First and foremost, I highly recommend reading this article showing how all the pretty things on Obama's website (a NYT article compared it to the Mac/Apple website) are connected to the actual on-the-ground organizing in the primary campaign so far:
The Machinery of Hope: Inside the grass-roots field operation of Barack Obama, who is transforming the way political campaigns are runI found all the information about the training process they've been using very interesting, especially this part:
by TIM DICKINSON, Rolling Stone, March 20, 2008 (Issue 1048, p. 36-42 in the print)
"We decided that we didn't want to train volunteers [...] We want to train organizers - folks who can fend for themselves."To work out that ethic on their website, they've created the "My.BarackObama.Com" platform within the general campaign site, allowing people to blog and do event organizing and fundraising and all kinds of other social networking from their space.
They also make it easy for anyone who wants to remix their media in their posts to do so, making videos available through YouTube and photos on Flickr and so forth. Then they're able to link back to those blog posts and videos and so forth to show how people's stories connect with their campaign or what their supporters are concerned about.
Moving from the primaries into the general election, they're continuing their training program and promoting it heavily right now through all their web tools:
Obama Organizing Fellows
I got an e-mail about that program at work and talked about it with my boss, who's been curious about all the hype about younger people following Obama and wondering how that connects to all this technology stuff. I told her the first time I noticed anything about Obama online was when my friends started joining groups on facebook - they were created by supporters, not the campaign, and were able to ratchet up support and actual fundraising very quickly because they could hook into the social features of the campaign website so smoothly.
This is exactly why Obama is marketing himself as someone who raises money through small donations: his campaign is drawing on the full range of people's commitment ability. This can include the die-hards who will apply for an intensive training program and commit to working 30 hours a week or people who are willing to let other volunteers from out of town stay with them for free while they attend those trainings. It also includes people who will call a friend in a primary state and persuade them to register to vote by a certain date or people who can only give $10 here and there when they're able. But they find a way to make any level of participation seem meaningful, which is exactly why it works so well.
Like the Jenkins paper we read on participatory culture, it's absolutely essential to the ethics/etiquette/mores/whatever of these social sites that you create a welcoming environment where novices can be mentored and everyone feels that they not only can contribute something but that whatever they can do will be valued by others.
I know the stereotype about millenials is that they need constant reinforcement - I don't know how true that is, but I do think it's an aspect of these online settings for a reason. Like using emoticons to adjust your tone in e-mail or on forum posts, giving feedback is essential to making participatory sites seem truly social. If people can tell that they're being listened to, they're much more likely to make an effort to speak their own words.
This is true offline, too, of course, but it isn't common in the political process. When I was a kid I remember helping my dad pass out flyers for a congressional candidate that he thought would make a big difference in Chicago - Michael Patrick Flanagan (who was running for Dan Rostenkowski's seat). It was raining and cold the day we passed them out, but we got a lot done and when we came back Flanagan was in his office and came out to thank us personally. That was probably my most direct participation in the electoral process that I can think of, but it isn't what I remember most.
After Flanagan was elected, my father read something about him in the paper he didn't like and sent him a paper chiding him for going back on his promises. A couple weeks later we got a call from the congressman, who wanted to talk to my dad personally and explain how the news story was distorting his actions. We were all kind of gobsmacked - it isn't the sort of thing you expect in Chicago if you aren't related to an alderman. :)
I do think it's great that Obama has been successful in getting a lot of people actively involved in the political process who haven't been interested before. But campaigns can do that - the real change that needs to happen, the change that Kamilla was wondering about, is in the second part of my story. We need people who will hold their elected officials accountable, and we need elected officials who take that kind of feedback seriously. Have any of you seen that happening online?
2 comments:
That's a cool story, though I didn't follow -- did you father write the congressman an email or a letter in the mail?
In terms of email, I noticed that Obama is very quick to respond to email correspondence. I assume he tells the people he hires that he takes online correspondence seriously, since it's the base of his campaign too. But I always thought that was cool. Dick Durbin is always days or even weeks behind Obama in responding.
Another thing I wanted to say was, in my own experience (which is by no means universal and I am sure other people have different experiences), it depends very much on the congressperson how much they will correspond over email. Which means that people living in certain districts will have a much harder time interacting with their congresspeople "directly" than others.
Overall, I would guess (again based on what I know, which is limited) that a situation like what happened to your father is actually extremely rare. I can't possibly imagine a situation in which the (otherwise very awesome and funny) congressman I worked for would ever call a constituent directly over the phone (though he was very nice to them in person). And he didn't have any clue how to use a computer, not to mention email. Seriously. This is the other extreme and also rare, but I say it to demonstrate that there is a large spectrum on the Hill among people who are more online savvy and others who are old and totally illiterate. (Why can't we have people under 60 working in Congress??!?!!! The eternal question)
Anyway, I definitely agree with what you're saying though. I very much hope that the Internet continues to engage people politically in the way that it does now. I thought about it more after I wrote my post, and in a way, it's kinda annoying for me to complain that online culture isn't doing enough, because the kind of participation we have today couldn't have even been imagined twenty, or even ten years ago.
I just hope our elected officials also catch on...
Oh, definitely a letter. My dad died 12 years ago and we didn't do e-mail back then. Sorry, that was so self-evident to me I didn't think to explain - but there's no reason you should know what time frame I'm thinking of. :)
And as to age & political process, Yikes, YES - that's why it freaks me out that they try to pass regulation about net neutrality and kids and filters and which sites are ok and videogames and all that stuff. I know there are plenty of tech-savvy older people, but there are some real Luddites in positions of huge power.
That bothers me not only because they probably won't "get" how they can interact with constituents this way online, but they could potentially really limit the way everyone else can interact on the web. gah.
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