Canada is in the midst of a federal election and you can read posts covering it by myself on r h i z o m i c o n and Impolitical on our respective blogs. Lorne Gunter in the National Post is mad as hell and he’s not taking it anymore. His beef? All of this social media in politics hoopla::

“Oh, please, spare me. Social media – services such as Twitter and Facebook – are not going to swing the current federal election away from the Tories and in favour of the Liberals, NDP or Green party, no matter how much anti-Harper activists and reporters wish they could.”

While he acknowledges that social media is a useful tool, he’s also making sweeping generalizations about their effects::

“But they don’t win or lose elections on their own (or pull off Middle Eastern revolutions), no matter how much social media devotees in newsrooms and elsewhere claim they do.”

He seems particularly perturbed by the shitharperdid website and this supposedly gushing Vancouver Sun article.

“The Vancouver Sun story claims 2 million web surfers quickly hit on the www.shitharperdid.ca site. Great, so they went to a site run by like-minded lefties and had their prejudices confirmed. Whoopee.”

He drifts into a Malcolm Gladwell argument that social media promotes just “one click activism” and doesn’t really engender any real persuasion. Here on ThickCulture, we have discussed Malcolm Gladwell’s downplaying and concerns about social media in the social activism arena, here, here, and here.

Lorne argues that social media campaigns are largely ineffectual, citing anti-prorogation and strategic voting efforts. Then, he loses it and goes off on Harper Derangement Syndrome as the latest manifestation of a leftist affliction along the lines of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Well, the left has no monopoly on demonizing the other side.

The problem with Lorne’s analysis is his narrow definition of success and assumption that social media merely preaches to the converted. There are three things wrong with what he’s saying:

1. It assumes a narrow definition of efficacy
2. It ignores the “mere exposure” effect
3. It ignores the marketing concept of “segmentation”

Efficacy

Gunter suggests that social media doesn’t win elections on their own, but nobody is really advocating that they are. Naheed Nenshi, the Calgary mayor whose campaign last fall was attributed to the use of social media notes that his campaign was based on ideas. Social media helped to personalize his campaign to make it salient to voters. I don’t think Gunter would quibble with this, but I think he underestimates the effects of content that “preaches to the converted” and the persuasive effects of content that goes viral.

When the March 2007 anti-Hillary Clinton Vote Different video went viral {posted by a designer who worked for the firm that designed Obama’s website}, Obama’s polling numbers didn’t budge. Guess what? That month, his contributions did, quite considerably. My point being is that the effects of social media may not be straightforward and political strategy needs to take account of this. The preaching to the base aspect of social media that Gunter views as a waste of time can help a campaign motivate its loyals and turn them into activists. Social media can also increase the exposure and salience of a party, which segues into the next issue.

The “Mere Exposure” Effect

Decades ago, social psychologist Robert Zajonc found that people can be persuaded to have positive inferences about an object {or brand, party, or candidate} through increased exposure. So, controlling for aesthetics and other source material and content characteristics, Zajonc found that increasing exposure leads to higher favourable attitudes. In effect, a “familiarity breeds contentment” route to persuasion that doesn’t require any real substance to the content. This explains how the ubiquity of Starbucks builds the brand with relatively little advertising. Social media can have the same effect. Anti-Harper sites can persuade by just going viral and entering into voter consciousness. The challenge is cutting through the clutter to get that exposure, i.e., coming up with something that resonates and goes viral.

Segmentation: It’s the Young Voters, Stupid

A big topic this election is the youth vote. The 2008 turnout for those 18-24 was 37%, compared to 58% overall, a historic low. Interestingly, some view this as likely to worsen, as prevailing attitudes deem voting as a choice rather than a duty [Also, see StatCan 2005 pdf youth voting/civic engagement report]. The youth vote is a prime target of sites like shitharperdid.ca and the youth…have more of a tendency to not vote Conservative. Getting the youth mobilized, along the lines of the Rock the Vote campaign in 1992, is tricky business that cannot be easily replicated. Nevertheless, sites targeting the youth aren’t necessarily “one-click activism” that has no effect.

It’s About Engagement

At the end of the day, engagement matters. I think it’s the height of arrogance for Gunter to state that social media cannot swing the federal election. I’m curious what Gunther’s thoughts are on the Conservative Party’s efforts to use the web and social media to scare voters about how there “might” be an iPod tax with false claims that IP expert Michael Geist has debunked.

The A Channel news in Victoria gets it, as does NDP Leader Jack Layton who used the Twitter term “#fail” {hashtag fail} in the English debates last week::

The idea that social media can increase youth engagement of “square” politics through sites young people use and help to make politics less intimidating are part of the democratizing potential of the web.

I’m not a big fan of video games, but during the last break, my poor sister-in-law had to suffer as our family gradually became more and more addicted to the game “Angry Birds” on her Iphone. At the same time, as a scholar, I’m intrigued by the way in which persuasion is leveraged in digital environments. Charles Mauro has a great article breaking down the question, “why is an interface so engaging that users cannot stop interacting with it?” Moreover:

“Why is it that over 50 million individuals have downloaded this simple game? Many paid a few dollars or more for the advanced version. More compelling is the fact that not only do huge numbers download this game, they play it with such focus that the total number of hours consumed by Angry Birds players world-wide is roughly 200 million minutes a DAY, which translates into 1.2 billion hours a year. To compare, all person-hours spent creating and updating Wikipedia totals about 100 million hours over the entire life span of Wikipedia (Neiman Journalism Lab). I say these Angry Birds are clearly up to something worth looking into. Why is this seemly simple game so massively compelling? Creating truly engaging software experiences is far more complex than one might assume, even in the simplest of computer games. Here is some of the cognitive science behind why Angry Birds is a truly winning user experience.”

I think Mauro’s conclusions may have lots of applications beyond the domain of video games, perhaps in political campaigns, etc. Read on for a terrific look at how such compelling and/or totalizing experiences can be crafted here.

Rick Mercer hits another one out of the park. For those American readers who are unfamiliar with Mercer, think Jon Stewart but Canadianized. Our leading comedian who hits on political issues and who will, clearly, speak truth to power.

For more on the insanity going on in Canada at the moment, with respect to Mr. Harper’s directive that the Government of Canada be referred to in official government communications as the “Harper Government,” see this recent Canadian Press report.

From Robert Wright’s New York Times review of Putnam and Campbell’s American Grace:

gaining an evangelical friend leads to a warmer assessment of evangelicals — by seven degrees on a “feeling thermometer,” to be exact — and gaining a non­religious friend brings four degrees of added warmth toward the nonreligious.

This suggests that the best antidote to religious intolerance is more religious pluralism. As numbers of Buddhists, Mormons and Muslims grow in the US and proliferate around the country, negative perceptions will be reduced. I look forward to reading their book, particularly how they reconcile Putnam’s hunkering theory that posits a negative relationship between neighborhood diversity and trust, with this finding about religious diversity.  Is race/ethnic diversity qualitatively different than religious diversity in how it affects trust?  It would seem to be.  It is conceivable than in a generation, we see interfaith tension between Christians and Muslims are significantly reduced.

My sense is that what led Putnam down this road is the potential power of religion as a “bridge” between racial and ethnic difference.  Wright’s has an interesting insight about the emerging rift between the “religious” and “non-religious” in society being a rather new cultural chasm.   More than the “clash of civilizations” the religious-non-religious divide  might be what defines the “culture war” for the next few decades.  It’s worth thinking about how the religious and self-identified non-religious talk with each other.  I’m proud to say that my campus seems to be on the forefront of having conversations between these groups.  Can athiests see the value of faith in serving as a central organizing principle for vast numbers of people and can the religious recognize that individuals can construct legitimate  ethical systems without appeals to faith-based systems?

Mouffe on why more robust, thicker conceptions of citizenship are needed in public affairs:

“By privileging rationality, both the deliberative and aggregative [political] perspectives leave aside a central element which is the crucial role played by passions and affects in securing allegiance to democratic values. . . . The failure of current democratic theory to tackle the question of citizenship is the consequence of their operating with a conception of the subject which sees individual as prior to society, bearers of natural right and either utility-maximizing agents or rational subjects. In all cases they are abstracted from social and power relations, language, culture and the whole set of practices that make agency possible. What is precluded in these rationalistic approaches is the very question of what are the conditions of existence of a democratic subject.” (Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, New York, Verso, 1996, pp. 95-96)

Guest Post by Chuck Raymond

Chuck is a NYC artist who has worked as an illustrator since the early 1980s. His fine art typically involves political themes and cultural critiques, a selection of which can be seen on flickr.

I’ve been saying nobody on network TV can get away with progressive views as David Letterman can under his long held guise as an idiot, although it’s a tired ruse as he’s on “it” when all have ceased. Nobody has a devastating follow up question as he does and that’s including cable!

Rand Paul (R-KY) was was on last Thursday night (February 24) and I waited wondering if he was going to go after him and he did as Paul didn’t get in one thing without a withering rebuttal. Case in point, Letterman does his “aw shucks” routine about the implications of the deficit, tax policy and the wealthy, and educational spending. Letterman countered by saying he isn’t buying what Paul is selling [11m 11sec], which was mostly tired, inconsistent Libertarian rhetoric. On the one hand, Paul wants to shrink the government and reduce the use of defense and green energy contractors, which he feels are a waste. On the other hand, he wants to increase the private sector. It seems like Paul is defining public and private as it suits him and talking out of both sides of his mouth. Government spending that goes to the private sector is bad, yet, private enterprise can do no wrong? I guess he was asleep during the subprime fiasco and resultant financial meltdown. At the core of Paul’s Tea Party approach to government is spending as little as possible and spending only on things he agrees with. Efficiency trumps fairness, access, or justice.

Paul came across like the corporate shill he is. When Dave advocated that maybe rather than looking at cutting education spending (which Paul painted to be a boondoggle) and that perhaps the US should spend more, Paul responded with “competition is good” worthy of the 80s Gordon Gekko. Speaking of the 80s, Letterman poked fun of Paul’s dated look, “I noticed you’re wearing jeans. Is that typical Kentucky senatorial garb?”

As scholars begin to tease out many of the factors in the Egyptian revolution and beyond, it needs emphasized that once again the affective dimensions of such struggles should not remain excluded from our analyses. Anna Sussman has an interesting article in The Atlantic demonstrating some of the ways that irony, satire, and other seriocomic forms were used to create solidarity and propel citizen mobilizations in Egypt.

Protestors held signs in Tahrir square imploring “Leave, my arm hurts” and “Leave, I want to shower/see my wife/shave/get married.” Of particular note is the way in which administration appeals were used as material for comic fodder. I think that the existence of such discourses in these matters continues to demonstrate two points about the role of humor in politics: a) it still remains highly undertheorized in a way that is no longer adequate for present conditions, and more so, b) that in everyday practice, it blends with a variety of other ways of communicating to create interactional effects larger than the sum of their parts.

Worth a read today in its entirety, here is the beginning of Lakoff’s weekend piece on Conservatives and what is at stake in the Wisconsin conflict:

–Dedicated to the peaceful protestors in Wisconsin, February 19, 2011.

The central issue in our political life is not being discussed. At stake is the moral basis of American democracy.

The individual issues are all too real: assaults on unions, public employees, women’s rights, immigrants, the environment, health care, voting rights, food safety, pensions, prenatal care, science, public broadcasting, and on and on.

Budget deficits are a ruse, as we’ve seen in Wisconsin, where the governor turned a surplus into a deficit by providing corporate tax breaks, and then used the deficit as a ploy to break the unions, not just in Wisconsin, but seeking to be the first domino in a nationwide conservative movement.

Deficits can be addressed by raising revenue, plugging tax loopholes, putting people to work, and developing the economy long-term in all the ways the president has discussed. But deficits are not what really matters to conservatives.

Conservatives really want to change the basis of American life, to make America run according to the conservative moral worldview in all areas of life.

Paul Krugman wrote on Monday about the power play that is at work in Wisconsin in trying to bust the unions:

In principle, every American citizen has an equal say in our political process. In practice, of course, some of us are more equal than others. Billionaires can field armies of lobbyists; they can finance think tanks that put the desired spin on policy issues; they can funnel cash to politicians with sympathetic views (as the Koch brothers did in the case of Mr. Walker). On paper, we’re a one-person-one-vote nation; in reality, we’re more than a bit of an oligarchy, in which a handful of wealthy people dominate.

Given this reality, it’s important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions.

You don’t have to love unions, you don’t have to believe that their policy positions are always right, to recognize that they’re among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle- and working-class Americans, as opposed to the wealthy. Indeed, if America has become more oligarchic and less democratic over the last 30 years — which it has — that’s to an important extent due to the decline of private-sector unions.

And now Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to get rid of public-sector unions, too.

There’s a bitter irony here. The fiscal crisis in Wisconsin, as in other states, was largely caused by the increasing power of America’s oligarchy. After all, it was superwealthy players, not the general public, who pushed for financial deregulation and thereby set the stage for the economic crisis of 2008-9, a crisis whose aftermath is the main reason for the current budget crunch. And now the political right is trying to exploit that very crisis, using it to remove one of the few remaining checks on oligarchic influence.

So will the attack on unions succeed? I don’t know. But anyone who cares about retaining government of the people by the people should hope that it doesn’t.

For more background on this conflict, see Ezra Klein on the budget impact of the Governor’s tax cuts and this piece on the billionaire Koch brothers backing the Governor’s anti-union moves.

This is clearly an epic political battle playing out in Wisconsin with national implications for the U.S. Similarly, the conflict may prove instructive for Canada, also facing a very large budget deficit and presently led by a very right wing federal leader who likely sees similar opportunities to exploit as the nation will have to start grappling with that deficit in coming years.

The above picture captures Canada’s Public Safety Minister Vic Toews during a sleepy Sunday afternoon cybersecurity public relations event held back on October 3, 2010. That Sunday afternoon event marked the official announcement of Canada’s cybersecurity strategy. It has turned out to be a rather unfortunate photo-op at the present moment. Canada was hit with major news this past week (that has actually been bubbling for a few weeks now) about a cyberattack against our government systems of Chinese origin. See, for example: “Foreign hackers attack Canadian government,”Chinese hackers targeted House of Commons.”

The talking points were deployed to downplay the attack, as if little of consequence had happened. Prime Minister Harper and Toews spoke on Thursday about the matter, Harper in what seem to be newly perfected dulcet tones that characterize his manner in recent months:

But he said at a press conference in Toronto that he recognized cybersecurity was “a growing issue of importance, not just in this country, but across the world.”

He added that in anticipating potential cyberattacks, “we have a strategy in place to try and evolve our systems as those who would attack them become more sophisticated.”

Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said he could not speak about details pertaining to security-related incidents, but he said the government takes such threats seriously and has “measures in place” to address them.

Lulling Canadians to sleep, as they so expertly do. It’s as if nothing, really, bothers these guys. Cyberattacks are everywhere, not just in Canada. What’s more, they explained, a government strategy is in place, the October launched strategy. The Harper government strategy is so successful, in fact, that the computers of Treasury Board, Finance and National Defence have been attacked over the past few weeks and the hackers “also cracked into the computer system of the House of Commons.” The severity of the breach is canvassed in the video report from CBC below, which reports the hackers “trolled government networks for weeks without a trace” for example. See also this expert: “…even in just a few seconds, if it was properly targeted — and it sounds like it was targeted — information of immense value could have been exchanged.” It’s a heck of a strategy that’s in place.

Canadians have been told there will be no effect on the upcoming budget, presently thought to be forthcoming on March 22 or March 29, a budget which will be a confidence vote and could see the defeat of the government, provoking a spring election. How the government is able to assure us, however, that no information pertinent to the budget has been lost is unclear. A security expert cited in the New York Times reporting on the breach was not convinced. We can imagine the fallout if the day after the budget were to be released any suspicious market moves were to occur. That’s a matter of speculation at the moment, given the uncertainty surrounding the hacking and the inability to get definitive information, but it’s something for rational observers to consider. How the government acts now in respect of the budget is something to watch. Indeed, on Friday, the Prime Minister engaged in sudden budget consultations with the leader of the fourth largest party in Parliament, the New Democratic Party. Whether this attack has factored into that consultation to any extent is anyone’s guess, given that there are other major controversies facing the Conservative government at the moment that may just as likely motivate them to stave off an election (they need only the support of one of the three opposition parties in order to survive a confidence vote).

Other points of interest surrounding Canada’s efforts on cybersecurity and this recent attack…

A paltry $90 million has been allocated by the Harper government over a period of five years to the task of cybersecurity. Those funds were allotted in the 2010 budget after their having been in office for four years and represent less than one year’s worth of promotional advertising for the Harper government.

It’s worth wondering what’s been done prior to and since Toews’ hastily arranged Sunday October news conference. Inquiring minds would like to know. Much of anything? It certainly served a useful purpose this week for the government and media to point to the event as an indication of the existence of a government cyberstrategy.

Canada’s Conservative government likes to characterize itself as tough on crime. They budget lots of money to build brick and mortar jails, billions in fact. But the above referenced cyberattack that has come to light fully in the past week, as they say in the online community, looks to be a big fail.

CBC video:

Besides the political-administrative morass of a delayed presidential election and deferred donor aid decisionmaking, Haiti’s recovery has been restrained by the obstacle of rubble removal.  Both Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti produced about the same amount of debris, 25 million to 33 million cubic yards, the equivalent of seven Hoover Dams.  In New Orleans, the debris issued from wood frame houses being knocked down and tepid floodwater ruining the interiors and furnishings of houses that otherwise suffered survivable structural damage.  In Port-au-Prince, the main population center for the nation’s 10 million people, the debris consists of concrete buildings leaning at crazy angles, slabs and walls, and pulverized concrete in piles like potato salad at a park picnic.

As of my September trip to Port-au-Prince, only two percent of the rubble had been removed.  The photo above shows the destruction on the street where I stayed.  The one below is from one of the hotels three miles away in Petionville.

In an article in the Huffington Post, Tamara Lush suggested several factors delayed rubble removal:
heavy equipment must be shipped by sea;  large earthmoving equipment have a hard time negotiating the narrow, debris-filled streets; poor recordkeepiong makes it hard to determine who owns destroyed properties; no single person has assume the mantle of rubble removal czar, prompting NGOs to take on the job themselves.  Lush points out that the groups often fight over small amounts of money.

In a November Newsweek article, Jeneen Interlandi notes that the slow pace of rubble removal matches the lack of capacity of either the Haitian government or the NGOs to direct large-scale disaster recovery and reconstruction.  Virtually all of the rubble removal taking place in 2010 was performed by hand.  The groups competing for money have demonstrated expertise in emergency relief and skills in building hospitals and schools in nondisaster situations.  But competency in those areas doesn’t mean they can reconstruct entire cities.  Interlandi includes a quote from Randal Perkins, CEO of AshBritt, a private company that recently won the first major contract for rubble removal from the government of Haiti.  While praising the NGOs for their “amazing” work in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, Perkins warned “that the work that’s needed now is of a much larger scale.”

Yet another issue is where to dump whatever rubble is removed.  Huff Post’s Lush notes that landowners have resorted to dumping debris in the streets, canals and the countryside, there’s only one place in the entire country where NGOs using U.S. funds can take contaminated rubble: an approved and environmentally surveyed site.  Even a year after the earthquake, experts in rubble removal such as one I met are certain they will encounter human remains.  As Michael Zamba, the spokesperson for the Pan American Development Foundation said, “There’s a lot of contaminated rubble with human remains in it.  It can’t go in a standard landfill.”

One solution may be at hand, courtesy of engineers from Georgia Tech in Atlanta.  Haitian-born Dr. Reginald Desroches, returned to his homeland in the aftermath of the earthquake.  His goal was to determine whether the buildings still standing were safe enough for occupancy.  Dr. Desroches and his team found the concrete in Haiti to be not just substandard but extremely weak.  One of his graduate students, Brett Holland, noted that “You could just scratch the surface with your thumb or finger.  It was like completely different from anything here in the U.S.  I was amazed.”

Learning that little landfill space was available on the island and that the Haitian government was studying dumping the rubble in the ocean, the Georgia Tech team was determined to find a way to recycle it.  Bringing samples of the Haitian concrete back to Georgia Tech, they used Hait’s natural resources to turn the rubble into a stronger concrete.  The process can be completed  by “nearly anyone in Haiti can do themselves without the use of heavy machinery.”

Now that a runoff election between the two presidential finalists is scheduled for March 20, perhaps decisions will start to come from what had been a weakened government.  Perhaps the rubble will be reborn in buildings that will re-emerge from the dusty streets of Port-au-Prince.  And perhaps the decades that it takes to rebuild Haiti may be reduced if those in charge of the process listen to the ideas of the sons and daughters of Haiti like Reginald Desroches.