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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).

In our second installment of ThickPod, Ken, Don and I muse about the sociopolitical significance of LOLCats, I thoroughly impress Don by showing him that I know who Marshall McCluhan is and Ken breaks out some Latin. Here are the posts we discuss in the podcast:

Ken – The Web 2.0 Election

Don – Facebook, Mass Interpersonal Persuasion, and the Public Sphere

Jose – Aren’t we the Change We’ve Been Waiting For?

Enjoy. And don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast RSS feed

Don has a thought-provoking post on the use of Facebook in mass-interpersonal persuasion.  In a post-lection analysis at CLU, José brought up the idea of how Obama created what is tantamount to a social movement using web 2.0 tools.  I was reading a US News article on the use of YouTube in the 2008 campaign and couldn’t help but recall the ParkRidge47 spectacle from early 2007 and the role of viral multimedia in politics and mass-interpersonal interaction.  In this video, the creator, Phil de Vellis, talks about how politicians should inspire content and how his Vote Different mashup went viral despite his posting anonymity.

The rise of political video watching is evident from Pew Research Center figures, going from 24% in December of 2007 to 39% in late October.  What I find interesting is how video is being used by both the public and the candidates.  The USNews article talks about how Obama’s campaign posted on YouTube a rebuttal to clips of Rev. Wright’s inflammatory remarks going viral, which were being used against Barack.  Obama Girl, the Yes We Can video, and Obama Art are all examples of Web 2.0 tools of video sharing and blogs being used to create meaning.  Add into the mix, the fourth estate (the press) with conservative Glenn Beck posting a video on the Obama National Anthem.

José noted how the Obama campaign will be written up as a “how to” guide on Web 2.0 campaigning, but what will the Web 2.0 president look like?  Given the “social movement” created, will this foster a technologically-mediated interactive democracy or will it just be more clutter?  How will meaning and relevance be maintained and how will the Republicans use Web 2.0 to rebuild?

Canada is set to vote in less than two weeks on October 14th.  It’s a parliamentary system, so voter choices at the representative level (MP=member of Parliament) in each district (riding) determine who the prime minister is.  The major parties are the Conservatives (far right & center-right), Liberals (center-left), New Democratic Party (left), Bloc Quebécois (regional), & the Greens.  The Bloc is a Quebéc-only party that has fallen out of favor this year.  The big issue this year is whether the Conservatives can get a majority government.  Currently, they have a minority government but with over 50% of the ridings (155 seats), they can get a majority, which means they would have much more power.

We’ve been talking about frames a lot, so let’s see how these play out in Canadian satire using kids to portray the party leaders.  Rick Mercer is in the same vein as Stewart/Colbert and a friend at Ipsos in Vancouver sent the following video around.  The players & some perceptions:

• Stephen Harper:  Conservative & leader of minority government (“W”-like, from the oil-rich west [Alberta], hoping for a majority, emphasizing the economy and “stay the course” mentality, leader of party doing well in the polls now, good at framing & evading)
• Stephane Dion: Liberal (embraced green issues & carbon taxes, nerdy/egghead reputation, has French accent and is linked to past separatist sentiments in Quebéc, leader of a party suffering from weakness now)
• Jack Layton: NDP (strength metaphor, charismatic, resurgence since Liberal party has faltered)
• Elizabeth May: Green (seen as splitting the vote on the left)

The latest polls show that the Conservatives will likely win, but fall short of a majority.  The NDP was hoping to be second, but they’re unlikely to overtake the Liberals.  The election will be decided by 45 “battleground ridings.”  I’ve been following this election since I spend summers in Toronto and figuring out Canadian politics.  I must admit that I find the US election cycle fatiguing… January 2007 – November 2008.  In contrast, this Canadian election season officially started on September 7, 2008 when Parliament was dissolved.

The Republican convention had a series of strange attacks on Barack Obama’s work as a community organizer. Kevin Harris points to an article in the Nation by Peter Drier and John Atlas taking the RNC to task for their attacks on local civic engagement:

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani delivered his own snickering hit job. ‘He worked as a community organizer. What? Maybe this is the first problem on the resumé,’ mocked Giuliani.

A few minutes later, in her acceptance speech for the GOP vice presidential nomination, Sarah Palin declared, ‘I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.’

The Daily Show (god bless em’) had a hilarious take on the comments and crystalizes what seems to be an out of sync contradiction between the campaign’s own theme of service and the Republican party’s professed belief in local community-based problem solving.

What gives? Me thinks this is suppose to be code for “angry left radical activist.” It’s meant to be another salvo at the Democrats for being a party full of Marxists trying to “stick it to the man.” But anyone who has worked with or studied community organizations know that they have become very mainstream. Many of them have been focused on building low income housing and providing job training. “Community organizing” has moved from an emphasis on political activism to one of asset building and community empowerment…things Republicans are supposed to stand for.

According to his Wikipedia’s page, this is what Obama did as a community organizer:

After four years in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago to work as a community organizer for three years from June 1985 to May 1988 as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland (Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale) on Chicago’s far South Side.[12][14] During his three years as the DCP’s director, its staff grew from 1 to 13 and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000, with accomplishments including helping set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants’ rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.[15] Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.[16]

This might work the way the Republicans intend. But if it does, I have developed quite a tin ear for political framing, which is pretty scary for a political scientist. A backlash has started against the community development snaps Micah Sifry identifies a facebook group called We Are All Community Organizers was launched immediately after the speeches. As of 4pm Pacific time on Friday, September 5, the list had 5,359 members. Of course, it’s unlikely many of the people on that list were McCain supporters.

Lots of people are jumping on the “Google-phobia” train these days. The general argument is that the constant flow of information is making it impossible for us to sustain attention, reflect or maintain long term relationships. In the Sunday Times Online, Bryan Appleyard summarizes, and seems to sympathize with this line of argument. This summary of Nicholas Carr’s info-dystopic article “Is Google Making us Stupid” highlights why we should be afraid, very afraid:

Instead he now Googles his way though life, scanning and skimming, not pausing to think, to absorb. He feels himself being hollowed out by “the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’”.

I’m with Carr that the main challenge of any knowledge worker today is to quickly sort out the wheat from the chaff. But it amuses me when writers presume that reflection is a depleting resource. As if we were all awash in the ability to be introspective and reflective and that the “big-bad-web” is sucking us dry. Reflection has always been limited to those with the maturity to cultivate it in the face of more alluring alternatives. Why is Facebook use any different than watching “Happy Days” (BTW has anyone gone back and reflected on how much that sit-com sucked? Wow!) Distraction is distraction and some are more likely to succumb to it than others, no matter how alluring.

And of course, those kids, with their newfangled “facespace” and “mybook” can’t be bothered to read a book because they are all “text-a-twittering” each other. To wit:

The hyper-connectivity of the young is bewildering. Jackson tells me that one study looked at five years of e-mail activity of a 24-year-old. He was found to have connections with 11.7m people. Most of these connections would be pretty threadbare. But that, in a way, is the point. All internet connections are threadbare. They lack the complexity and depth of real-world interactions. This is concealed by the language.

Join Facebook or MySpace and you suddenly have “friends” all over the place. Of course, you don’t. These are just casual, tenuous electronic pings. Nothing could be further removed from the idea of friendship.

As if somehow young people didn’t understand this. If they are so distracted, then why the greatest resurgence in youth civic engagement in three decades? Trust me, I don’t mean to swing too far in the opposite direction. I’ve assigned many a book chapter in class only to get blank stares back, but is that the internet’s fault?

Let’s say that it is. Then what that means is that the professor doesn’t have a monopoly on the dissemination of knowledge. If a student is curious about a concept, he/she can get their “Wikipedia on” and evaluate that against what I am saying. What this means for academia is that we’ve got to work much harder to be relevant. Instead of bemoaning why students aren’t reading War and Peace how about developing a clearer rationale for why they should?

It’s true that our students are less interested in empirical knowledge and more interested in “knowledge they can use.” But this is a far cry from being disengaged or stupid. Many of our young people want to be relevant, to make positive change in the world. The Web provides an unprecedented array of tools to do that. Reflection not necessary. Of course, War and Peace might help them develop a mature belief system that can enhance their understanding of how the world should change, or whether it should change at all. But that takes work and has always been painful. Anyone try to read War and Peace pre-Internet? How about Moby Dick? The Sound and the Fury had me banging my head against the wall. And I didn’t even have ESPN soccernet.com.

Update: Edge.org, which I’m starting to fall deeply in love with (in a platonic way) has a forum on Carr’s article.