How far has digital journalism come?

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(Images originally from MBC On Focus, 28 May; reproduced here)

When I was doing my MA a few years back, a tutor mentioned one day that Korean pro-democracy student activists looked like well-trained soldiers when they threw Molotov cocktails. I don't remember why the topic was brought up in the first place but I remember being quite surprised at learning the existence of such a reputation outside the country. After the mid-1990s, however, street protests of such kind seem to have become a thing of the past. Or at least replaced by a more pacific version. Since 2002, when there was a series of commemorations for the two teenage girls killed in a vehicle accident caused by two American soldiers, protests have invariably taken the form of candlelight vigils in Jongro Square, Central Seoul. And it was the case with the one against the beef import deal, too. Until last weekend. After 16 times of candlelight rallies in vain, frustrated protesters eventually stayed gathered until early in the morning [* according to the Korean law, you need a pre-granted permission to protest and you can't protest after the sun sets] and some of them started to march on the roadway until they all were taken to the police station. The police also announced that they intend to arrest anyone who violates the law on public assembly and demonstrations. In this context, the biggest issue in Korean cyberspace at the moment is whether the authorities' hard-handed reaction is justifiable. What makes the citizen protesters angrier is not the embedded violation of human rights by the current legal framework in general. The reason is rather that the rallies are NOT "ideologically motivated" like the authorities and the pro-government media define. I am by no means saying that it's okay to be hard-handed via-à-vis ideologically motivated activism, but the point to be made here is the mass of protesters this time, which the authorities said they would take any necessary measures to stop, is indeed composed of those who wouldn't usually be engaged in collective action like this: mums that brought their children with them, teenagers after school, young ladies in their high heels, etc. Therefore, those who have been participating in the rallies and those who sympathise with the protesters flood online discussion forums and comment boxes on news portals with the question, "Hundreds of riot police with their shields? Are we really in 2008 or in the 1980s?" On the other hand, the authorities' argument is that that what's illegal is illegal, it was the citizen protesters that turned violent first, and the police only reacted to that.

 

It shouldn't be my place to say which account is what exactly happened because I wasn't there, but what I dread to notice is the striking similarity between what the authorities of today say and what the military government in the 1980s said when they sent paratroopers to major cities to quell pro-democracy protests. The Gwangju Massacre in May 1980 had been officially regarded as a rebellion inspired by communist sympathisers, and it took almost a decade before it received recognition as an effort to restore democracy from military rule. The police appeal that it is not fair to compare what's happening now with what happened in the 1980s, given how things have changed. I know there has been no gun, no tear gas, etc. I don't think, however, that the comparison is meant to be a simple equating anyway. It's more about the fear of "going backwards in democracy". Can we blame someone for being shy after bitten once?

 

Hence, while rallying, today's protesters in Korea also live-broadcast their rallies through their mobile phones, webcams and laptops. This is not just to mobilise more people but, perhaps more importantly, to protect themselves from potential government propaganda and media distortion against them. In other words, they are making sure that the rest at their homes see that there are no pro-communists behind the protests and that no violence is initiated by the protesters.

 

Liberal news media like Hankyoreh, OhmyNews and MBC (above) put welcoming spotlight on this phenomenon, commenting that this is a new version of digital journalism. Sounds cool and cutting edge, but saddens me personally. One of my interviewees, who happened to have been directly exposed to the 'Gwangju Uprising', told me that he was really shocked when he moved to Seoul immediately after the incident and found that people in Seoul had no idea what'd happened in Gwangju and vaguely guessed that it was a rebellion orchestrated by pro-communists, just like the government and the pro-government media said. He added that he regretted that things would have been different if there had been for the Internet. The first model of DIY journalism, OhmyNews, was born in Korea and now a version two. What's going on is unfortunate enough, but I also find it sad that the impressive level of technological sophistication that Korean civil society is often associated with in the literature seems acquired out of necessity.

Grauniad unlimited

It is nice to see that, even in the age of the web, old habits die hard. In particular, the copy editors at the Guardian at still earning their money, even on Michael White's politicsblog. Apparently,

Friends report seeing David Miliband here at the very wet Hay Festival. He was spotted in the audience for Gene Robinson, the openly-Christian American bishop, and for ex-President Jimmy Carter, at 83, twice his age, who apparently told him he was too young to be foreign secretary. Thanks Jimmy.

 An openly Christian Bishop? Who'd have thought.

The long tail of information

OK, we all know this, but still every time I encounter it, it just blows me a way.

I stumbled on a random fact the other day about the time people spend shopping. Apparently the Norwegians spend the least, Canadians spend the most. I mentioned my new and very exciting fact to Stephanie Carvin, a lecturer in the Department here who happens to be Canadian. Stephanie's explanation for it (aside from the fact that Canadians just like shopping...) was that Canada is jammed full of huge malls and that these aren't only commercial centres, but act as community resources, where people meet, socialise, and access services. That seemed pretty plausible, although we had no idea how many shopping malls there were in Norway.

So I'm back at my desk and curiosity takes over. I open up firefox and type "shopping malls in Canada" into Google. First hit is this article in Wikipedia. A couple of clicks later (via this page), I get to this list, of shopping malls in Norway. There are about fifty shopping malls in the whole of Norway, and lots, lots more in Canada (sorry - there are actually far too many to count). I reckon, even on a per head basis, Stephanie is right. Additionally, the Canadian centres are a lot bigger, while the largest Norwegian shopping centre only has hundred fifty shops in it.

But here's the point. I could have been in any research library in the world, and I don't think there is anyway I could have located that piece of information as quickly. In fact, it seems fairly likely I would never have been able to find it in that form, laid out perfectly for addressing my specific query.

The amazing thing though is that the list I found hadn't been created by a single individual who chose to sit down and compile it. Nor was it put together with an express single purpose in mind. Instead, it was manufactured by hundreds, perhaps thousands of atomised individuals, all with their singular motivations and interests. But these micro-level actions led to a macro-outcome: creating a resource that previously would not have existed. The remarkable thing then is not just ease or the speed with which we can now access information, but also the ability of web 2.0 environments to extract inputs from multiple sources, and remodel and reorganise them again and again, to make that information more and more useful. That is unprecedented.

Notes from the YouGovStone/FT Ask the Experts event on the US election

Digital Politics: Effects of the Information Age on the 2008 U.S. Election and Beyond, US Embassy May 15, 2008

Panellists:

  • Phil Noble (US) Noble & Associates, Washington DC, Founder – PoliticsOnline
  • Dr Andrew Chadwick (UK), Head, Department of Politics and International Relations and Director, New Political Communication Unit, Royal Holloway, University of London
  • Joanna Shields (US) International President, Bebo
  • Jimmy Leach (UK) Director of Digital Communications, Freud Communications and former Head of Digital Communications for the Prime Minister’s Office

Last night I was one of the panellists at this event. It was a lively and interesting debate, with a good range of perspectives and lots of opportunities for audience members to ask questions. Gideon Rachman from the FT was a superb chair, even managing to squeeze in several email questions along the way. You can also view the webcast here. Carole Stone of YouGovStone and the staff at the US Embassy made us feel very welcome while we waited in the Benjamin Franklin room and during the drinks reception that followed.

First up was Phil Noble, now something of an internet campaign veteran. Phil spoke enthusiastically about the Obama campaign and of how the metrics of success for judging campaigns were now evolving. There were some remarkable statistics about Obama’s online fundraising – currently around the quarter of a million dollar mark.

I followed Phil. My talk - The 2008 Digital Campaign: What's New and Why Things Will (Almost) Always Be Different in the UK - was divided between making four basic points about the current campaign before providing a brief snapshot of mine and Nick Anstead’s research on the interplay between the internet and party institutions and electoral environment. The text of my speech is included below this summary.

Joanna Shields, International President of Bebo, one of the biggest social networking sites and soon to be acquired by AOL, came next, with an interesting perspective on the activities of young people away from the formal politics of voting.

Finally, Jimmy Leach brought us all down to earth with a dose of scepticism, not to mention humour, about politicians’ abilities to adapt to the new communication environment. For example, will the openness of the network campaign continue when a candidate enters office? Not likely, Jimmy suggested.

Webcast.

Gideon Rachman’s blog entry at the FT.

YouGovStone site.

PoliticsOnline. 

 

Here’s what I said…

The 2008 Digital Campaign: What's New, and Why Things Will (Almost) Always Be Different in the UK

First, I want to highlight four big themes in online campaigning that we’ve seen - so far - in the 2008 electoral cycle in the United States.

Second, as a political scientist, I’ll briefly consider a major puzzle: why has the internet had a greater impact on parties and election campaigning in the United States than it has in the UK?

So, what’s new and interesting in the 2008 US electoral cycle?

First : it seems to me that the internet is coming of age as a platform for political discourse. It has moved from the model of static pages toward a means of enabling a wide range of goals to be achieved through networked software services. Joanna Shields’ company, Bebo, is obviously a significant part of this general trend.

A second big theme of this election is collective intelligence in online campaigning. A distributed network of creators and contributors, the majority of them amateurs, can, using simple online tools, produce information goods that may better those produced by so-called authoritative sources. Though this is not entirely new - we saw this emerge with Howard Dean in 2004 - we now have a recognisable and proven campaigning model. It is based on online venues loosely meshed together through automated linking technologies, particularly blogs and social networking applications.

The internet now enables ongoing citizen vigilance on a grand scale. Political actors and media elites now inhabit an always-on environment in which it is impossible to escape the “little brother” surveillant gaze of citizen-reporters, from Twitter feeds to Flickr photostreams of marches and demonstrations ignored by mainstream media, to video bloggers and their YouTube uploads. One good example here is Mayhill Fowler, the citizen journalist who first published Barack Obama’s now infamous ‘Bittergate’ remarks a few weeks ago.

A third big theme is that online video is now much more important than it was. YouTube has made a sizeable dent in earlier predictions of the emergence of the slick televisual online campaign, able only to be resourced by wealthy politicians. YouTube video conversations are often effective precisely because they don’t depend upon professional media production techniques.

And what are people watching on YouTube? Well, alongside the countless videos of people using Mentos candy to explode bottles of diet Coke, we find citizens watching unedited 37-minute long political speeches! Consider Obama’s ‘More Perfect Union’ speech delivered in Philadelphia a couple of months ago. By last week, almost 5.5 million people had watched that speech in its entirety. We know this because YouTube does not count partial viewings. Micah Sifry of the Techpresident blog, who we had as a speaker at a recent conference on the politics of web 2.0 at Royal Holloway, has spoken of this as a shift from the sound bite to the sound blast.

My fourth and final big theme is that data are now everything. Those who can successfully mine, refine and subsequently protect it are more likely to emerge as dominant. But the interesting thing is that most of these data have been created by the labor of volunteers and they may simply be the by-products of countless distributed and coincidental interactions. Election campaigns in the United States are now characterized by obsessive and continuous recalibration in response to instant online polls, fundraising drives, comments lists on YouTube video pages, and blog posts. But the key point is that informational value emerges from a combination of distributed user generated content and its centralized exploitation. It blends the campaign war room with the campaign network.

So, briefly, to an interesting puzzle: Why has the internet had a greater impact on parties and election campaigning in the United States than it has in the United Kingdom?

This is a quick snapshot of a forthcoming research paper that I’ve co-authored with my colleague, Nick Anstead.

To answer this question we need to understand how the internet interacts with political institutions - in particular, the organization of political parties and the norms and rules of the electoral environment. These vary greatly across political systems.

So we need to ask: what kinds of institutional features are more likely to have affinities with the technological characteristics of internet communication? A comparative approach allows us to hypothesize what may, or may not, gain traction in different political systems.

We hypothesize that different types of party organization and electoral environment have the potential to catalyze or to retard the development of internet campaigning. This is so because these institutions make new communication technologies more or less useful to candidates and parties.

When looked at comparatively, American parties and campaigns are unusual political institutions - quite different from those found in most European liberal democracies.

Consider two aspects of this:

The US is a much more pluralistic political system than the UK. It is federal, it has a strong separation of powers, and parties are comparatively weak and they are not nationally integrated. The UK is, despite devolution, a unitary system, has a very weak separation of powers, and parties and comparatively strong, integrated and hierarchical.

The pluralistic environment in the United States makes it necessary to build campaign networks composed of horizontal and vertical connections that mesh with the fundamentally fluid basis of the system.

Compare this with the UK, where the lines of communication are more vertically oriented, more firmly drawn and are based in long established formal structures with accompanying bureaucracies. The internet's suitability for creating loose horizontal networks has fewer affinities with this set of arrangements.

Second, the mechanisms for candidate recruitment and selection are also radically different in the two countries.

In the US, primaries and caucuses offer an institutional framework for sanctioned dissent. In the UK, the environment for candidate selection is much less open and fluid, and more nationally-oriented.

The long timescale and the uncertainty of the primaries encourages ‘outsiders’ and forces all candidates to continually build coalitions of support.

When the context is fluid, the risks are high, but the costs of organizational innovation are low, candidates are more likely to experiment online

In the UK, there are (literally) no, or very, very few, ‘outsider’ candidates, the selection process is internal to parties, to a fixed timetable and it’s nationally-uniform.

So in the UK, there is less need to use the internet for lowering costs and reducing uncertainty and risk by spreading a campaign across a wide range of networks.

There are other important differences between the two systems, such as the broader media environment and the rules governing campaign finance. If you want more detail on this argument, do feel free to download the paper at our website at Royal Holloway.

By way of a conclusion, I’d like to remind you that the subtitle of my talk was Why Things Will (Almost) Always Be Different in the UK.

Things may be changing as we speak, mainly because the eroding permanent membership base of British parties may actually be incentivizing them to seek alternative models to mobilize support. Watch this space!

Shock: social networking sites are not like real life

Funny video clip from the BBC satirising the process of "friending" in Facebook. Certainly brings home the chasm between face-to-face and online. But when I see comparisons like this I often think they're missing the point a bit. Online environments create new and hybrid contexts for interaction; that's part of what makes them shapers of social change.

Election lexicon

When you sit and read too many blogs and too many articles on electoral politics, you start to notice something: certain words and phrases are contagious. Each election cycle, wherever it occurs either offers up new expressions or pushes them to the forefront of the public mind. This seems to prove that human beings have a group mentality when it comes to language and tend to emulate each other. It is an interesting question about how the Internet is impacting this process. I would hypothesise the rapid communication flows and network structure of new communication technology will catalyse the spread of specific terminology.

I thought it would be fun to try and compile a list of election words and phrases over the next few months. These don't just have to be from the US, but from anywhere in the world. I'm going to start now with a few ideas, but I will try to update it with new suggestions as they occur to me. If anyone has any other ideas, do please leave them in the comments section or mail me.

Without further ado, here are some ideas to get us started.

Blue state and red state. Hard though it is to believe now, but this distinction only appeared in the 2000 election. Prior to that TV networks had mixed and matched their coverage between parties and colours. Due to the polarized electorate in 2000, and the fact that the election was contested for so long, the colours that were being used during that election cycle stuck (for examples: here, here and here). See also purple states.

Kool Aid (as in "drinking the kool aid"). This term originates from the 60s culture when the Kraft-produced soft drink was used as a way of taking acid. Generically, the phrase (which is commonly associated with Fox News's Bill O'Reilly) means anyone who believes fervently and unquestioningly in something. During the 2008 election cycle the term Kool Aid drinkers has frequently been applied to Obama supporters (for example: here, here and here).

Throw someone under a train. This is a new one on me, at least as part of the day-to-day lexicon of politics. Throwing someone under a train involves destroying the reputation of a former ally or friend for one's own political benefit. I first heard it in the immediate aftermath of Obama race speech, where some accused him of "throwing his grandmother under a train in order save his own political skin". It has now become ubiquitous, although there are some variations out there, such as "from a train" and "under a bus" (for example: here and here, and here for the variation).

Another shameless Internet rip off

A while back, I blogged on the idea that the Internet might be starting to become a dominant cultural form because other media were referencing it. However, while that example clearly fell into the category of "referencing", one I saw tonight was closer to a shameless rip off. Nonetheless, it still speaks about the influence that YouTube is having on popular culture.

So here's the amazing original - one of the most viewed videos in YouTube history. 



33 million views later, here's what the advertisers came up with.



All I can say is I hope that got paid a big wad of cash.

Elizabeth Edwards on the press agenda

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The fantastic Elizabeth Edwards has just penned a great piece for the NY Times, blasting the press for it focus on the trivial (the fantastic graphic above accompanied the Times article). Edwards's argument is simple - the desire of the press to construct a simplistic narrative framework through which electoral politics can be viewed excludes really viable candidates who should be considered. The two examples she cites are Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, who could well have been serious contenders but could not get any real campaign traction. Additionally, she argues that certain candidates whose role in the race is artificially inflated because they "fit" - Rudi Giuliani being used as evidence of this. 

I suspect this story has a more personal undertone though. Although Edwards pointedly uses examples of candidates who wound up at the very lowest rung of the primary contest and made little impact, she might well also be thinking of her husband, who despite being a very serious candidate for the Presidency, lost out in the Clinton-Obama deathmatch narrative the media created very rapidly after the Iowa caucus. And it shouldn't be forgotten that Elizabeth Edwards is also returning to a previous campaign talking point about the triviality of the media discourse, which was the subject of what was (in my humble opinion) the best video of the entire campaign season. 

 


Who would the Simpsons vote for?

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A long time ago, I remember reading an article about whether the Simpsons (who are, after all, the most typical American family imaginable... well, sort of) would vote if given the choice between George W. Bush and John Kerry. That was actually a fairly simple exercise - Marge would have been solidly for Kerry, while Homer would have gone for the incumbent. This primary season is far more complex than the 2004 general election, so I reckon it is worth asking the question again (with apologies for demonstrating far too good a knowledge of the Simpson's back catalogue): who would the Simpson's vote for?

Marge is fairly easy, I suspect. She would have to be a Hillary supporter, I reckon. Although she now doesn't work and stays at home, Marge was a bit of a second wave feminist when she was school (as I remember, she burnt her bra on one occasion and also wanted to be a female astronaut), so she would certainly feel affinity with Hillary's bid to be the first woman president. Also, despite her liberal politics, Marge is pretty religious, so she might not have been that impressed by Obama's comments about people clinging to their religion.

Now Homer is a bit more of an issue. He is the classic Nascar Dad who would probably have been for Bush in 2004. He doesn't like taxes, politicians, or liberals (and you can bet your life he watches Fox news). So would he be in McCain's column? Maybe. Homer would also be the kind of voter that the Democrats know they have to get back if they are going to win the White House back in November. And at the outset, that seemed a good bet, as an economic downturn encouraged millions of Homers towards the Democrats. But the long and divisive primary may be putting him off. Certainly Homer would need to be convinced to vote for Obama, as he is the demographic that has given the Illinois Senator most problems during the primary contest.

Just for fun, let's just assume that Bart and Lisa can vote too. Bart - the classic millennial generation child - would surely be for Obama. And even if he weren't before this weekend, Obama's Jay-Z-style brush off of Clinton would surely have sealed the deal. More than that though, although supremely confident, Bart needs a bit of hope in his life. His school is hugely underfunded, while his teachers think he is destined for a career working in Krusty Burger (and that's before we even talk about the bullies he has to put up with everyday). I think Lisa is the least predictable of all the Simpsons. She is really clever and believes the world can be made a better place. But she is also quite cynical. I suspect she might have started out supporting Clinton (like her mother, she is a bit of a feminist). The question is how she would have reacted to the campaign? Would she believe that the Clinton's had gone negative and rejected them for it? Or would she regard Obama as rhetorician lacking in substance? It could have gone either way. But if I were making a prediction as to what Lisa Simpson wanted in her heart, it would probably be this: she probably has her fingers crossed that Al Gore gets nominated at the convention.