Like Will, I do not approve of Google’s new favicon.
But things change, and you can take a little trip down memory lane to other forgotten masterpieces.
I, for one, welcome our new Web 2.0 overlords.
Monthly Archive for June, 2008
I’m really surprised that I haven’t heard more buzz in the blogosphere about this email sent by Howard Dean to the DNC mailing list yesterday afternoon headed “Major policy change” that included this passage:
As we move toward the general election, the Democratic Party has to be the Party of ordinary Americans, not Washington lobbyists and special interests. So, as of this morning, if you’re a federal lobbyist, or if you control political action committee donations, we won’t be accepting your contribution.
I don’t know much about the financial merits of such a decision (though I’d assume that Dean knows what he’s getting into), but it seems clear to me that Democrats are going to be relying heavily on the grassroots fundraising strategy, driven by a broad base of small donors, that’s been driving the Obama campaign for months. In fact, the Congressional candidate I’m working for here in Minnesota is taking this one step further by asking his supporters (again, via email) to become not just grassroots donors, but grassroots bundlers:
Try and set a goal of $250, $500, $1000, or whatever you feel comfortable with, and get pledges from all your friends, family and co-workers so that you can meet your goal. With many of us working together to achieve our campaign’s fundraising goals, we’ll be able to ensure that we have the resources to get our message across the district.
It’s this sort of thing that leads me to question the trope among conservatives I know and respect that Obama’s appeal generates a cloying triumphalism — “celebration for celebration’s sake,” as James puts it. (This is the respectable backbone, in my opinion, to all those fairly ad hominem posts implying that Obama’s an unworthy candidate because his rallies look like Beatles concerts. This is America, people — when we turn ideas into events, we get evangelical, overheated and generally frenzied. See also: camp meetings.) I don’t think a candidate who succeeded only in raising his supporters to warm, fuzzy euphoria would be able to count on small donors himself, let alone make it possible for his party to do the same or other candidates to ask those donors to take the initiative in raising money themselves. The knowledge that Obama’s primary victory has been fueled by the willingness of his supporters to put their money where their shrieking mouths are — and, furthermore, that as of this week their candidate and his party are relying on them to continue to do so — certainly has the potential to foster a sense of personal responsibility among casual supporters of the Democratic Party as well as its activists.
Of course, “potential” isn’t a terribly persuasive word in the world of political messaging — theoretically, the core of Obama’s movementarian rhetoric, which found its (somewhat ridiculous) apotheosis in the “you didn’t do this for me” rhetoric that closed his speech Tuesday — should have fostered this sort of responsibility many months ago and many times over. I do think that’s happened to a certain extent, only to be overshadowed both in media coverage and in practice by Obamania. But even mainstream Obamania, motivated by a desire to see the man elected rather than restore the civic virtue of which he speaks, has acquired a character that isn’t quite as celebratory as it’s made out to be; it’s acquired a relentless forward drive typical of movementarianism and incompatible with resting on laurels or even taking stock.
This is what surprised me standing on the floor of the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul on Tuesday. Sure, there were plenty of jubilant eruptions, and I admit that many of us (including myself) were jumping up and down at the words “I will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.” But even as pundits on TV were choking up at the historic nature of the moment that had just passed, the spectators in the arena were talking about the race toward November; the “Yes We Can” cheers never turned into “Yes We Did,” and by that I was quite pleasantly surprised.
It’s tempting to say that this relentlessly forward-looking nature is a symptom of a progressive outlook and therefore of course it wouldn’t be obvious to the conservative mind; personally, I think it’s much more characteristic of movementarianism, and that James et al. have underestimated Obama supporters in mistaking a movement for a moment. If it’s true that the Democrats have no momentum without their nominee, that’s bad news indeed: he looked exhausted on Tuesday, and I could have sworn that afterwards I saw him mouth to Michelle, “Now, let’s go home.” But I suspect that the high voltage of an Obama rally is due not to the celebratory camp-meeting euphoria of release, but to the euphoria of being hit with a jumper cable: literally, a charge to do something. If the antidote to “celebration for celebration’s sake” is accountability — and I suspect it is — Howard Dean’s gamble is a huge step in the right direction.
John alerts me to the fact that they’ve given the FLDS kids back to their parents. The bill for keeping them? $5,200,000.
For 460 children. For two months.
On the other hand, I now look forward to moving to Texas, where I can expect the state government to subsidize my growing family to the tune of $68,000 per child per year. Score!
So I agree with basically everything Nicola says below, and I myself have been talking up the interactivity of new media from a PR standpoint for a while. But I’ve never seen any data on this, and I’m beginning to get rather skeptical of many of the premises — I mean, when the phrase “we don’t want politics that sounds like it’s been through a focus group” is as safe and obvious a statement to make as if, well, it had come out of a focus group, then I begin to get leery.
Most problematically, is it really true that traditional media represents “authority telling“? I suspect that this thesis may be the product of coastal elites who, regardless of their ideological affiliation, will always think of the New York Times when they say the words “traditional media.” But even the newspaper has a history of consumer-driven content (most of the suburbs where I grew up in Cincinnati had their own “Community Press” papers with skeletal staffs and content largely provided by local Women’s Clubs and Boy Scout troops). Furthermore, the newspaper’s self-image as an objective voice of Truth was a construction to replace its self-image as an advocate for the Just that the age of yellow journalism had instilled. Apparently it was the right decision then, but in assuming that that is the core of their identity, rather than a strategic choice, they’ve calcified themselves — possibly fatally.
I’m not saying that the Internet isn’t opening up galaxies of possibility that never existed before — that’s pretty obviously true. But when we talk about the incredible interactive power of “new media,” it’s really important to separate those technological advances which are truly unique to This Particular Moment from those latent potentialities on which Old Media deliberately turned their backs when they decided to become the men behind the curtain.
The LA Times had an interesting piece on the “web gap” between Obama and McCain. (Short story shorter: Obama is featured in many more, and much more flattering, YouTube videos than his presumed opponent.)
Jon Henke, at the new Next Right, proposes a solution:
There’s a simple answer for how to fix this: build a multi-million dollar right-of-center online infrastructure with many companies who do right-of-center digital advocacy, produce strategic messaging and content and hire top blogging and video production talent so that the talent can do this sort of thing full time.
Have you spotted what’s missing?
Obviously, infrastructure and investment are incredibly important, and something that the Right needs to work on. Still, the tubes don’t just provide a new medium for old messages — they also reflect the new sensibilities of new constituency. Call us “Gen Y” or “Millenials” or “those darn kids,” but we don’t want politics that sounds like it’s been through a focus group.[1]
McCain’s problem isn’t that people dislike him — people dislike any, and occasionally every, politician — but that the people who do like him don’t like him very much. Real enthusiasm can’t be generated by a multi-million dollar infrastructure, or by fat paychecks to bloggers.[2]
What we really want — what the Right is going to need — is message.
A huge and important part of political campaigning is, and will always be, getting a message heard. Equally important, though, is crafting the message in the first place, and young people want to hear different things than Boomers do. (Case in point: my parents failed utterly to grasp the hilarity of this.)
Far more than traditional media, which takes the form of authority telling, new media functions around community and conversation. This is incredibly powerful for the campaign that knows how to take advantage of it: if you can appeal to the people who make things happen on blogs and videos, they’ll do your job for you. The really telling example here isn’t Obama but Ron Paul, who beats McCain and Clinton combined for YouTube hits. He has an infrastructure now, but it grew virally — and that’s what Web 2.0 is all about.
From the Department of Tricky Questions, Easy Answers…
to this:
The central injustice of the Ivy League, according to Samuels, is that it selects a group of 18-year-olds based on what it tells them is their hard work but is in fact their inherited privilege, and it then grants these golden children the freedom “to become someone new. In turn, the university will testify to the social legitimacy of your actions by putting its name on your diploma.” This was the case for Samuels, whose acceptance to Harvard was his ticket out of a strict Orthodox Jewish upbringing he was already itching to escape. But by Samuels’s own logic, such self-invention cannot possibly be widespread in elite institutions whose aim is to perpetuate privilege across generations. Rather, such institutions rely on their students not to change, or else they risk losing the very assets that make them desirable to elite schools in the first place.
I offer this:
Many students — especially those from public high schools and those outside the West Coast and Northeast — deliberately decide to come to Yale because they have the freedom to change in response to the new opportunities presented to them or to throw off repressive social norms that their hometowns forced upon them. I know I did.
Of course, there are plenty of students here whose high schools are overrepresented within the student body…The well-established lifestyle some carry to Yale from private schools in New York and L.A. is appealing, even dazzling, to those from flyover states. I often wonder if the reason that Yale’s mainstream culture seems so upper-class to some isn’t because it reflects most students’ backgrounds, but rather because students who do have these pedigrees offer a pattern that the rest of us — who had no idea of what to expect when we got here — can follow. It’s not that middle-class students are forced to conform; it’s that we’re given the opportunity to become the sophisticates we imagined ourselves to be.
Seriously, folks, admitting that college culture isn’t a monolith makes a lot of things so much easier.
(I snark. The piece is good, and the non-Ivy-centric thesis of the book it’s reviewing — that the “made” in “self-made man” should probably by followed by “from whole cloth” — is downright fascinating.)
Apparently anthropologically irresponsible stories are like bullies: you can ignore them out of smugness, but they won’t go away.
Check out Culture Matters for a thorough and just-snarky-enough takedown of what’s wrong with this particular iteration of the “undiscovered tribe” myth. I’ll post more on what’s wrong with the myth as a whole early next week (since I also saw Indiana Jones tonight and was pleasantly surprised–as an anthropology student, that is, not as a movie viewer).
In the meantime, I’ll be getting settled into my summer digs in Minneapolis, where I hope to do my part to keep giving you the Iqra’i you crave while splitting what remains of my time between campaign work, senior essay research and freelancing. In case you were wondering what I was doing with my summer while Nicola does the right-footed Beltway shuffle.
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