertrend to these developments—forcing writers to work within a tightly bounded channel where communicative impact, rather than spewing, becomes more of a norm again.

In Between Facts and Norms, Jurgen Habermas considers the ongoing question of how public, democratic deliberation might be moved from peripheral points in society to the very core of governance. That is, how might citizen opinions, social movements, and all manner of individuals and groups working outside the loci of decision-making push their diverse issues to the center of political institutions?

Obama’s change.gov is making headway on this question, and has thus far received high levels of citizen input via their online invitations for issue feedback. As I briefly mentioned in one of our last podcasts, though, it would seem equally productive to move some of the online discussion at change.gov to reflexive matters about the very “procedure” by which this mechanism hopes to best advance their democratic goals. Other bloggers are now picking up on this need too (see www.techpresident.com/blog/entry/33538/, “Open for Questions Round II: A Video Response”).

Many argumentation scholars have different ways of conceptualizing public deliberation. One traditional, useful scheme is to consider arguments as products (i.e. content), as processes (i.e. as human interaction), and as procedures (i.e. as rules or reasons that call into question such matters as forum, structure, etc.). My recommendation for change.gov and any similar online environments the Obama team is about to create is to not only make transparent the issues (argument as products) that might be debated over online, but the most useful processes and procedures that might be put in place to do so. Better yet, the administration should have a period where these considerations are also open to feedback from a public eager for change and full of innovative ideas—as we strive toward a good, albeit imperfect, new media system that decreases the deliberative distance between those with and without access to political resources and power. – Don Waisanen    

I just finished watching the Frontline documentary “Growing Up Online”—a fairly ominous portrayal of social networking sites, online identity, and current intergenerational tussles between parents and youth over the public and private dimensions of cyberspace (the full episode is at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/).

 The program draws its evidence from various parents, teachers, scholars, and young people who hold different views about the harms and benefits of online engagement among contemporary American youth. There are several vivid examples of how many young people are using the net as a place to create a postmodern pastiche of identities not afforded to them in their everyday lives (and that in turn, often change their identities in offline settings). At the same time, the producers explore the dark side of online communication through cases of cyberbullying, and some tragic stories about websites offering young people advice on how to become anorexic or even commit suicide. At the end of the program, viewers are urged to counteract these negative trends by finding ways to teach cyber-citizenship to students. One thing I noticed in the show is that, while the concept of “identity” is raised, it is both left a) critically unexplored, and b) disconnected from notions of citizenship. I would argue that productive discussions of cyber-citizenship presuppose two important considerations left unacknowledged in this and many media accounts of these issues.

 My first concern is that (if my assumption is correct) there is far too little instruction or discussion of “identity construction” below the college level in American education. The teaching of cyber-citizenship in this program is reduced largely to citing mantras about the dangers of online communication to young people—a worthwhile endeavor, but too minimalist an approach for understanding the totalizing online environments which now envelop our lives. If Web 2.0 has pushed us into a new era of “mass interpersonal persuasion” (see BJ Fogg), where one can assert themselves in the public sphere in a way that is rapid, morphous, and amplified to an extent unprecedented in history, there are ethical and consequential stakes in doing all we can to help young people understand the force that the symbolic construction of identity plays on this massified scale. It seems to me that the tragedies resulting from cyberbullying partly follow from a failure to understand the role language and images play in identity construction—in how we can ingest and reify social symbols in self-fulfilling ways that tend to resist alternatives. Folks such as George Herbert Mead can help lead the way here. There are also discussions in the field of argumentation studies about how “one’s self is an argument” (see RL Lake) that may be helpful in understanding the self as a deliberation that is neither purely essentialized nor some kind of fraudulent multiformity. Many young people swing between these two extremes in their understandings of online identity—with devastating consequences…

 This underscores my second point—the importance of understanding the relative fixity or fluidity of the concept of “identity” itself. The most democratic forms of communication on the Internet are likely to occur somewhere between the extremes of a completely fixed or fluid identity. In order to meet the demands of trust that community requires, it is helpful to have an anchored identity that locates one’s unique voice within a public sphere, while remaining accountable and responsive to the needs and concerns of others. On the other hand, healthy human communication is also founded on having a flexible identity, which is needed to adapt to others and meet the unique demands of ever-changing situations. As Neil Postman once remarked—have you ever met a “professor” who acts like a professor in every situation? A moralist who can’t stop being serious? Or a comic who is always “on”? We should introduce our students to the idea that polar understandings of identity often veer toward solipsism, and social identity is best promoted when paradoxically both fixed and fluid. Of course, this lesson is not unique to online communication. Yet given how selves are now being projected exponentially via the Internet, this would appear to be a matter with stakes that no modern curriculum or understanding of cyber-citizenship can leave behind. – Don Waisanen

I’ve spent the last several days at the National Communication Association convention in San Diego, exploring several themes in rhetoric and public affairs. It’s been a fitting moment to reflect upon this year’s election dynamics, and several panels on political communication have been wrestling with some of the data emerging on issues ranging from Obama’s oratory to the extraordinary use of the Web over the course of both campaigns. Rather than exploring any of these in depth, I’ve compiled a broad list of some heuristic points—what some political communication scholars consider the most noteworthy aspects of the campaign and key issues to continue exploring:

Most scholars seemed to agree that Obama’s speech on race in America was one of the most important speeches in the contemporary era. In a larger sense, several scholars noted that “Obama is a candidate made by oratory,” and this will remain a phenomenon in much need of further elucidation. Some noted that Obama’s campaign should finally put to rest for good any claim that oratory or rhetoric no longer matter. A couple of scholars argue that Obama has borrowed President Reagan’s rhetoric of the American Dream, but reconstituted it as a communitarian rather than an individual vision of political engagement (see the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rowland & Jones, 2007).

McCain’s use of the term “maverick” was diffused during the election, as the key issues he was a “maverick” on (torture, immigration, and global warming) were all issues that didn’t play to the Republican base. As such, McCain’s campaign was in a difficult box. We also need to recognize that in presidential campaigns we have a history of admiring heroes and then not voting for them. “Hope” was not a theme of the campaign, it was the result of it (Rowland).

In this election, Saturday Night Live did a great job of showing that woman candidate A does not equal woman candidate B. At the same time, we need to look more into the way in which Palin’s maternal image affected many women. She became for many women what George W. Bush has proven to be for many men—the kind of person you could “go out and have a beer with.” In particular, this should lead us to seek out differences between how many women voters responded to Hillary Clinton versus Sarah Palin (Carlin).

We need to look at the overwhelming number of political ads used in this campaign. In the 2004 presidential campaign, both candidates created and endorsed (i.e. a count of “official” candidate ads) approximately 250 video ads. In this election, the sum was 850 (Louden)!

During every debate, Obama’s greatest asset was that he came off as steady, cool, and unflappable. McCain was very different in every debate. In Marshall McLuhan’s terms of hot and cool media, Obama was a cool candidate with a hot response (Anderson).

This election was a fusion of tradition and new politics, it was undoubtedly a realigning election of “Chicago precinct politics meets Web 2.0.” Obama came across as a pragmatist, following a line of political engagement stemming from John Dewey. We also need to know more about Obama’s remarkable consistency and message discipline during the campaign (Smith).

Obama’s use of the Internet to drive participation was extraordinary, in terms of both contacting voters and contacting them often. That the Obama campaign now has a database of 11-12 million e-mails to contact will remain a key resource in governing. A highlight in the campaign was when 630,000 new Obama voters gave to the Obama campaign in September, apparently in response to the Palin bump. The average donor gave $86 in the Obama campaign, half of which came in from the Internet (Hollihan).

The number of videos about Obama on YouTube totaled 112 million, the number of McCain videos totaled 25 million. Obama’s friend list on Facebook hit 3 million, compared to McCain’s 625,000. In October/November alone the Obama channel beat the number of hits on the Beyonce and Britney Spears channels on YouTube. Polls demonstrate that people were engaged in this election through the participatory media experiences that were offered by the campaigns. The study of media effects is on its way out, people are driving their own effect change now (Bennett).

There is some remarkable new research out on the persuasive dynamics of Facebook. Stanford researcher BJ Fogg argues that a new form of persuasion has emerged in the structure of Facebook, namely, “mass interpersonal persuasion. . . . This phenomenon brings together the power of interpersonal persuasion with the reach of mass media.” In particular, Facebook has brought together six dynamics of persuasion for the first time in history, such as an automated structure, rapid cycle, and measured impact—in a way that goes far above and beyond what is often called “viral adoption” (www.bjfogg.com/mip.pdf). Weiksner, Fogg, and Liu also find another six patterns of persuasion in more specific Facebook applications, such as provoke and retaliate, reveal and compare, and expression (some of which are native to Facebook)—which invoke many persuasive norms such as “reciprocity,” “cognitive dissonance,” and “social proof” (www.springerlink.com/index/20652047j6801376.pdf).

I believe that mass interpersonal persuasion and the confluence of these influential techniques bear heavily upon the design and articulation of future public sphere activities. While there is much about Web 2.0 worth critiquing, we might remain critically hopeful about the possibilities for Facebook to create online cultures of trust and risk that perform valuable functions for deliberative democracy. Running through Facebook’s post-election newsfeeds, I noticed the remarkable degree to which many people engaged their online friends, of many political persuasions, in discussions over the results. Even when some of this communication was quite divisive, people still carved out an interactive space for engagement. Beyond my own experience, however, there are two connections I would like to make between Facebook and the public sphere.

First, in ideal public spheres individuals should be able to talk in an “unrestricted fashion” about matters of general interest—and these arenas are instantiated through conversation “in which private individuals assemble to form a public body” (Habermas). There are thus some bounded communicative conditions that individuals commit themselves to in order to democratically advance as much of the public interest as possible. In the same way, when Fogg mentions that Facebook makes it easy to build a “high-trust culture” due to a number of agreements and assumptions users make when joining and using the service, we can see that the structure of Facebook appears to lay the groundwork for communicating upon which much public sphere activity relies.

Second, what Fogg terms “automated structure” evidences how Facebook sets in motion persuasive experiences. As he puts it, “computer code doesn’t take a vacation or go on coffee breaks.” As such, this is one place where I see Facebook perhaps promoting civic engagement even more than, say, face-to-face communication. Facebook actually encourages members to further online interaction without their having to do anything. We’ve all been to public meetings where someone forgets to send out the minutes afterward, or follow up with an important e-mail to the group. Facebook has no such qualms, its computer codes make sure that we receive news of important events, and can even see public conversations occurring between others in ways unrestricted by the demands of time and space. If someone else joins a group protesting global human trafficking, they don’t need to tell others that they have joined, Facebook structures the experience in such a way that everyone will rapidly receive the message. 

A fascinating piece of research on Sarah Palin just came out in this month’s “Communication Currents” (a website that distills some of the best new research in the field of communication into bite-sized writings), helping us deal with questions like: Why has she been so popular among so many? In what ways has she been framed differently than other women leaders like Hillary Clinton? And what might we infer from this in the lead up to the election? (see www.communicationcurrents.com/print.asp?issuepage=117) 

The authors argue that there are deeply gendered, metaphorical identity frames of the rugged “Pioneer” (an “independent think[er]” and a “symbolic token of women’s achievements”) and authentic “Beauty Queen” (who “knows how to adhere to society’s rules for appearance”) that have been recast for Palin in such as a way as to make her fit into “the Frontier” narrative that has its roots in Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency. More importantly, the metaphor of “The Unruly Woman” which many in the media used against Hillary Clinton has been rhetorically refashioned for Palin, who can “revel in unruliness” because of the ways her other conservative credentials protect her from attacks as a “feminazi.”

I should add into this discussion that, the pioneer and frontier metaphors would appear to have a track record in beating out “intellectual” frames (perhaps a subset of the “unruly”?) in American politics. In prior elections, George W. Bush was continually using the frontier myth (e.g. rugged cowboy, Crawford ranch, use of posters such as “Wanted: Dead or Alive” of Osama bin Laden [West and Carey]) to power over his intellectual deficits. It may be the case that history is repeating itself here unfortunately, and if so, Palin may not have as much to worry about over the next month as this last week may suggest.

 Furthermore, despite much of the controversy about Palin’s appearances on television last week and average performance in the vice-presidential debates, she still stands a good chance of rising in credibility in the coming weeks due to these frames. There is decades of research on the concept of “credibility” in the field of communication. While we often talk about credibility as something someone “has,” it is a far more dynamic construct than is given credit, more akin to what someone “does” and constantly in flux given moment-to-moment audience perceptions. For example, even over the course of delivering one speech, a speaker can start with high credibility, lose credibility, and regain it by the end (say, all within 10 minutes!). If anyone, the career of Bill Clinton—whose credibility has gone up and down continually over the years, should teach us much about this. Given the time left until the election, I think we’ll see that Palin’s credibility will continue to wax and wane with these ongoing metaphorical campaigns, and the degree to which they are undermined or advanced by each side.

New technologies such as social networking sites are bringing diverse cultures into contact as never before. Whether or not websites such as Myspace or Facebook help or hinder democracy is an open question, and a topic many journalists and scholars are still coming to terms with. Some view these sites as devices for amplifying narcissistic tendencies. Journalist Christine Rosen argues, for instance, that social networking sites are committed to the principle “show thyself” rather than “know thyself.” From a different perspective, the Los Angeles Times today posted an article exploring ongoing debates about religion (in this case, Islam) on Facebook (“Facebook reflects struggle over Islam’s role”: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-facebook19-2008sep19,0,1968535.story).

The story notes that young Muslims in the Middle East, in particular, have been using Facebook as a means to dialogue with others about religion and politics. Many are using the site to create a space for public argumentation largely denied in the social and political structures of their societies. Some are using Facebook to dispel myths about themselves and their faith with Westerners. Most want to know whether cyberspace could potentially act as a tool that might create change in their own social contexts.

While these questions remain open, and I think that scholars examining Web 2.0 have often been far too celebratory about its potential, these online debates and deliberations on Facebook appear to be a largely positive social phenomenon. Many young Muslims seem to be finding their rhetorical selves by engaging in an online dialectic between the local and the global. Facebook is becoming a means to traverse the very human constructions of borders and boundaries which have traditionally enveloped their lives. At the same time, Facebook is being used in these examples as a way to create attention structures that highlight the existence of both multiple viewpoints and embodied others.

As the devout and the secular battle it out online, are the sides having any effect upon one another? Only time will tell. But I can’t help but think that, as more and more viewpoints are competing for attention online, they are at least teaching the world that choice matters. Whether or not people are persuading one another in these matters, these online debates evidence various communicators (of both tolerant and intolerant orientations) colliding with the notion of “options”—that no one construction or interpretation is all that’s out there. As such, these young Muslims struggling over Islam’s role should realize that (as Marshall McLuhan once said) “the medium is the message,” and that above and beyond the content posted on the social networking site, it is perhaps the structure of Facebook itself, as a way to open communicative space, that holds the most promise for breaking down various societal boundaries.