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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.

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.

This NYTimes article brings up some interesting questions about hacktivism and whether or not it’s a form of protest. I think for many, it’s hard to be sympathetic to the LulzSec/Anonymous crowd with their taunts and adolescent antics, but the idea that many of these young people echo protesters of the 60s who may have been naïve in their understanding of the gravitas of their actions. More interesting to me is how LulzSec and hacktivism can develop into a social movement, tapping into youthful angst in the current zeitgeist in this era of diminished expectations in the West.

I’ve been thinking about LulzSec as a social movement that uses social media to tell the tale of their exploits and get the word out. Last year, Malcom Gladwell asserted that social media takes away from real social change, fostering a lazy form of “one click” activism::

“The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.”

Gladwell was unmoved by the events of the Arab spring, remaining skeptical of social media’s impact. I think what’s missing isn’t just the content of the communication, but the meaning of it and what it does to people psychologically. Social media can be empowering, creating {dare I say} tipping points from social contagion. In other words, people seeing large numbers supporting a cause acting as a motivator that goes beyond low commitment acts.

Hacktivism has a draw as a counterculture, given it’s a movement {evident in social media} and has the objective of pushing back on the power structures—often with adolescent churlishness. Perhaps the computer makes the seduction easier, since one doesn’t have to go outside and don a balaclava. Consequences seem remote, akin to the pirating of IP. In the Times article, Professor Spafford of Purdue was skeptical that the arrests last weeks will make a difference::

“A whole bunch of people were angry, they didn’t really think about whether it was legal or not. It never entered their minds. This was kind of the equivalent of a spontaneous street protest, where they may have been throwing rocks through windows but never thought that was against the law or hurting anybody.”

The allure is empowerment through destruction for a cause. It isn’t all destruction, though. The legal targeting of PayPal in a boycott, due to not allowing Wikileaks to collect donations, will be interesting to watch. While it may not result in any real change, it may be part of a meaning system that attracts more followers and emboldens them, perhaps in the spirit of a Palahniukian Fight Club.

While the Toronto G20 protests serve to remind us that even lawful assembly can get you locked up, I wonder if in the wake of that, counterculture activists are rethinking their strategies. Will there be an allure of civil disobedience behind a proxy IP? Disrupting the communication technologies we’ve all grown reliant on, in order to bring attention to their cause or block the powerful’s media access through denial of service attacks.

I think it’s early days to make any statements about whether or not social media is a bust when it comes to social movements. I don’t think there is a restriction on what types of activities can be fostered with social media, so the beliefs that it cannot spawn anything requiring commitment and that it takes away from “real” social movements seems premature. While hacktivism may seem distasteful, I feel it can develop into a decentralized counter culture movement that delights in destroying the house of cards of data we’re all dependent upon.

I’ll leave you with two thoughts. It will be hard for governments to control the activities of people, particularly as computer security knowledge diffuses and when there are sufficiently large numbers of people acting together simultaneously or relentlessly. The former narrows the information asymmetry between user and law enforcement and the latter is contagion overwhelming the order. We live in interesting times.

This is the first of a three-part series of posts on the media:

1. Media & the Selective Outrage Machine
2. The Culture War Is Not Really Taking Place
3. The Big Hit:: CBC v. The Canadian Cancer Society

While it’s not new that news journalism is a business in financial dire straits and the newspaper already has its death date set in 2043, the pressure to remain relevant has pushed it from infotainment into a neo-Hearstean monster. While William Randolph Hearst would engage in fabrication, known for his quote, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war”, news these days is about dramaturgy in the narrative in a cynical grab for viewers, subscribers, and pageviews.

Jon Stewart coined the term “selective outrage machine” to characterize Fox’s outrage at the Common-White House controversy. In order to be fair, the same tactics can be seen on MSNBC, as well as on the far right and left of the political spectrum. It’s how the game is played in the attention economy.

I think in our current culture of optics, the other side of the “fail” coin is the blatant attempt to manipulate the news media’s thirst for the dramatic. It’s a Goffman world, ruled by the tenets of The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life.

DSK & Roman Polanski

Watching the Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape allegation was particularly cringeworthy. I thought Cyrus Vance’s {Manhattan District Attorney} mouthing off to the press was setting the stage for disaster. While some were playing the angle, I was thinking of the Duke lacrosse players. Let’s face it, the story as it unfolded was red hot. A rich, powerful champagne socialist with a history of womanizing rapes an asylum-seeking Islamic immigrant  housekeeper at in his pricey suite at the Sofitel. It was one of those divisive stories where even being neutral was deemed as tacit complicity in violence against women. The media frenzy created an indefensible whipping boy in DSK, which, to me, seemed premature given that the facts surrounding the case left some ambiguity with respect to its supposed airtight nature. The case started to unravel, with allegations that the accuser lied and had inconsistent stories, along with supposed assertions by the NY Post that the victim was part of a prostitution ring.

Salon.com has annoyed me over the years by actively creating an adversarial mosh pit, where feminism is positioned in ways to extract maximum ire. I would argue that Kate Harding’s 2009 piece on Roman Polanski, reminding readers that the self-exiled director raped a child, served the single purpose of invoking the outrage machine against someone Harding deems as indefensible. Rather than explore the nuances of the case and the strange prosecutorial and judicial circumstances of 1977 that was the crux of the matter in 2009, readers were reminded what a monster Polanski is and implying that due process be damned. My post on Roman Polanski was a reaction to Harding’s piece, which I felt was troubling to say the least, in its knee-jerk simplicity that plays to generating controversy. Then again, 722 comments and 236 Facebook likes probably added up to mission accomplished.

Fast forward to this month. Salon posts an OpenSalon blog entry by Heather Michon in the same vein as Harding’s as a Editor’s pick. The focus is on the discrediting of the accuser because of her past lies, some of which are more material to the case than others. Michon is concerned that there’s a gulf between what transpired and whether the government thinks it has a case to make a conviction. This supposed “disconnect” is due process. So, how does this all play out? Salon selectively ignores the accuser’s conflicting stories that can sink the case, while focusing on the scrutiny of the accuser’s past. Meanwhile, others in the media pat the system on the back for “working”, by eventually coming to some “truth”. The reality is that this is all pure theatre and a theatre that’s entering into the logical calculus of those within the institutions that should be above using the media to generate hype for publicity and political gain. This isn’t new, but the ubiquity of media is and this should concern us. The alignment of interests of the media and the state is the logical extension of infotainment presaged by Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and my sense is that the genie is out of the bottle with little that can be done to put it back.

Casey Anthony & Nancy Grace

The public outrage regarding the Casey Anthony acquittal was pretty predictable. The stage was set for this generation’s OJ trial, fuelled by another media frenzy. The most interesting article I read in the aftermath was Brian Dickerson’s column on how Anthony’s #1 detractor, Nancy Grace, made her acquittal possible.

Nancy Grace became part of a media hype machine, using her punditry soapbox to paint Casey Anthony as incarnate evil, complete with the derisive moniker, Tot Mom. Dickerson argues that the publicity given to Anthony vaulted her from indigent defendant obscurity to a criminal defence lawyer career maker. Grace used Anthony as a punching bag in her well-orchestrated drama of the indefensible defendant. Polanski raped a child and Anthony killed hers. Manufacturing the outrage provides for a clear and easy target to direct the hate in the name of justice. Through the outrage, everyone can participate in meting out justice for the victim, Caylee Anthony.

The problem again is that due process takes a back seat to the hype. Let’s face it, due process isn’t sexy. Particularly when it evokes examples of “technicalities”, allowing the “guilty” to go free.

In another media twist, the defense team used social media to fine tune their approach by analyzing public sentiments. While the efficacy of such maneuvering is still up in the air, crowdsourcing opinions of testimony in high profile cases is likely to be de rigueur.

The selective outrage machine has the potential to morph how we the public form opinions. Appealing to a sense of justice in a juicy narrative is where the media is at, while social media digests it and puts it back out there. This further influences others and serves as a feedback loop into social institutions, such as the courts. I don’t see news as getting better or journalists becoming more ethical about their craft because, frankly, the market could care less and I don’t see any way of legislating style or professionalism, in light of free speech.

Writer/Producer Sameer Asad Gardezi is behind a trio of videos that are a response to a video entitled “Hate Comes to Orange County” {below}, where protestors and local politicians {Ed Royce [R-40], Gary Miller [R-42] and Villa Park Councilwoman Deborah Pauly} expressed their views about an event at the Yorba Linda Community Center. The event in question was a fundraiser held by the Islamic Circle of North America, an America Muslim relief group, raising money for women’s shelters. The controversy about protest centres on the taunts, including derogatory comments about Muhammad being a pervert, references to wife beating, and the ever popular “go home terrorist”.

Gardezi is using these satirical videos to push back on this divisive speech::

“I can’t say that this was my revolutionary stance to vindicate a group of people…It was the only way I felt I could react to the situation in a way that could satisfy me — if other people felt the same that was the cherry on top.”

He’s using humour, on a YouTube channel titled teapartyyouthla, in the Aladdin videos [see part 1] to take a Disney pop culture icon and turn the extreme rhetoric against it::

“We weren’t explicitly unveiling anything or trying to provide a new truth, just trying to break down something that already exists and use satire as a way to showcase that.”

There’s also a Facebook page with this gem::

“Let’s never forget a kabob is an evil hot dog. Nonetheless, thank you for the post KABOBFest.”

Gardezi noted the use of humour with the blowback from the Alexandra Wallace debacle, where a notorious fameball UCLA student posted an anti-Asian rant to build an audience–further questioning the adage that any PR is good PR. Sameer wanted to tap this satirical vein with his videos. I think this is an interesting addition to the discourse, using hyperbole and projecting context on to a sacred cow of sorts. I also think that this shtick is a whole lot fresher than Stephen Colbert’s, which is getting stale and sharing far too many jokes with The Daily Show.

Today, Facebook signed up to use Web of Trust (WOT) reputation ratings to help create a safter on-line experience for its users. The effort is intended to avoid phishing scams within Facebook.  Once a Facebook user shares a link:

Facebook automatically scans the links, applying WOT’s information, to determine if the website is known to distribute spam or contain malware. If the link is identified as untrustworthy, then a warning will appear allowing the person to avoid the link, learn more about the rating or continue forward.

Assessments about the trustworthiness of the site are determined by the crowd. I’m not sure exactly how it will work but presumably if enough people flag a site as malicious, a WOT warning appears.

Sounds good so far.But I wonder how this crowdsourcing of malicious links on Facebook simultaneously binds us even more closely to an “architecture of publicness” (a term I’m playing with as I prepare a manuscript on Facebook’s effect on political identity).  What I mean by this term is a on-line design structure that provides social incentives to reveal elements of yourself, whether it be your behavior, your likes and dislikes or pieces of information from your past or present.  All this can of course be aggregated and mined for marketing purposes, even if it won’t necessarily be used in this way.

Theoretically, WOT data would seem to be no different.  As you report which sites are unsavory, Facebook (and/or WOT, I’m not sure how this data is collected) learns more about your tastes and preferences and your browsing habits.

An appropriate retort would be that this is all happening in the name of making Facebook a more secure environment….fair enough.  There is no reason why the relentless revelation of your online self has to be all bad.  In fact revelation is cathartic and desirable in many ways.  However when we start to rationalize revelation by making it mundane, it does something to us (I think).  I’m not sure what that is yet, but I’m afraid there’s a part of it that’s not so savory.  How much sharing is too much sharing on-line?  I’m not entirely sure.

In December, I blogged about the cartoon-childhood violence meme that morphed from something else and was being criticized for being another example of “one-click activism.” There were interesting comments that are definitely food for thought.

Celebrity Causes & Controversial Issues

While the crowd can start a viral meme, celebrities can use social media to promote their cause to their followers. The idea of increasing awareness for causes can be tricky, particularly when there are “sides”. I don’t think anyone is countering Sarah McLachlan’s pleas to stop animal cruelty, but issues like Jenny McCarthy’s advocacy surrounding better knowledge surrounding childhood vaccination and autism does. She’s facing a backlash, particularly in light of the fraudulent Wakefield study. Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon.com bashes her as a misguided mom, acting as if she’s railing against a mountain range of “science”, but, let me be frank here. The journalism of Mary Elizabeth Williams doesn’t scream health sciences expert, plus, it seems like she doesn’t even read what she links to. She cherrypicked a quote by McCarthy on the Oprah site, but conveniently left this out::

“I am all for [vaccines], but there needs to be a safer vaccine schedule. There needs to be something done. The fact that the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] acts as if these vaccines are one size fits all is just crazy to me…People need to start listening to what the moms have been saying.”

This is hardly the ravings of a lunatic. Plus, the problems with the “science” that Williams cites is that they do not prove that a vaccine-autism link does not exist. It may well be more complex than the studies are allowing for, with certain, very specific subpopulations at risk.

Is Bad PR Better than No PR?

So, this week, power couple Demi & Ashton started a campaign to fight sex trafficking, “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls”. The ads have people scratching their heads.

I get the execution of the ads, but I think it’s a bad one. It’s using hyperbole and humour to make a point, while riffing on the Old Spice “Your Man…” campaign. The idea is that “real men” do certain things and don’t “buy girls”, so be a real man and don’t buy girls.

Jezebel took the trafficking ads to task, but included a quote by Helen A.S. Popkin didn’t sit right::

“One might argue that faux-zany vignettes in which Jamie Foxx opens a beer bottle with a remote and Bradley Cooper eats cereal bachelor-style are as effective at wiping out underage sex trafficking as posting the color of your bra in your Facebook status is at eradicating breast cancer. The video campaign just costs way more money.”

Popkin’s post is chock full of snarky cleverness and deconstructs the false syllogism, apparently unaware that effective advertising or campaigns need not be logical. Let me see, “the war on terror = the war in Iraq, hence…,” oh, nevermind. Popkin’s use of a Facebook meme example points to a recurring theme that people resent what they feel is tantamount to doing nothing. This may well be the case, but it doesn’t mean it’s always the case and I think it’s short-sighted to see anything having the appearance of an “identity” campaign, where a user identifies with a cause ostensibly to raise awareness as doing nothing. The challenge is to leverage the identity and awareness into action. Here’s a better critique of the ads on bumpshack.

Demi Moore isn’t concerned about the backlash::

“People’s criticism has created even more conversation…While we didn’t want to offend anybody and it’s certainly not our intention to make light of any issue we take very seriously, we see that it’s actually doing what we intended.”

The question I have is what exactly is the intent? Well, Demi and Ashton have a foundation and you can donate to fund more multifaceted campaigns to promote…awareness, as well as demand reduction strategies. They also have a page listing what you can do to help, including flagging/reporting ads on Craigslist.

Well, nevertheless, it’s a good cause, right? Not everyone thinks so. Melissa Gira Grant is calling Demi and Ashton out on their publicity stunt, providing links to organizations working on providing support for those in the sex trade. I must admit that I’m a bit troubled by D&A’s attempts to curb a serious problem, but the execution is just symptomatic of the entire approach. It reeks of paternalism and focuses on “girls” being trafficked, feeding into a saviour theme of philanthropy. Moreover, as it stands, their foundation’s initiatives are paper thin and does smack of a publicity stunt, given how there are many existing organizations doing work in the sex trafficking arena. Finally, the approach is hostile to sex work outside of trafficking by advocating vigilanteism on the Internet, smacking of Amber Lyon’s “investigative journalism” on the matter for CNN.

I think this is less about social media and “one-click activism” as it is about misguided celebrity ventures. While some might piss and moan that the use of social media in getting the word out doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, but I would argue that there’s a danger of celebrity use of social media that can result in misguided actions.