Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Thursday, January 03, 2008

"To Find Voters, Look Online"

[via ABC News]
For the first time in polls since 1996, this ABC News/Facebook survey finds the Internet rivaling newspapers as one of Americans' top two sources of news about the presidential election. It's also the only election news source to show growth, doubling since 2000…

Seventy-three percent of adults now go online, the most in polls since the dawn of the Internet age. Forty percent use the Internet specifically for news and information about politics and the election, surpassing the previous high, 35 percent in a 2004 survey….

The four in 10 adults who use the Internet for election information are highly attuned to politics; compared with other adults, they're 22 points more likely to be following the campaign closely, 21 points more apt to plan to vote in an upcoming primary or caucus, 13 points more apt to report having voted 2004 and 10 points more likely to report being registered.

Informed, engaged citizens are turning away from The Village, bought and paid for mouthpiece of incumbent interests, the pampered narcissistic beneficiaries of a corrupt and brutally unjust system they are eager to discuss not in its substantial impacts but as gossip columnists.

But where once this disgusted recoil landed majorities into a de facto reactionary anti-politicism or pseudo-objective "neutral" apoliticism from which the conservative politics of the status quo always chiefly benefited anyway, now citizens are not just turning away from the corruption of The Village but turning to the online collaborative commentary, criticism, organizing, fundraising that is peer-to-peer democracy and finding that they are strong.
Rebutting onetime notions of isolation in cyberspace, 72 percent of people in the online political population report doing volunteer work for a church, charity or community group; volunteerism drops to 52 percent among other adults.

Online political participation, moreover, extends to in-person political discourse. Fifty-eight percent in the online political population regularly discuss or debate political issues with others in a face-to-face setting. Far fewer other Americans say they talk politics, 40 percent.

This seems to me to highlight a different (but related) and also enormously interesting development: Much of the commentariat has not yet come to terms with the truly momentous shift from what I call the First Wave of Internet Radicalism in the 90s which was mostly organized in the Clinton era against attempts to censor online expression into the Second Wave of Internet Radicalism which was organized in response to the farce of the Clinton Impeachment (MoveOn is a pretty good candidate for the inaugural moment of the shift into the Second Wave), and consolidated by corporate consolidated media's subsequent indifference to Bush's stealing of the 2000 Election, and then its complicity in the drumbeat for what were obviously immoral, illegal, and sure to be disastrous wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

What is really being registered in the ABC report in its framing of the point about political engagement as a matter of "[r]ebutting onetime notions of isolation in cyberspace," is precisely this shift from the First to the Second Wave of Internet Radicalism, a shift that is a matter of ethos quite as much as substance.

While the First Wave of Internet Radicalism was broadly defined by the curious market libertarian ethos of the Wired Magazine digirati, the Cypherpunks, the California Ideology, and so on, the Second Wave of Internet Radicalism is defined by an ethos of participatory democracy that resonated with the insurgent Dean candidacy's promise to give voice to the "Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party," providing the user-driven content that facilitated the rise of Daily Kos, and sponsored tide-turning challenges to corrupt Establishment incumbents like Joe Lieberman and so on.

Given the relatively short life and rapid growth of the Internet as an alternate institutional framework for citizen education, agitation, and organization, peer-to-peer, it is not surprising that both media and political analysis find it hard to keep up. I'll admit that this discussion of the shift from a First to a Second Wave of Internet Radicalism constitutes a central preoccupation for me as I am re-working my old dissertation into what I hope is a publishable book, and I'm afraid I can become a bit of a bore on the topic. The latest title of Pancryptics: Technocultural Transformation of the Subject of Privacy (the old version of which is still available online), is Second Wave Internet Radicalism: From Libertarian Privacy to Peer-to-Peer Publicity better reflects my changing emphasis and thinking on this stuff.

To find citizens, look online (and into the streets).

2 comments:

VDT said...

I'll admit that this discussion of the shift from a First to a Second Wave of Internet Radicalism constitutes a central preoccupation for me as I am re-working my old dissertation into what I hope is a publishable book, and I'm afraid I can become a bit of a bore on the topic. The latest title of Pancryptics: Technocultural Transformation of the Subject of Privacy [...] is Second Wave Internet Radicalism: From Libertarian Privacy to Peer-to-Peer Publicity better reflects my changing emphasis and thinking on this stuff.

I'm very happy to hear about your changing emphasis and thinking. Also, the new title sounds more hip while previous one may have been too opaque.

Anonymous said...

Glad to hear you mention a possible book again, Dale. What happened to "Progress Is The Great Work"? You got my hopes up with that title.