Dave Meslin calls himself a community choreographer, a term I find as endearing as his notion about the dynamics of political disengagement. He identifies seven barriers that make it difficult to participate in local politics, including:

• City Hall—An example of “intentional exclusion” is the overly verbose legalspeak in documents that make it difficult and uninspiring to take action. Meslin drives home his point by showing a retail ad with the same treatment.
• Public Space—We sell it to those with the most resources, rather than reserving it for the most important issues
• The Media—With movies, plays and other forms of entertainment, articles often include easy-to-find information about how to take action (e.g., a time, place and location of a show). In political coverage, there is no such follow-up opportunity.
• Heroes—A quick rundown on popular movies shows a pattern of heroes being chosen. This creates a myth about leadership that discourages the uninvited dreamer. In reality, being heroic is a collective effort that is voluntary and imperfect.

He wants to redefine our notion of voter apathy as this complex web of barriers. By doing so, we can more easily identify and dismantle those obstacles.
redefine apathy as complex web of barriers

Meslin’s talk is a reflection of his practice, which includes a number of creative ideas to combat political apathy. He has run a candidate version of American Idol to pare down a field of politicians to support, and his Better Ballots coalition is a citizen movement that focuses on problems with elections (low turnout, low turnover, lack of diversity, and lack of fairness).

Related: David Bismark has an idea for secure electronic voting that is verifiable and transparent.

James M. Titus isn't human, but he played one on Twitter

Organized by the Boston-based Web Ecology Project, the experiment called for three teams to program social-bots Twitter accounts that coule mimic human conversation. They selected 500 real users (I presume they had a way of confirming that), most of which shared an affinity for cats. Accounts like @JamesMTitus relied on a database of generic responses, focusing on the most responsive people in the target community. In the second week, additional bots were added to allow teams to try to thwart the efforts of other bots to be perceived as human.

Although the Evil applications are readily apparent—in February, Anonymous hackers revealed government interest in infiltrating online groups—Tim Hwang also sees the potential for great good. A new version of this social experiment called “The Narrows” will attempt to construct a community where one does not yet exist, leading to the hope of using bots as connective mechanisms to help shape large online communities.

This immediately reminded me of a couple other projects related to fakery on Twitter.

Truthy

Truthy (@ truthyatindiana) is an Indiana University research project about detecting astroturfing and other misinformation around political topics. While it takes a little practice to understand the meaning of the network visuals—the site now offers a nice visual guide that explains some of the common patterns, with specific examples—the work has produced some new insights about political use of Twitter, as well as statistically confirming other assumptions.

One of the most relevant to my perpetually delayed dissertation is the analysis of the #gop hashtag, which clearly shows a polarized group.

Truthy mapped the network of activity around #gop on Twitter

An example of a grassroots meme, the #gop hashtag is widely used on Twitter, but in two very distinct ways. One cluster reflects use by conservatives, and the other contains liberal critics. People will retweet others in the same community. When they do mention those in the other community, it is typically expressed as a disagreement. This might support known patterns within political forums online, where members engage with opposing views while reinforcing information flow from their peers.

Cyc AI

The other is Cyc (@cyc_ai), a non-profit organization to manage and grow an ontology of general knowledge that can allow computers to reason like humans. The Cyc systems leverage natural language interface, detailed background information, and deep inference to create conversational knowledge. Cycorp and Cleveland Clinic Foundation built the Semantic Research Assistant (SRA) to answer clinicians’ ad-hoc queries. Cyc, which began back in 1984, is using Twitter to help train it’s information. Recently, the tactics have changed to use a variety of inquisitive wordings to prompt confirmation of data.

Cyc is using Twitter to help train its algorithms

The Twitter account claims to allow you to send a direct message and get an answer, but that hasn’t worked for me yet. The Cyc project isn’t without criticism, not the least of which is scalability and responsiveness to cultural shifts in meaning.

Kevin Spacey is slated to star in a political thriller, “House of Cards,” based on a novel about the dark side of British politics. According to Ted Sarandos at Netflix:

We’ve committed to at least 26 episodes of the serialized drama, which is based on a BBC mini-series from the 1990s that’s been a favorite of Netflix members. Originally written as a novel by former UK Conservative Party Chief of Staff Michael Dobbs, “House of Cards,” explores the ruthless underside of British politics at the end of the Thatcher era. Reset against the backdrop of modern-day U.S. electoral politics, this new one-hour drama follows Spacey as an ambitious politician with his eye on the top job.

The executive producer of the series will be David Fincher, fresh off his Oscar nomination for The Social Network. The episodes are slated to “air” in 2012 for customers in U.S. and Canada.

This is a big move for the disruptive media company. Having already successfully migrated from physical DVD rentals to online streaming of movies, the acquisition of an original TV series—technically, Netflix is only agreeing to license the show before it is successfully produced—shifts the perception of the company from a conduit to a source of entertainment. “House of Cards” presumably won’t be available in a movie theatre or via DVR (unless your device is integrated with a working Netflix account). To watch this content, you have to join their club.

Netflix beat out HBO and AMC for the rights to the show. Television industry executives are raising eyebrows, as it is unusual to order an entire season of a show without a pilot episode in the can. Company executives are soft-pedaling the risks. Even with great people involved, though, there is no guarantee of success.

As Fast Company‘s Austin Carr writes:

Remember Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip? The much-hyped NBC series in many ways boasted the same “perfect storm” of talent as House of Cards. The show starred Friends’ Matthew Perry, The West Wing’s Bradley Whitford, Amanda Peet, and was helmed by mythical wordsmith Aaron Sorkin. NBC, so confident in the series’ potential, ordered up (only) 22 episodes before a pilot was even shot. Sound familiar?

After a strong start, however, Studio 60′s ratings dropped off a cliff, and the network cancelled the show after only one season. Netflix is on the hook for two (short) seasons of the show, minimum, whether or not it tanks.

VP Steve Swasey said evidence for the decision to bid came from their existing data. “A lot of this comes from our algorithmically driven software recommendations,” Swasey told Fast Company. “We know what our members like and watch.” Citing other serialized one-hour drama like Heroes, Lost, and Dexter, Sarandos said that this project “represents a manageable risk” and could lead to additional original programming in the future.

Netflix enjoys a 61% share of the U.S. market for digital movies streamed into the home or downloaded over the Internet. A wide margin separates them from #2 Comcast (8% of the market). There are currently 20 million subscribers to the service.

The first part of my research is about understanding how people are talking politics right now. This will require a combination of examining existing artifacts—Twitter streams and the archived posts from two WebLab forums—and a inquiry built around new conversations. This summary will detail the plan for the conversation experiment.

Some inspirational music from Leonard Cohen: “Democracy“

“Lunch With Other” Experiment

Inspired by an activity suggested by Elizabeth Lesser—in which two polar opposites sit down over a public lunch with the intent of being curious, conversational, and authentic—I propose to explore the strategies and language used when two people engage in a discussion. This experiment will include four parts: a screening survey, a series of 1:1 conversations, pre- and post-conversation mood assessment, and follow-up interviews with participants.

Screening Survey

There are two key reasons for this initial survey. First, I can include a much larger participant group (in theory) than I’ll be working with during the later stages of this inquiry. This may permit some generalizations I won’t be able to get through the conversations I’ll analyze. Second, this serves as my primary means of slotting respondents into pair-able conversations.

The survey will include questions about:

• Self-declared affinity to political labels (e.g., “Conservative”)
• Indication of support for specific political issues (e.g., “How much do you support expansion of I-69?”)
• A short description of current personal politics
• A short description of a key political influence leading to current political philosophy

Since this initial survey is meant to help filter respondents for inclusion in the later stages, the questions here will have to reflect the dimensions being examined in those conversations (see below).

Recruiting for participation in this project will likely target local online forums (MoB Talk, Bloomington Online, local Twitter, and possibly the Herald-Times online comments) to focus on accessible participants who can easily be observed and interviewed. Because one key dimension for this work will be the effect of computer mediation, recruitment outside of Indiana is important, too. General social media, established political forums, and blog posts will spread interest in this initial survey across a wider demographic.

1:1 Conversations

From the participant group from the initial survey, a few dozen people will be invited to join the second phase of this study. Selection will specifically look for pairs of people showing polarized ideology and support of single issues. This will filter out moderate politics to allow me to focus on extremes during the conversations.

There are a number of possible dimensions to explore with each pairing:

• Affinity to ideological labels (liberal, moderate, conservative)
• Spectrum of support for a single issue
• Scope of single issues (local, regional, national, global)
• Age of participants (18-29, 30-44, 45-64, 65+)
• Locality (Indiana, Not Indiana)
• Mediation of discourse (face-to-face or computer mediated)
• Prior knowledge of Other’s affinity (i.e., does a liberal know she is talking to a conservative?)
• Deception (i.e., misinform people about the other person’s ideology)
• Purpose of the conversation (political issue, non-political topic, seeking understanding)
• Preparatory information (i.e., talk around a particular news article)

My initial strategy will look to capture information about eight kinds of conversations across three key variants: ideology, mediation, and purpose.

Each participant in this phase of the study will be asked to have four conversations over a span of a few weeks. In two of the conversations, they will be matched with someone considered a polar opposite, by virtue of ideology and perhaps other factors, such as stance on a key issue or age. In the other two conversations, they will talk with someone who is similar. Their conversations will either be primed—we’ll provide some article to discuss and ask them to match a picture with their presumed ideology and stance on the issue—or the pair will be simply asked to get to know one another. Future iterations of this study could delve further the nuances of presumption and the nature of the task.

The start of each paired session will be recorded, with a transcript used for content analysis. Conversations can last longer—I want to allow them to reach comfortable closure—but I’m most interested in comparing the first thirty minutes of discourse. For those in primed conversations, an article about the topic of conversation will be sent to them in advance.

Mood Assessment

Due to the desire to assess mood and preserve as pristine the initial stages of discourse, participants will be separated prior to their conversation. As part of the paired conversations, a short survey will be administered to each participant—at the start and immediately following the discussion—to gauge each person’s mood and the perceived mood of their partner. Mood will be determined by selecting among eight faces, arranged in a circle, representing possible expressions and avoiding issues with semantic interpretation of terminology.

Those in primed conversations will also be asked to select from four possible descriptions of the politics of their partner, guessing which one is accurate. The options will derive from the mix of ideology and support of the single issue being discussed. This will be repeated at the conclusion of the conversation as well.

Follow-up Interviews

After the conversation and survey data has been analyzed, specific participants may be invited to individual or group interviews to explain their strategic decisions during the discussions and provide more insight into their own political philosophies and activities. The purpose of this part of the inquiry would be to clarify and deepen the understanding of key findings from the previous data.

Expectations

The findings from the survey will be most useful in trying to answer three important questions:

1. How strongly are single issues aligned with political labels?—My assumption is that, in our current political landscape, positions are defined by the affinity to a label, rather than contributing to a flexible definition of that label (e.g., conservatives oppose gun control).
2. What common influences lead to shared political views?—I expect to find some words, ideas and experiences expressed by participants will show strong associations with descriptions of one’s personal politics. This also includes finding links between political descriptions and labels.

I would love to add a third question, looking at potential shifts between political background and current politics, but I think that is a rabbit hole better answered by existing research that points to family as a key factor in social learning. That said, I do expect to find some examples of a negative experience leading to a political shift.

Analysis of the conversations will look for differences in the eight types of conversations (primed and not primed, similar and different ideologies, face-2-face and computer mediation) to see if any conclusions can be made about the effect these dimensions have on discourse. In particular, I’m asking:

1. What distinguishes polarized from kindred discourse?—I expect to see more aggressive and defensive language, a quicker declaration of position, and less willingness to change in discussions between polarized individuals than kindred ones.
2. What distinguishes computer-mediate discourse from face-to-face conversation?—My hypothesis is that the mediation has much less impact on political discourse strategies and language than polarized participants, but people will prove to be bolder and more task-oriented through the computer than in person.
3. What impact does focused purpose have on political discourse?—The conversations that prepare by reading a specific article to act as a catalyst for their exchange will be less diverse in the topics they discuss and less empathic in how they converse.
4. How is discourse affected by knowing the politics of your partner?—If polarization is the dominant factor, then being accurate in guessing the ideology and single-issue position of the other person will not dictate discourse strategy as much as which politics you assign. I expect that the conversations that aren’t primed will be more exploratory and adaptive than those where the participants are asked to assign a political view to their partners.

At this level, the expectations for polarized discourse will be tempered with the awkwardness of personal exchange between two strangers. The characteristics of the exchange won’t rise to the level of systemic polarization, as described by conflict theorists Dean Pruitt and Jeffrey Rubin. However, I expect that some of the seeds of systemic conflict will be observable, such as increased sarcasm, more generalizations, and diversity of tactics to prolong engagement.

The end outcome of this inquiry will be the ability to articulate some of the dynamics of political discourse, as they relate to the political labels, advance preparation, and relational language. Understanding these factors may help guide development of a framework for the design and critique of political forums.

The portal works both ways, however, and organized protest is a universal activity. Just as Americans paid attention to the events in Cairo, Egyptians are paying attention to the unions in Wisconsin, sending pizzas to feed the protesters.

Somewhere in between the utopian promise of global connectivity and the dystopian fear of losing humanity lies the practical truth about the value of technology in politics. A key part of this puzzle is microactivism, the small-scale, many-to-many communication that facilitates political expression.

Microactivism includes activities such as retweeting links and joining Facebook groups, interactions that reflect political intentions without necessarily rising to the level of political mobilization. There is value in this low-barrier, low-effort form of activism, according to CLU’s José Marichal, who recently examined how Facebook groups are formed. Such spaces are useful to communicate who a person wants to be, as an extension of their identity rather than a separate self. “Political Facebook groups allow for the performance of these ‘possible selves’ through the formation of idealized political identities,” Marichal writes.

Adopting a view of politics as a meaning-making process gives greater importance to microactivism as an important step toward realizing an idealized political self. Particularly since a platform like Facebook encourages sharing of your own identity, contributions to groups and other spaces attached to that identity allow political choices to strengthen ties to everyday life. Microactivism offers a middle ground between full activism and disengagement. Marichal considers it an open question whether or not this behavior leads to advanced forms of engagement.

Much of this activity takes place in the “filter bubble”—content aggregators that inhibit exposure to contrasting points of view—where cross-cutting conversations don’t often take place. One concern with microactivism is that it reinforces homogeneous views of the world.

In a University of Bremen study of how scientific paradigms are adopted, researchers discovered a relationship between adoption of ideas and innovation:

Overall, the model shows how new paradigms have a tendency to quickly rise to dominance, to decline slowly, and to quickly be replaced by other paradigms. When the innovation rate is high, the takeover process is chaotic, with many new ideas competing for dominance.

In this model, the researchers have defined innovation as something that occurs in a vacuum, essentially, with the competing method of idea adoption coming from peer endorsement. “Our model suggests that herd mentality makes a larger system less innovative than several smaller ones,” Stefan Bornholdt says. “In short, for innovation it’s better to listen to yourself than to others.”

While I take issue with the oversimplification of that definition, the dynamics of a political system are a tension between exposure to socially-supported ideas and those derived from one’s own experience. The herd mentality leads to fewer new ideas and more dominating adopted ones. For politics, that could help explain the extreme polarization we are experiencing: Social endorsement of ideas has greatly outweighed our personal meaning-making.

What would be the impact on political discourse to have a social network present discrete issues endorsed by a mix of ideologically-diverse friends? Would microactivism suffer because the political identities of friends have been muddled, or would the same activity continue with the benefit of exposure to diverse ideas?

A Pew Internet study revealed that 22% of all online Americans used social media for politics during the 2010 campaigns.

In covering this report for Web Pro News, Mike Sachoff highlighted these statistical tidbits:

• The “political social media user” group represented by these 22% of internet users voted for Republican congressional candidates over Democratic candidates by a 45%-41% margin.
• Among social networking site users, 40% of Republican voters and 38% of Democratic voters used these sites to get involved politically.
• Tea Party supporters were especially likely to friend a candidate or political group on a social networking site during the 2010 election—22% of such users did this, significantly higher than all other groups.

Which all underline the idea that, while the motivations and use of social media may still be partisan, there is no longer a gap between major party use of these tools for political engagement. As we collectively develop our digital fluencies, these skills become a common platform for potentially escaping partisanship, too.

Back in 2003, Americans officially shifted to networked communication for their political engagement, when email became the best channel for political campaigns. Now, mobile devices are becoming increasingly important, with about one-quarter of Americans using them to engage with the 2010 mid-term elections.

Technology allows us to re-think governance

In a 2005 First Monday paper, Beth Noveck examined the benefit of collaboration in political decision-making. She claimed technology helped with “collective visualization,” in particular, of a big picture of ideas. This drives a new understanding of the assets, issues, dissent, and coordination around political topics. In rejecting the arguments of anti-group advocates, Noveck suggests that technology has afforded us the opportunity to re-think where the center of power is situated. By adjusting law to support a lower level of decision-making and self-governance.

Regardless of what one views as the causes, there is general agreement that there are problems. Our legislative decision–making processes suffer from what Carl Schmitt termed the “motorization of law.” Slow institutions, designed for a different temporal reality, rush to keep up with the pace of modernity.

The past pushes for e-democracy are designed to make current systems more efficient, rather than re-thinking how technology can innovate how we conceive of governance. Specifically, Noveck suggests “a model of consociational democracy premised on the collective action of small groups working on a scale enabled by technology.” A few years ago, Noveck described a wiki government filled with experimentation and X-Prize kinds of challenges to bring innovation to citizen feedback and policy making.

Expertise is part of diversity

Cary Coglianese noted, however, that access to information and participation is not sufficient for good governance. In discussing the role of information, Cary points out:

One of these barriers is the specialized knowledge needed to participate meaningfully in the often highly technical decisions raised by rulemaking. Improving the accessibility of regulatory information on the Internet provides no guarantee that a significantly greater number of citizens will actually be able to process that information well.

This is one of the insights that came out of the “Wisdom of Crowds” research that examined the ability for groups to accurately predict the future, describe the unknown, and make good decisions. Some of the agents have to be able to bring their expertise into the equation to make the collective sufficiently diverse, and thus smart. For politics, this means not only that existing leaders have to engage in these kinds of communal brainstorming, but that the improved reach needs to bring in other experts with the goal of raising everyone’s ability to understand the nuances of policy-making around a given issue.

Behavior change requires social reinforcement

Network size and diversity clearly impact the spread and direction of information flow, but what is good for information isn’t always good for behavior. Although there is evidence that political action is helped by the political activity of your social network, work has also been done to distinguish between the advantage small-world networks give to information and what is required from a network to spread changes in behavior. The threshold for behavioral change requires multiple sources of social affirmation. As the connectedness of the world increases, the level of local social reinforcement decreases: Social clustering is as important to political change as long-range ties to information.

Having a few things in common triggers empathy

This tension between weak-tie information and strong-tie behavior becomes more interesting when considering a recent study on the development of empathy in strangers. In experiments conducted by Stanford psychologists, 70 women were asked questions about their birthplace and favorite things (like books and movies). Under the pretense of meeting a fellow participant in the study, each woman chatted with a confederate of the research team, dropping references to a variable number of things mentioned in the initial questionnaire. In addition, the confederate described a stressful situation. After the conversation, the participating women were debriefed to gauge their own stress levels. Another version of the experiment included men and women, and replaced the stress trigger with one of physical exertion (i.e., running in place while the participants watched).

The researchers demonstrated that those with at least three things in common showed elevated levels of stress and physical signs of exertion, even though they were not the ones put in those situations. This is interesting for political networks because it suggest that empathy—a key element of relationships—doesn’t take much in common to be triggered. Systems that facilitate ways to find some commonality among diverse members might benefit from both increased information flow and behavioral change.

In the talk, Lesser laments the “otherizing” of people in different political camps. When our goals are to persuade, or failing that cripple the beliefs of others, frustration tends to surface in the form of hyperbole and presumption about the motivations and expectations of others. Too much of that leads polarization, a deep rut of ineffective conversation in which semantic labels squawk at each other.

To combat this, Lesser suggests lunch.

She invites each of us to find a person we might consider an Other, someone who’s politics are what motivates you to scream into the wind, and meet with them over good food. In that public discussion, forget about being defensive or lining up your logic for debate. Don’t interrupt. Instead, be curious, conversational, and authentic. Listen.

“[U]buntu work is slow, and it’s difficult. It’s two people dropping the pretense of being know-it-alls. It’s two people, two warriors, dropping their weapons and reaching toward each other. Here’s how the great Persian poet Rumi put it: ‘Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I’ll meet your there.’”

For me, lunch may have to be splitting a package of Pop-Tarts—or perhaps in between sessions at TEDxBloomington on May 14—but I would love to have this kind of discussion with my Other. Who will it be?

10questions asks voters to select and critique candidate Q&A

10Questions invites its community to pose and vote on questions to ask candidates, and then critique on the quality of their responses. The philosophy is that this process fosters broader involvement of voters—potentially gives voice to traditional also-ran candidates—and bypasses the bias of media machines and campaign spinsters by allowing the content to be framed from the bottom up. Through the candidates’ video responses, voters are exposed to answers and scrutiny that might be difficult to extract from a live debate.

Iterating on the CommunityCounts project, the site is the product of partnerships between Personal Democracy Forum, The Knight Foundation, Google, YouTube, and a number of national media partners, like the San Francisco Chronicle and the Miami Herald.

When 10Questions launched in September 2007, the experiment was about the Presidential campaigns. During the mid-term elections of 2010, 10Questions identified 43 competitive races in 11 states. The site has focused on the two major American political parties, but minor candidates could participate, too, if they met base criteria (ballot status, have a website, competitive in polling numbers). The results varied, but the organizers behind this method of political discourse are encouraged about its potential as a platform.

There is a little road-not-traveled undercurrent for me here. Some of the people associated with 10Questions and projects like it were part of the RootsCamp meetings in SecondLife in November 2006. My academic interests deviated from politics by the time 10questions was launching in time for the 2008 elections, but it is the kind of project that could have been a focal point of my dissertation.

In the feedback session that followed, the discussion of polarization politics suggested a nice high-level framing of my research interests. Namely, the reason for being interested in facilitating a relational approach to talking politics is that it may be a way of mitigating or reversing the violent consequence of polarization.

A Polarized America

In America, polarization is peaking. A Gallup poll revealed Obama’s second year of his current term of office was the most polarizing since 1953. Aside from two re-election years for Reagan and Clinton, the Bush-Obama decade has split Americans since the Iraq War entered Year Two.

A few years ago, Pietro Nivola of the Brookings Institution (a Washington think tank) argued that party polarization “is the historical norm, not the exception.” It even has some advantages, such as giving voters a greater self-confidence because the candidate choices are easier to distinguish. Nivola cited a number of system properties that contributed to the current polarization, including geographic separation, “safe seats” in incumbent districts, and Internet communities that allow people to self-select ideas they want to hear. President Bill Clinton once said he thinks the Republican Party believes in polarization (a claim that itself is polarizing).

Another explanation is that, instead of the two parties growing apart, they are in fact more similar than ever. Polarization is a necessity to differentiate two groups who have voted together on a number of divisive issues, such as tax cuts (2001), Iraq (2002), and abortion ban (2003). Counter-intuitively, it is easier for centrist voters to pick a side when the distance between their ideologies and practices is not as great.

In the March 2008 issue of Journal of Politics, a debate raged over the cause of polarization in America politics. Alan Abramowitz (Emory) and Kyle Saunders (Colorado State) published an article debunking the assertion by Morris Fiorina of Stanford that polarization is a myth:

Fiorina argues that twenty-first-century Americans, like the midtwentieth-century Americans described by Converse, “are not very well-informed about politics, do not hold many of their views very strongly, and are not ideological” (2006, 19). However, our evidence indicates that since the 1970s, ideological polarization has increased dramatically among the mass public in the United States as well as among political elites. There are now large differences in outlook between Democrats and Republicans, between red state voters and blue state voters, and between religious voters and secular voters. These divisions are not confined to a small minority of activists—they involve a large segment of the public and the deepest divisions are found among the most interested, informed, and active citizens. Moreover, contrary to Fiorina’s suggestion that polarization turns off voters and depresses turnout, our evidence indicates that polarization energizes the electorate and stimulates political participation.

source: “Is polarization a myth?” (March 27, 2008)

Their conclusion is that polarization is a product of and results in an engaged electorate. In a response, Fiorina criticized that view (and many of their measures), arguing that polarization is driven by the elite down to the electorate. Whether or not polarization is real, there is little denying that our language used when talking politics is polarizing.

Avoiding Violence

A times of peak polarization, the threat for an outbreak of violence increases. Conflict theorists Dean Pruitt and Jeffrey Rubin identified five changes that contribute to escalation:

1. Parties move from light tactics (e.g., persuasive arguments and promises) to heavy tactics (e.g., threats and violence).
2. The conflict gets bigger, both in terms of the number of contentious issues and the resources invested in the struggle.
3. Issues move from specific to general as party relationships deteriorate (e.g., the other side is “evil.”).
4. More and more people and groups are drawn into the conflict.
5. Goals switch from “doing well” to winning to hurting the other.

There are two big considerations about this cycle of polarized politics. First, is it inevitable? Is it human nature to seek conflict and evolve our discourse until something explodes? Or, is this escalation a self-fulfilling prophecy, brought on by a feedback loop that reinforces our polarizing behaviors? Second, if it is not an inevitability, would a different mechanism of discourse—relational politics—serve to disrupt the escalation to conflict?

Focusing on human relationship in political discourse is not the current expectation of American politics. Adopting and facilitating, through our designed systems, a relational focus could alter the goals of discussion, moving away from consensus and convincing toward understanding. When I look at the five changes of Pruitt-Rubin, I see areas where a relational approach can have impact. Imagine the following:

1. Through collective moderation, participants avoid heavy tactics in favor of light tactics.
2. Contentious issues are humanized through storytelling and empathy.
3. Accountability instituted through personal introductions and group trust prevents generalizations by asking for specific experiences.
4. Multiple threads allow for self-selected small interest groups to form within a forum.
5. Goals switch from convincing to understanding.

These are a few of the key properties of the WebLab small group dialogue forums of the late 1990s and early part of this century. While the designers may not have intentionally set out to facilitate a relational approach, their well-chosen constraints had these effects.

“The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.”
—Norman Cousins

“If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.”
—Thomas Wolfe

These two quotes illustrate a paradox of American politics. As humans, we are hard-wired to connect with others. Yet our societal debates are largely characterized by barriers to connection. My doctoral research will examine political discourse through a relational lens, to understand the dynamics of political connection in the hope of improving how we discuss politics online.

Political Discourse

The first component of this research seeks to understand how Americans currently talk about politics with each other. I am focusing mainly on amateur politicians—those with great interest in politics, but for whom politics represents a small fraction of personal resources—and the different kinds of online and offline tools they use to mediate their discourse.

Our use of tools and identifying labels constrain our debates. Discussion of issue-based topics, such as abortion or taxation, typically faces communication obstacles that include an assumption of prior political opinions, inability to access new information, and a general disconnection from the people with decision-making power. These barriers can be lessened through considerate design of our political forums.

Initial analysis of an online political forum and a political wiki supports the notion that successful assimilation into an online political community is impacted by the strategies a new member initially adopts. Those strategies, in turn, are constrained by the mechanics of the technology and established behavior of the community. A framework of potential barriers—trust, conflict, expertise, activity, skills, social connection and validity—will be used to understand these circumstances.

Relational Design

The second component of this research explores how the strength of relationships impacts the quality of political discourse.

Relational-Cultural Theory (RCT) rejects of the power-over model in favor of power-with, the notion that people are at their strongest when in relation with others. The concept of mutuality—joining together in a kind of relationship in which all participants are engaged, empathic and growing—is potentially applicable to an ideal politics, where discussants embrace their differences while working toward a common understanding. Supporting the kind of relationships described by RCT are concepts like embodied interaction (users create and communicate meaning through their interaction with the system) and the phatic function of communication (convey the state of the channel by initiating, maintaining, or terminating connection).

These ideas form a lens for the critique of the dynamics of online political discourse. I hope to suggest design choices that will address the structural and cultural disincentives to engage other discussants, allowing political connections to become more meaningful.

Violent Speech Breeds Violent Attitudes

The University of Michigan reported that research by doctoral student Nathan Kalmoe shows that there is a clear negative impact of violent political rhetoric. With a series of surveys, Kalmoe examined the effects that changing some of the language (e.g., “fight” to “work”) had on how willing people are to adopt violent attitudes.

Participants read two anonymized texts (no subject, no target, no party affiliation) from political TV advertisements. Respondents were asked about their aggression levels and interest in violence against political leaders (N = 412). Essentially the same survey was conducted twice more throughout the year, except with only one text instead of two (N = 512) and then with the party affiliations revealed (N = 384). These studies were conducted prior to the 2010 mid-term elections, at least two months prior to the Arizona shooting that killed six people and critically injured U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

Kalmoe concluded that those more prone to aggressive behavior became more likely to adopt violent attitudes about political figures. To a lesser degree, young people generally are more susceptible to this kind of priming. Party affiliation played no role in this effect.

The More You Hear

Add to Kalmoe’s work the findings of the latest Edelman Trust Barometer, released yesterday. The annual report gauges attitudes about the state of trust in business, government, NGOs, and media. The survey included over 5,000 college-educated participants in 23 countries, ranging from ages 25 to 64.

Key findings from the annual Edelman Trust Barometer survey

While much of the survey is focused on comparing the rise and fall of stated trust in different kinds of organizations, one question asks:

How many times in general do you need to hear something about a specific company to believe that information is likely to be true?

In response, 59% of participants indicated they would need to hear something 3-5 times for it to be true. One-fourth of sample didn’t even need that much repetition to trust the information they got.

Reputation of the source impacts how willing someone is to believe positive or negative information. When a company is distrusted, 57% will believe negative information after hearing it once or twice, but only 15% will believe the same amount of positive information. For trusted companies, only 25% believe negative information and 51% believe positive.

While agreeing with violent statements is not the same as conducting violent behavior—an important early claim by some in the aftermath of the Giffords shooting—aggressive rhetoric could still be a leading indicator of violent acts. Furthermore, hearing that kind of language from a trusted source makes it more likely that it will be believed. If that message is about not trusting another source, the rhetoric has effectively constructed another barrier to critical thought about opposing ideas.

These are some of my favorites:

Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.—Plato

The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness.—Norman Cousins

A leader who loses his connection to his people soon loses the ability to lead them.—Robert Ley

All this technology for connection and what we really only know more about is how anonymous we are in the grand scheme of things.—Heather Donahue

Loneliness is proof that your innate search for connection is intact.—Martha Beck

In the different voice of women lies the truth of an ethic of care, the tie between relationship and responsibility, and the origins of aggression in the failure of connection.—Carol Gilligan

[P]artisan attachments powerfully shape political perceptions, beliefs and values, and incumbents enjoy advantages well beyond the way in which their districts are configured.—Thomas E. Mann

It’s nice to say let’s be bipartisan. But we’re a partisan nation. We were raised as a partisan nation.—Colin Powell

The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence.—Walter Lippmann

[P]arty labels do not ensure unanimity any more than trying to cast the challenge we confront as a people through a partisan prism.—J. D. Hayworth

If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.—Thomas Wolfe

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.—Robert Anton Wilson

Quotes like these become touchstones for more work, allowing me to remember some of the motivating notions that drive the research while encouraging me to continue searching for better ones that fit with my results.

And what does it mean for accountability, when any individual can post manipulated footage on YouTube, or information on a blog site which hasn’t been subjected to some of the rigorous fact checking process newspaper or television or radio reporters have to go through before they can publish or air a story.

This is an old but persistent question about Web 2.0 content. The underlying assumptions are that rigorous fact checking will guarantee truth and that only trained professionals in traditional media are capable of checking facts properly.

First, mass collaboration in uncovering truth is, collectively, a rigorous process. Just as a common initial criticism of Twitter focuses on a single tweet (the “I don’t want to know what you had for lunch” complaint), rigor is often judged by the depth of work done by an individual or a small group of people providing oversight. However, crowds can cover more ground. Participants leverage their own personal expertise and self-select what interests them enough to warrant further investigation. Each person contributes a piece of the puzzle. A small group must be responsible for considering and acting upon all the pieces.

Second, whether formal or intuitive, training adds experience and efficiency to the process of fact-checking. Compared to the average Joe, journalists are likely to be better at confirming facts. However, their expertise is just part of the collective. No single person will have all experiences or the resources to generate a timely and comprehensive outcome. Collective participation is like pouring sand into a jar full of rocks. The wisdom of the crowds effect makes us smarter together than the smartest individuals (see: Wikipedia).

More importantly, suspect content found on the Web makes us question how true it is. The more we become familiar with Web 2.0, the more skeptical and skilled we become in confirming information. Our alarms start sounding, and we start to strategize where we might look for answers. When we consume or produce Web content, we are training ourselves in the art of criticism. We become less reliant on traditional institutions filled with formal experts to do our thinking for us, and more engaged with the social circles—including strangers—we trust.

By the way, the ANU forum is finishing today. You can catch up by following their Twitter stream or their webcast of the sessions.

Carter: What I really hope is our next president takes on King Arthur’s philosophy.

Me: (resisting the urge to start singing Camelot) Yes? What’s that?

Carter: War is only the very very last resort.

Me: (lost in patting myself on the back for such brilliant parenting as to produce such a thoughtful kid)

Carter: Of course, my larger concern is Area 51.

Me: Huh?

Carter: I’m afraid the next president, whether it’s Obama or McCain, might abuse Area 51.

Me: Again, huh?

Carter: (working on his patient voice) It’s likely there’s some powerful alien technology there, and the next president could use it as a terrible weapon. I don’t want that to happen.

Me: But (struggling) that isn’t happening now, right? The current president isn’t using alien technology, right?

Carter: Well Mom, I think there’s a good chance the next president will be smarter than this one.

One can only hope.

Carter: Did he really live on a peanut farm?

Archie: Or played in a park?

Carter: What is the favorite pet he ever had?

Me: How about you ask something that we couldn’t answer by searching the web.

Carter: Okay- what’s his favorite color?

Archie: Does he have a question for me?

Carter: Does he play Packrat?

Archie: Has he ever met George Washington?

Carter: Is he excited about Spore?

Archie: Does he even play Spore?

Carter: No one plays Spore. It isn’t out yet.

Archie: I meant, does he make creatures on Spore?

Carter: That’s called Spore Creature Creator.

Archie: Does he do that?

Carter: Does he think Obama should be president?

Archie: Has he ever had toys?

Carter: Every kid has toys.

Archie: I mean as an adult. Has he had adult toys?

Me: brief moment during which I am transformed into something from Beavis and Butthead

Archie: Has he ever tried to eat Panda Puffs?

Carter: If he doesn’t think Obama should be president, who does he think should be?

Archie: Has he ever made an oven?

Mmmmm. Not sure if Talk of the Nation is ready for our questions.

Lewis: They (The American People) want leadership. They’re so thirsty for it they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there’s no water, they’ll drink the sand.

President Andrew Shepherd: Lewis, we’ve had presidents who were beloved, who couldn’t find a coherent sentence with two hands and a flashlight. People don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty. They drink the sand because they don’t know the difference.

–The American President

When the Barack Obama lovefest started, I wanted on.

I braced myself for the ride of my life and headed out to see Obama speak. I wanted more than politics—I wanted leadership. I wanted a politician who understood the difference between fighting the fights he can win, and fighting the fights that need fighting. Surely someone with Obama’s charisma and intelligence could persuade the American people to talk about the real issues instead of dumbed-down soundbites.

I want to believe in Barack Obama.

Rewind 17 years.

Fall of 1991. Working days at a bank and evenings as a waitress, taking some coursework in the afternoons, I survived in a fog of beer and cigarette smoke, stumbling through early adulthood.

Something happened and I woke up. My stumbling shifted to gingerly picking my way through the days, making sense of my life. The day I woke up, I turned on the TV and saw a bunch of older white men—looking like all the uncles at a Bridwell family reunion—and a younger black woman.

The man in charge said all the right things. He talked about the justice system—allowing it to work without bias—and then sat back as the other men demeaned and belittled the woman. He might have felt an urge to stand up and do something, like impose basic rules of evidence so she could have the same protections she would have had in a court of law. This was the Senate, however, and he chose to wait for the fight he could win instead.

I watched, horrified, as the men pretended to understand the basics of sexual harassment, thus their convenient dismissal of any expert witnesses on the topic, and then asked questions that completely missed the point. These were questions designed not to enlighten, but to debase. It was a stunning illustration of how little power American women have, how very much power white rich men have, and how very little the senators understood it all. Clarence Thomas was confirmed to our Supreme Court where he can show generations how dangerous the cavalier abuse of power can be.

Today

I hear Obama saying a lot of right things. I appreciate him reaching out to a broad audience in order to beat John McCain. My complaints about Obama do not mean I’ll vote for McCain. The implication that my desire for more intelligent and honest discussion means I would prefer the lowest common denominator is infuriating. I’m complaining because I’m tired of drinking sand. By adding Joe Biden to the ticket, Obama might as well have handed me a toy funnel so I could swallow more efficiently.

I want a presidential candidate who is truly presidential. Someone who has the courage to confront the American people with deeper discussions than his polls dictate. Someone who assumes we know the difference between sand and water.

It’s easy to argue that Biden didn’t do anything wrong during the Clarence Thomas hearings, it’s much harder to argue that he did anything courageous. I find a similar theme throughout Obama’s platform. Instead of fighting the fights that need fighting, he’s standing by, voting present, almost leading.

I’m thirsty.

Thanks to Andrew McKinney—the man I apparently replaced as Internet phenom—for tweeting about this great little viral marketing project by PalTalk, a online video chat community.

I first experienced this technology with the Bob Dylan album promotion last year. Engineered by social media company Techlightenment to coincide with a new release of Dylan music, that flash video allowed one to superimpose messages on the placards used in the artist’s famous “Subterranean Homesick Blues” film. The PalTalk version is quite well-crafted and in most instances, the telltale Flash shimmer is hard to detect.

Like Drew, my campaign is now in trouble. Thanks to PalTalk, anyone can be an Internet phenomenon.

In 1996, Amy took her new degree in social work to Door County for a week-long workshop with Judith Jordan. Jordan, one of the current torchbearers for relational-cultural theory (RCT), proved inspirational not only to Amy but also, vicariously, to me. The simple concept that we humans are hard-wired for connection with others is a foundational idea that has permeated my thinking.

A few years ago, Boston Globe reporter Christina Robb wrote a great history of RCT in the form of a book, This Changes Everything. Robb chronicles the overlapping professional careers of three extraordinary women—Carol Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller, and Judith Lewis Herman—as they gain insight from their pioneering experiences bending gender boundaries, thus planting the seeds for a revolutionary feminist perspective on clinical psychology, psychiatry, and education. The title of the book is from a quote by Miller when reflecting on the impact these insights have. Miller, the founder of RCT, died in summer 2006.

RCT examines women’s creation of self around their relationships. This contrasts other theories of human development focusing on individuation and autonomy. Strength is in the relationship, a dynamic beast that incorporates a cycle of disconnection and reconnection. The outcome of healthy relationships are energy, clarity, a sense of worth and—most importantly—a desire for more connection. With disconnection comes confusion, lethargy and isolation. The trick to good mental health is not to avoid the latter, but to work through it back into a state of connection with others.

Mark Pesce’s talk on Hyperconnectivity

These themes again resurfaced in my informatics work, which deals with the dynamics of community building. On June 24, Mark Pesce gave a talk on the social nature of humanity at the Personal Democracy Forum, Lincoln Center in New York. The name was familiar to me as the author of VRML, and early 3D markup language, but I found his current project—The Human Network: Sharing, Knowledge and Power in the 21st Century—to be much more compelling. His book is due out in mid-2009.

Pesce argues that the mixture of new mobile technology and our social nature is creating a fast-changing world we no longer can (or should?) control. The crux of his message is built on this key insight:

Children are experts in mimesis—learning by imitation. It’s been shown that young chimpanzees regularly outscore human toddlers on cognitive tasks, while the children far surpass the chimps in their ability to “ape” behavior. We are built to observe and reproduce the behaviors of our parents, our mentors and our peers.

Our peers now number three and a half billion.

In short, connection is an inevitably useful evolutionary force that shapes our global culture.

USC researcher Mizuko Ito studied teenagers in Japan and found that kids engage in a continuous conversation, or co-presence, with and average of five other friends. These conversations are mostly trivial in nature, but they begin the moment the teens wake up in the morning until they go to sleep at night. Led by Twitter, microblogging has shown that the interest in and value of short, phatic messages is cross-cultural. Those seemingly pointless answers to the core question, “What are you doing?” collectively form a dance of connection and disconnection upon which healthy people thrive.

Pesce puts this in the context of politics and democracy. Hyperconnectivity is producing hypermimesis, which itself leads to hyperempowerment. Because everyone has the potential to see what everyone else is doing, innovative notions spread quickly and spark action within the masses. Those who fight against these dynamics is tilting at windmills. As Pesce observes: “The mob, now mobilized, can do as it pleases. Obama can lead by example, encourage or scold as the occasion warrants, but he cannot control. Not with all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men.”

This is precisely why finding a way to connect Jean Baker Miller to Stanley Miller and Scott Miller is so important. The genetic predisposition toward connection coupled with a technology that soon will reach 3/4 of all people on the planet adds up to the inevitability of a hyperconnected world. The ship can’t go back into the bottle. Instead, we have to understand what might come from having a boat on the desk.

Usability Consultant Kimberly Krause Berg lamented last fall that the social web is more about disengaging from others than relating to them. (“We’ve had the Internet to use to change the world for over 10 years now. They still pave Paradise and put up parking lots.”) She reiterated some of those same ideas more recently, specifically taking issue with the notion that people over 40 don’t “get” social media. Kimberly makes an eloquent case for the need to see, hug, and sense our social contacts.

In doing so, however, Berg backs up to the old argument that computer-mediated relationships are inherently inferior. Strong and weak ties, online and offline … each connection we make affords its own opportunities and limitations. To appropriate her own example, Woodstock was special not merely because people had pot, mud, nudity and music over which to bond. It was special because a small mass of individuals did manage to connect, despite exponentially fewer opportunities to do so. Perhaps Woodstock exists in a different form these days, through microblogs or Second Life parties, and—thankfully—the magic isn’t as unique in a hyperconnected world.

Amateur coverage of Dennis Kucinich getting shut out of national debates

Two months ago, the panel guests on MSNBC Tucker suggested they should “shut up about the polls” as they speculated on why Kucinich isn’t garnering more respect from the Democrats for trailblazing many of their current political stances. The only change since is that the media and political machines have successfully worked to trim the logistics of the entertainment productions trying passing as meaningful political debates. Many mock him, some express concern, but the bottom line is: issue debates are the worse for excluding him. He is articulate, passionate, quick-witted and—most often—right about the policies he supports.

I hate the modern political machine. This was supposed to be the year of Politics 2.0, where the Internet allowed us to bypass corporate decisions aimed at bypassing the democratic process. Instead, we are allowing those with power to dictate and interpret the bar by which the powerful are allowed to compete for power. Well, here’s my long-tail contribution to a better tomorrow:

Vote for Dennis Kucinich. Do everyone a favor and vote for him in any poll you come across. The vote costs you nothing, and nfortunately, polls have become more meaningful than the ballot.

Although Kucinich is politically the closest alignment with me, some of the other dimensions—such as marital history—may have pushed him further away than the other Democrats. My closest match is 78-year-old Mike Gravel, who matched up well with my profile and holds many of the same beliefs as Kucinich. The recommendation prompted me to check out his site, where I learned the former Senator from Alaska has a presence in Second Life.

Overall, the site is a clean design and appears to go deeper than many of the similar political tools popping up as the countdown to electing a new President ticks closer to the one-year mark. Some criticize the inside-the-box use of public positions as the basis of matching candidates, but the information complexity and interactions involved with configuring one’s own profile is pretty impressive. The interactive features act like a card sort, allowing you to drag key issues in four broad categories into a spatial arrangement of relative importance. The configuration took a couple minutes to complete and produced a simple visualization showing the candidates of highest relevance.

Connect2Elect has a drag-n-drop tool to prioritize political issues.

Where the criticism holds up is in how Connect2Elect makes use of that data to generate the outcome and in the top-down nature of possible tags.

The push pin metaphor used in the main visualization works only as much as one can aggregate all of the issues into a single measure of distance from your position. I don’t think that is practical. While Connect2Elect does incorporate another dimension in the display—placing a pin in a particular quadrant to show where each candidate most aligned with one of the four sections of your issue tags—the algorithm seems to overly simplify all of the profile depth.

There are some inherent constraints on the candidate side about what can be compared. This is an information accessibility issue, most likely, and not necessarily a deliberate choice of Neighborhood America and introNetworks, the creators of the site. It would be interesting to be able to compile richer candidate profiles through their history of public service. This could include impact on constituents, performance in lower offices, and legislative history.

Perhaps there is a potential marriage with a site like Fantasy Congress, which looks a a wide range of metrics in measuring political success to power their online games. The issue tags, too, are merely a reflection of populist issues and not generated by grassroots and local interests. Open-ended folksonomies, older issues of concern (like flag burning amendments), and criteria such as consistency would enhance the match engine. The use of folksonomies, in particular, and local issues are important in facilitating discovery that crosses standard party lines. If the only options are binary tags associated with an abstracted party platform, then the visualized results will inherently reflect that division.

Dennis Kucinich isn’t my candidate of choice, according to Connect2Elect

I may be a bit older than some of my classmates (and a few professors) but not so much older that I would have been the only one online in 1998. Even at WikiSym 2006, I got big blank stares when I mention WebLab. Frankly, it is mystifying.

Here are some other interesting links about WebLab, Marc Weiss and Barry Joseph:

• Online Community Report interview with Mark Weiss (February 2002)
• NPR Interview, unofficial transcript (December 1998)
• WebLab founder Marc Weiss participates in Digital Independence planning session (2004?)
• GMD Studios article by Marc Weiss (from the “boom years”)
• Games for Change & Serious Games Initiative (from the WebLab network)
• Global Kids (where Barry Joseph went after WebLab)