So Facebook is going public. The circle is complete. Now Facebook users can invest in the company that turns them into the product being sold. The forthcoming IPO will no doubt lead to shareholder demands to become even more profitable by finding more ways to extract value out of it’s product… (e.g. you and me).

This is not an impossible task. There is so much more of ourselves that we could be sharing. Gary Wolf’s fantastic NYT article about the Quantified Self movement illustrates the ease with which we can collect data on ourselves. From miles run to pulse rate to mood, the ways in which we can “operationalize” ourselves are limitless. Social media has made this a norm. As one app designer put it:

“People got used to sharing,” says David Lammers-Meis, who leads the design work on the fitness-tracking products at Garmin. “The more they want to share, the more they want to have something to share.” Personal data are ideally suited to a social life of sharing. You might not always have something to say, but you always have a number to report.

This culture of sharing is personally rewarding in so many ways. But we just at the start of thinking about the negative consequences of accelerated sharing. What happens to those of use who want to be more judicious in what we share? The “to share or not to share” question” may be the most significant social question of the 21st century. Do we rush headlong into a sharing culture or do we resist it? As Gary Wolf’s article points out there is this great superficial collective itch that revealing satisfies:

When we quantify ourselves, there isn’t the imperative to see through our daily existence into a truth buried at a deeper level. Instead, the self of our most trivial thoughts and actions, the self that, without technical help, we might barely notice or recall, is understood as the self we ought to get to know.

This operationalization of the self provides as many challenges as it does benefits. In a book I’ve written about Facebook that will come out in July I argue that Facebook puts an undue stress on our desire to “know ourselves” through our symbolic interaction with those we “friend.” I want to offer a deeper concern — what happens to the “self we do not know” or even know we want to know? Anytime we make the self a subject, we’re drawn inward. We see the world “out there” through the lens of the interior, or the personal. But not everything is personal. Of course, we always see the world through our own eyes, but what I think accelerated sharing does is “wear grooves” into our being so that we have more difficulty standing outside of ourselves to see the objective world as it is. This undermines the possibility of seeing or imagining alternative notions of the self.

In my last post I argued that we might be in a place in presidential politics where novelty, or the ability to create “high valence” moments carried more weight in presidential politics than in the past where organization and money was of utmost importance.

I argued that is was difficult for Mitt Romney to create positive valence moments and as such might struggle down the line. Today after his big win in Florida, he makes the unfortunate comment that he isn’t concerned with the very poor in America. I’ve already seen this circulate on Facebook and Twitter a few times. His propensity to only create negative “viral moments” hasn’t hurt him yet. Gallup has him leading his rivals in the national polls for the first time since New Hampshire but Gallup also has an intersting “intensity index” that finds Romney scores low in intensity of support for him as a candidate when compared to Gingrich.

If this were all about organization and money, we’d be done talking. So I’m putting out a “high positive valence” theory that posits that Gingrich will be the nominee…. but I’m not putting any money on it 🙂

Sometimes we political scientists can get a bit too sure of ourselves. I went around telling everyone I knew (including my classes) that Mitt Romney was going to be the nominee of the party and all this mishigas about 9-9-9 and racist named hunting sites and whatnot was the opening act for the big show… the coronation of the former Massachusetts governor by a Republican establishment that usually gets what it wants from the nominating process.

That may still happen. But I wonder if we haven’t entered a time in our political life where novelty matters as much as predictability… an era where the “noise” in our statistical models begin to carry more weight than the models themselves?

There are certain times where the social and political world are in such upheaval and parties are so fragmented that party establishments can’t control the process (see Goldwater ’64 or McGovern ’72). But I’m starting to wonder whether we’re simply living in an age where novelty and newness have a cultural currency they didn’t previously have.

As an Internet scholar, I naturally draw things back to the Internet, particularly Facebook in my case. On Facebook, the lingua franca of political talk is the sharing of a link. Shared links on Facebook tend to gather more likes if they carry “high negative or positive valence” in that they elicit strong emotions. As such, the ability of a political campaign to surge or fall because of a “rupture” in the normal operation of a campaign is not created, but exacerbated by social media.

Newt Gingrich’s chiding of Juan Williams and John King in successive South Carolina debates was the very high valence clip that spreads through Facebook and other social media like wildfire.

Does the rise of social media create a new age in presidential politics where the ability to create high valence moments matter more than a candidate’s resume? It’s hard to see Mitt Romney creating high valence moments (except by accident). As such are there dangers ahead for him? Particularly if Florida’s delegates ultimately get apportioned proportionately?

You can still make a case for the “demography is destiny” argument. A social conservative won Iowa. A moderate won New Hampshire. A marginally southern candidate won South Carolina. A more centrist, broad-appeal candidate is going to will Florida. I might have predicted this all along by just looking at demographics or at the very least party ID in each state. But I’m suspicious that there is more unpredictability ahead for this race.

In preparation for my California Politics class, I’m reading some of the antifederalist critiques to the constitution. Some of the core critiques seem ludicrous by today’s standards. For example, the idea that power should be concentrated in states because they more conform to the ideal of a small, homogeneous republic seems absurd, particularly given the size of states like California, New York and Florida.

But other critiques seem more prescient. Particularly one anti-federalist critique of the separation of powers that suggested that true checks and balances required more pronounced social class division. As an example, England had divided government because their houses were brokend down into a House of Commons and a House of Lords. Without legislative branches specifically designed to represent class based interests,

In a system without build in representation by class, “natural aristocracies” would dominate all brances of government. These “few and great” might be lauded for their intellect, ability, character and/or wealth, but the Anti-Federalists thought they represented a class apart from the “common man.” If we interpret “natural aristocracies” to be those that have been able to amass wealth with their talents, this critique becomes prescient. As this chart of the wealth distribution of Congress illustrates, the US Congress sure appears to be more like a “natural” House of Lords than a House of Commons.

The Federalists thought that national goverment would create the diversity of commercial interests necessary to prevent the majority from usurping the rights of the minority… in this case, propoerty owners. The ability to break up class based factions into farmers, laborers, crediters, debtors, etc. means a majority coalition would be difficult to form.

It seems both the Federalists and Anti-Federalists were right in this regard. The system protects minority factions from tyrannizing the majority but it also facilitates the capture of government by “natural aristocracises.” Whether they are men of high characther, ability or simply just the lucky or shrewd is for another post, but the fact that wealth is highly correlated with representation was presaged by the Anti-Federalists.

In a state where foolhardiness gets elevated to an artform at times, it’s easy to criticize Jerry Brown for doubling down on high speed rail in his State of the State address today. The much maligned and ridiclued project would seem to be the last thing voters need to be investing scarce resources on. Without passage of a host of tax hikes on the state ballot, K-12 education in the state will be cut drastically. And with a seven year old, I have a vested interested in maintaining quality public education.

But there’s something about Brown stubbornly sticking to his guns on this issue that strikes a resonant chord with me. In the face of declining revenues and blaoted public sectors, it’s refreshing to hear a political figure throw caution to the wind. Maybe the cost overruns on this project will be prohibitive. Maybe Jerry Brown wants to out do his former governor father. Maybe no one will be interested in taking a high speed train from Los Angeles to San Francisco (although I would). But the chutzpah involved in saying “we’re going to make this work” in the face of data that would suggest otherwise is heartening. It represents a wisp of faith in public mindedness and the belief that we can still do great things as a polity. The more sober political analyst might see this as a big waste of money, but the former English poetry major sees this as a necessary tonic in California.

Andrew Sullivan has dragged me back into thinking about the Obama Presidency through an essay in Newsweek geared at defending President Obama’s first term. He rightly notes the irony that criticism of the president from the right and the left paint starkly different prictures of the man. From the right:

Obama has governed as a radical leftist attempting a “fundamental transformation” of the American way of life. Mitt Romney accuses the president of making the recession worse, of wanting to turn America into a European welfare state, of not believing in opportunity or free enterprise, of having no understanding of the real economy, and of apologizing for America and appeasing our enemies. According to Romney, Obama is a mortal threat to “the soul” of America and an empty suit who couldn’t run a business, let alone a country.

But the Left sees him as a:

hapless tool of Wall Street, a continuation of Bush in civil liberties, a cloistered elitist unable to grasp the populist moment that is his historic opportunity. They rail against his attempts to reach a Grand Bargain on entitlement reform. They decry his too-small stimulus, his too-weak financial reform, and his too-cautious approach to gay civil rights. They despair that he reacts to rabid Republican assaults with lofty appeals to unity and compromise.

Sullivan, as he has done in the past, attributes this to a “long game” that Obama is playing where he is less interested in winning short term political battles, but is rather more focused on changing the long term dynamics on policy issues. If he’s indeed in it for the “long game,” then catering to the whims of pundits and partisans that want you to “mix it up” would not serve his ends.

But in an age of constant chatter, is the right type of executive leadership style one which makes no sound? Is Obama trying to get the Republicans to “snatch the pebble from his hand”? It has been interesting to watch. In my head, I try to work through the counterfactuals. What if he pushed back against the Republicans on the debt ceiling issue? Would the outcome have been different? Perhaps? But I am coming more and more to the view that in our Internet/Twitter/Facebook age, we might be best off with a leader who consciously seeks to offer a “non image” of him/herself.

In this Super Collider of ideas, images and identities in which we live, we might be better off with a leader who almost chooses not to place himself into the whirlwind and instead pushes ahead and formulates policy (aggressively when he has a majority, but more conciliatory when he has opposition). Is all this “leading from behind” stuff a recognition that this is an ungovernable electorate. No fireside chat is going to bring the nation together. We live in an ironic, post-authenticity era. Does he know this?

Is this some great, transformational president we are experiencing? Or maybe he’s just really bad at agenda setting and Sullivan (and me by extension, I guess) are giving him way too much credit. Maybe his weaknesses as giving the “big speech” that will bring the country along is just that and nothing more. Maybe caving on the debt ceiling was just a cave and not some grand “rope a dope” strategy?

This puzzle is what makes Obama an interesting figure to observe. He does this politics thing differently and I’m not entirely sure if he does it badly or brilliantly.

Micah Sifry has a great post at TechPresident on the use of Facebook “sentiment analysis” to explain political campagin trends. The gist of the post is that looking at whether negative or positive terms are associated with a candidate on Facebook is of little usefulness because it is impossible to detect irony. So if someone posts that they are “happy” Newt Gingrich is still in the race, it’s difficult to know if that person is saying it as a supporter or as someone who wants Mitt Romney to win. Without knowing other things about the nature of the Facebook user, it becomes impossible to know what “happy” means.

However, in context, it becomes much easier to predict what a poster means when they say they are “happy” a candidate is still in the race. The amount of content individuals post about themselves on social media sites like Facebook or through the profligate use of Google’s array of cloud applications is staggering. By taking all of that data, “data ninjas” can create startlingly accurate models that predict individual human behavior. It has heretofore been difficult to predict behavior in the social world because there is so much individual variability (the problem of inferential statistics as being “mean centric”). But the plethora of self reported data makes it increasingly easier for statisticians to create accurate models of individual behavior. If you are the unit of analysis, then accurately predicting your next move is simply a matter of having enough data. For all of our presumed spontineity, we humans rely a great deal on regularity and routine.

The implications of the product of what I call in an upcoming book the “fully specified self,” where marketers can with increased accuracy predict our behavior and provide us with opportunities to engage in that predictable behavior, are profound. Recent books by Eli Pariser and Jarod Lanier do a nice job detailing the problem with interacting with a medium (the Internet) whose central purpose is to give you back to yourself. I fear that for most of us, the natural response is to become more rigid in our core beliefs.

I wonder if the appropriate response to this is to intentionally break your routine (e.g. post something you disagree with or listen to music from a genre you’ve never heard of). In politics, this might mean consuming media from contrary views. For all the desire we might have to “feel right” about our belifs, we have an important contradictory impulse to live authentically. We want to be right, but we also want our beliefs to actually be right. The Internet does intersting things to this tension, giving us fodder for believing that what we think is right is actually right.

Can Twitter close the political participation gap among racial and ethnic minorities in the US? Digital inequality takes on many guises, from a “new digital divide” that separates those with high speed Internet access from those with slower connection speeds to a gap in the development of the digital skills needed to access Web resources in empowering ways.

The relationship between social connection and political engagement is difficult to wrap one’s arms around. On one hand it creates challenges for democratic life by compeling us to see public life through the lens of our personal networks. But on the flip side, those who value and cultivate connection might be more disposed to benefit from social media. A recent Pew survey found that Blacks and Latinos in the United States were significantly more likely than whites to be “early adopters” of Twitter.

Without looking deeper into the data, I can’t produce a good answer as to why this is the case, but one suspicion I have is that Blacks and Latinos in the US are more prone to communitarian values than non Hispanic-whites in the US who might be more individualistic in their world view (broad generalization, I know). If this is the case, Blacks and Latinos might be more drawn to the ability to forge and sustain community via Twitter. Twitter allows for the development of connections based on communities of interest. As such, they are more oriented to the formation of new, much thinner, bonds than is Facebook, which is mostly based on pre-existing networks.

A research question I am currently purusing with Jessica Lavariega Monforti at the University of Texas-Pan American asks whether acquiring digital skills leads to increased feelings of trust and efficacy among Blacks and Latinos in the US as compared to Non-Hispanic Whites in the US. If the proposition that Blacks and Latinos are more prone to a communitarian world view and hence forming thin-tie social networks via Twitter, then the social network could be a source for closing the civic and social divide in America. Too early to tell of course, but an interesting research journey to embark upon.

In my google reader feed sit two blog posts back to back. One called The New War on Science by Daniel Honan calls “climate change deniers” to task for ignoring what he sees as a near-unanimous consensus on the reality of man-made global warming.

Right next to that post is one called Climate Showing Some Resistance to CO2, which notes that:

Oregon State researchers estimate that “the most likely figure for climate sensitivity is 2.3°C, which is more than half a degree lower than the consensus figure, with a 66% probability that it lies between 1.7° and 2.6°C.” The data was taken from ice cores, fossils and marine sediments that data back to the last ice age, about 20,000 years ago.

Given the fact that we can’t know with 100 percent certainty that global warming will destroy the planet, how should the non scientist process this information to make policy judgments?