My (very small) piece of citizen journalism

[This post and another previous post relating to this issue were originally published on my own personal weblog].

Good news for anyone who read this recent post that I put up and agreed with my sentiments.If you go to the urls for the two ads on the Guardian website (here and here), you will see that they are listed as expired. However, if you refer back to the links in the original post – which are stored on my furl archive, so are still accessible – you will see that both jobs were due to come down on the 18th July, a full week in the future.

I don’t know, but I hope that my original post (and far, far more importantly, the coverage it got from other more prominent blogs, such as DSTPFW and Comment Central) had a little bit of an impact and helped shame the Guardian into removing these ads, which should never have appeared on their website in the first place. 

Call For Papers: YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States

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YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States
April 3 & 4, 2009 - Amherst, Massachusetts
http://youtube08election.crowdvine.com
 
A two-day conference jointly hosted by:

  • The University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Political Science
  • The Science, Technology, and Society Initiative (STS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
  • The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
  • The Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP)
  • The Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP)

 
Keynote Speakers
Richard Rogers, Professor in New Media & Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and Director of govcom.org.
Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University, the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the School of Engineering, School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA.

Approach
The Program Committee encourages disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches rooted in political science, media studies, and communication scholarship. The JITP Editor strongly endorses new and experimental approaches involving collaboration with information and computer science scholars. Potential topics might include, but are not limited to:
 
- citizen initiated campaign videos,
- candidates' use of YouTube,
- bloggers use of YouTube to influence the primaries or election,
- the impact of YouTube on traditional or new media coverage of the election cycle,
- the effect of YouTube on citizen interest, knowledge, engagement, or voting behavior,
- social network analysis of YouTube and related election-oriented sites,
- political theory or communication theory and YouTube in the context of the 2008 election,
- new metrics that support the study of the "YouTube Effect" on elections,
- archives for saving and tools for mapping the full landscape of YouTube election content,
- use of YouTube in the classroom as a way to teach American electoral politics, or
- reviews of existing scholarship about YouTube.

Paper Submissions
Authors are invited to prepare and submit to JITP a manuscript following one of the six submission formats by January 7, 2009. These formats include research papers, policy viewpoints, workbench notes, review essays, book reviews, and papers on teaching innovation. The goal is to produce a special issue, or double issue, of JITP with a wide variety of approaches to the broad theme of "YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States."

How to Submit
Everything you need to know about how to prepare and submit a strong JITP paper via the JITP web site is documented at http://www.jitp.net. Papers will be put through an expedited blind peer review process by the Program Committee and authors will be notified about a decision by February 15, 2009. A small number of papers will be accepted for presentation at the conference. Other paper authors will be invited to present a poster during the Friday evening reception. All posters must include a "YouTube" version of their research findings.
 
Best Paper and Poster Cash Prizes
The author (or authors) of the best research paper will receive a single $1,000 prize. The creator (or creators) of the best YouTube poster/research presentation will also receive a single prize of $1,000.

Conference Co-Chairs
Stuart Shulman, University of Pittsburgh
Michael Xenos, Louisiana State University
 
Program Committee
Sam Abrams, Harvard University
Micah Altman, Harvard University
Karine Barzilai-Nahon, University of Washington
Lance Bennett, University of Washington
Ryan Biava, University of Wisconsin
Bob Boynton, University of Iowa
Tom Carlson, Åbo Akademi University
Andrew Chadwick, Royal Holloway, University of London
Greg Elmer, Ryerson University
Kirsten Foot, University of Washington
Jane Fountain, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Jeff Guliati, Bentley College
Mike Hais, Co-author, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube and the Future of American Politics
Matthew Hale, Seton Hall University
Justin Holmes, University of Minnesota
Helen Margetts, Oxford Internet Institute
Mike Margolis, University of Cincinnati
Andrew McCallum, University of Massachusetts Amherst
John McNutt, University of Delaware
Andrew Philpot, University of Southern California-Information Sciences Institute
Antoinette Pole, Montclair State University
Stephen Purpura, Cornell University
Lee Rainie, Pew Internet & American Life Project
Jeffrey Seifert, Congressional Research Service
Mack Shelley, Iowa State University
Charlie Schweik, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Chirag Shah, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
John Wilkerson, University of Washington
Christine Williams, Bentley College
Morley Winograd, University of Southern California
Quan Zhou, University of Wisconsin-Stout

The Wars against Terror have begun

‘The wars against terror have begun, but it will take some time before the nature and composition of these wars are widely understood.’ So argues Philip Bobbitt, a senior advisor to both Republican and Democrat administrations for decades and Professor at Columbia University, in his new book Terror and Consent. We are experiencing a war on terror, but there will be more. This is not simply in light of the expected wars over energy and water in the coming century, but because of a fundamental change in the nature of the state and the communications environment it operates within. Put simply, when states exist, as Bobbitt says they do now, to empower individual citizens and private and third-sector organisations to create economic and social value through global, decentralised networks, then they also create the template for the very form of terror that will strike back against them. Through history, each state has indirectly shaped the nature of terrorists that have attacked it, and today’s ‘market state’ triggers a mirror image response from global, decentralised networks like Al-Qaeda. The wars and terrorist groups of the twentieth century were made possible by – and were a reaction to – the twentieth century nation state. But that state has gone. As long as the twenty-first century is governed by market states, we can expect more wars on terror.

bobbitt.jpg

Bobbitt calls for a fundamental re-think of the relation between strategy and international law so that we have a common framework for dealing with these wars, just as the twentieth century witnessed a particular legal framework for dealing with wars between nation-states. This implies, however, new forms of regulating communication, and on this he is less specific. It is the very diffuse, emergent character of communication today that makes it difficult to get a grip on what is being regulated. This thing, ‘communication’, does not stand still long enough for regulators to comprehend what they are trying to regulate. Last week’s attempt by Viacom to get Google to hand over the details of anyone who has ever viewed Youtube demonstrates this. Bobbitt’s ostensibly reasonable attempt to harness state conduct of war within law (to avoid any repeat of the abuses the current war on terror has produced) could be used to justify unreasonable control of our communications by states.

Given that researchers at the NPCU are producing analysis of jihadist media and the current battles for consent and legitimacy between Al-Qaeda, other jihadist groups, and Western states, we might seem well placed to explain the role of communication in the generation, prosecution or hopefully avoidance of future wars. But it is imperative that far-sighted thinking about law, the state and war should be accompanied by equally far-sighted thinking about communications. One cannot work without the other.

Learning difficulties and the digital divide

One of the best papers I saw in the whole web 2.0 conference held at Royal Holloway a few months back was given by Dr Helen Kennedy. Helen spoke about how people with learning difficulties were being excluded from the web and designers gave little thought as to how to structure websites in such a way as to make them useful and accessible. It was certainly a very thought provoking session. 

For that reason I was thrilled that Helen's work was featured on Channel 4 news yesterday. I do have to declare a slight interest (the report was put together by a Channel 4 researcher who is a friend of mine) but they did a really great job.

[Brightcove videos seem to really upset squarespace, so here's the link].

How many small donors does David Davis have?

Further to my previous comments, David Davis's team have done a lot of work on this website, which is now considerably better. It has a donate online button (still a little bit too tucked away, I would suggest) and a blog which is being frequently updated and allows commenting.

Davis had just published a press release claiming to have a great deal of support from small donors. The sum given is £40,000. This is impressive, but too few details are given for the "small donor" claim to be truly meaningful. I have left a comment on his blog requesting more details.

In the US election, small donors have been hugely important for both Barack Obama and the Ron Paul campaign, and they seem to be a really positive trend, so this press release and the possibility that British politics might see a small dollar funded campaign is a really positive thing. But on the back of that, can I ask two questions:

1. How do you define small donors? In the US they have a very definite cut off point, which is $200 (the point above which where individual donors details - name, address, etc - have to be reported to and published by the Federal Election Commission). 

2. Also, the Obama campaign has published the total number of individuals who have actually given them donations, as this necesserily increased transparency. Would you be interested in following suit, as such an action would seem to fit with the grassroot powered ethos you are trying to engender in your campaign.

[I have crossposted this blog post on my research centre weblog, which examines political communication online:

/npcu-blog/2008/6/25/how-many-small-donors-does-david-davis-have.html ] 

So the let's see if it gets published and also if we get a response.  

Commentators versus the blogosphere (and how not to do online fundraising)

Few things in politics shock me any more, but last week's events in Westminster were simply breath taking (here is a typical reaction). David Davis's decision to resign from his parliamentary seat and contest the resulting election on the issue of 42 days is one of the biggest political surprises in recent years. It is still not really clear how this is all going to pan out and whether Davis, Cameron or Brown will be the big winner (or loser) from these events.

The early stages of the contest lead to two observations. Firstly, there does seem to be a huge divide between the established wisdom of political commentators and those who comment on these events on blogs and message boards. For an example of this, look no further than Nick Robinson's newslog. Robinson broke the story of Davis's resignation and, in his original post, played up the angle of a division between the outgoing shadow Home Secretary and the leader of the opposition. Within a matter of hours, comments were appearing all over the board attacking Robinson - he was buying Labour spin, he was failing to recognise Davis's bravery, he didn't understand just how angry the electorate were over 42 days, he represented "politics as usual" (indeed the attacks were so vitriolic Robinson wrote another blog post justifying his position). A similar pattern occurred on the message board and on other blog.

There is clearly an interesting conflict going on here, but I suspect two things are happening. Firstly, we are back to the old chestnut of how unrepresentative people who comment on politics online are, if only because they disproportionately care about politics, relative to the rest of the voting population. For this reason, I suspect the commentators are ultimately right - Davis might have harmed the Conservatives long term political calculations, which are aimed at looking like a viable government in waiting and winning a majority in a general election. At the very least, it is one hell of an unnecessary risk when plan-Cameron looks to be going perfectly. But, this leads me to my second point - Davis's maverick behaviour is tapping into a genuine sense of anti-politics, which seems to reject smartly packaged, strategic calculation. And that is why it is attractive to a lot of people online.

Such feeling would seem to provide fertile for an Internet campaign, especially since Davis has said that he going to fund the election from individual donations to his cause. It was today that he launched his website... and what a missed opportunity! There is, right at the bottom, a tiny donation link (you could really miss it if you weren't looking very hard). This is what you get if you click on it:

If you would like to support David by making a donation to his campaign, you can do so by making cheques payable to:

‘Haltemprice & Howden Conservative Association Fighting Fund’

Send them to 32 Main Street, Willerby, East Yorkshire, HU10 6BU

Oh dear. 

Call for Program Committee Volunteers - "YouTube andthe 2008 Election Cycle in the United States"

Last Call for Program Committee Volunteers - Please reply directly to stuart.shulman@gmail.com if you are interested in joining the Program Committee.

DRAFT - Call for Papers - DRAFT

"YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States" April xx-xx, 2009

A two-day conference jointly hosted by:
The University of Massachusetts Amherst Department of Political Science
The Science, Technology, and Society Initiative (STS) at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst
The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
The Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP)
The Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP)

Keynote Speakers
Day 1: Richard Rogers, University of Amsterdam,  Director, govcom.org is a Web epistemologist, an area of study where the main claim is that the Web is a knowledge culture distinct from other media. Rogers concentrates on the research opportunities that would have been improbable or impossible without the Internet. His research involves studying and building info-tools. He studies and makes use of the adjudicative or 'recommender' cultures of the Web that help to determine the reputation of information as well as organizations. The most well-known tool Rogers has developed with his colleagues is the Issue Crawler, a server-side Web crawler, co-link machine and graph visualizer.

Day 2: Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University, the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the School of Engineering, School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA. He is the Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University. He is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in communities.  Specifically, his research team is developing and testing theories and methods of network science to map, understand and enable more effective networks in a wide variety of contexts including communities of practice in business, science and engineering communities, disaster response teams, public health networks, digital media and learning networks, and in virtual worlds, such as Second Life.

Approach
We welcome both disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches rooted in political science, media studies, and communication scholarship. The JITP Editor strongly encourages new and experimental approaches
involving collaboration with information and computer science scholars. Potential topics might include, but are not limited to:

- citizen initiated campaign videos,
- candidates' use of YouTube,
- the impact of YouTube on traditional or new media coverage of the election cycle,
- the effect of YouTube on citizen interest, knowledge, engagement, or voting behavior,
- political theory and YouTube in the context of the 2008 election,
- new tools and metrics that support the study of the "YouTube Effect,"
- the use of YouTube in the classroom as a way to teach American electoral politics, or
- reviews of existing scholarship about YouTube.

Paper Submissions
Authors are invited to prepare a manuscript following one of the six JITP submission formats by January 10, 2009. These formats include research papers, policy viewpoints, workbench notes, review essays, book reviews, and papers on teaching innovation. The goal is to produce a special issue, or double issue, of JITP with a wide variety of approaches to the broad theme of "YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States."  Authors of accepted papers will be notified by March 1, 2008.

How to Submit
Everything you need to know about how to prepare and submit a strong JITP paper is documented at http://www.jitp.net/. Papers will be put through a blind peer review process and authors will be notified about
a decision by March 1, 2008.

Best Paper Prize
The author or authors of the best paper will receive a single $1,000 prize.

Conference Chair
Stuart Shulman

Program Committee
Sam Abrams
Ryan Biava
Bob Boynton
Andrew Chadwick
Jane Fountain
Jeff Guliati
Matthew Hale
Justin Holmes
Mike Margolis
Andrew McCallum
Toni Pole
Stephen Purpura
Jeff Seifert
Mack Shelley
Charlie Schweik
Christine Williams