social networking

The New York Times writes about the transition for some some young ex-Clinton staffers now working for Obama in Chicago.

A piece in the Flint (MI) Journal examines new social networking and media tools and their connection to an increase in youth political engagement this fall. Unfortunately, this article includes an example of the Republican strategic pessimism regarding the youth vote:

Facebook won't win any elections, said Harry Awdey, president of UM-Flint's College Republicans.

"We're trying to energize who we have out there but a lot of young people aren't going to vote," he said. "It seems like every couple of years they say it's going to be the year of the youth vote and it hasn't been yet.

"I'd like to think people are more civilly engaged but it's really that voter participation was so low that it had nowhere to go but up."

Nate Silver (of FiveThirtyEight.com fame) pens a good, if simple op-ed in the New York Post on the importance of the youth vote to Obama and why a surge in youth turnout appears likely this November.

Another piece -- this one in the Pioneer Press (MN) -- examines the paradox of a young, technology-obsessed McCain supporter supporting a 71 year old man who doesn't do email. Here's a sneak peek:

Andy Brehm is an e-mailaholic who frequently logs onto his Facebook social networking page to chat with his friends over the Web.

But the man he wants to be the nation's next president doesn't do any of those things.

Brehm, 27, a recent law school graduate, is as tech savvy as they come. John McCain, 71, the presumptive Republican nominee, once said he's never done "a Google."

...

"To be honest, I'd rather the president not spend his time e-mailing," Brehm said. "There are more important things to deal with. This country has some real serious problems that big government and higher taxes aren't going to fix."

A localized example of the surge in Democratic registrations this year: Boulder, Colorado.

Reuters speculates whether hip-hop could help or burden Barack Obama.

Alright, so I know I have ranted on this before, but the video I just saw on Politicker has me riled up again. Here is the video:

Notice a few things here. First, the poster the guy is holding in the video spells YouTube wrong. Bad sign. Second, McCotter has only had the account for 3 days, after the whole Twittergate scandel broke.

Now this isn't just some tech geek having a gotcha moment with a screen shot (it is that, but not just that). The point I made in my earlier post is that bringing the franking rules up-to-date was something that both Republicans and Democrats could have both supported and worked together to do in a timely and cooperative fashion. Unfortunately, the Republicans don't want to let that happen.

I'm a true believer in the concept of Congress 2.0 and using the new tools the internet has provided us to enable our elected officials to communicate more effectively. As a matter of fact, most of the Democrats and young voters I have spoken to agree. The idea that the Republicans have turned this into a partisan battle sickens me, especially since there isn't really any disagreement to be fighting about. They have created a straw man argument in order to call the Democrats Stalinists and use all those Russian sounding Communist words they remember using back in the Cold War.

Progressive organizations have been leading the way in the use of the internet and social networking tools in the political sphere. The Republican Party is not the great defender of the freedom of the internet (just look at their stances on net neutrality).

So how about we stop with the rhetoric and name-calling, put our Russian-to-English dictionaries away, and actually work to get these rules updated since it's something almost all of us agree on. And please try to spell the name of the website right in a video that you are posting to that website.

So that's my rant. If you were expecting a useful internet tip or something I actually wrote one on my personal blog. Ironically, it is about the self-populating Twitter links used by the Let Our Congress Tweet site.

So, what are your thoughts on this whole thing? Let us know in the comments.

The Center for Community Change's Sally Kohn has a piece today about the passionate Millennial activism that is taking place online and the extent to which it happens off line.

We've kinda heard this complaint before with Thomas Friedman's Generation Q piece that slammed the Millennial Generation for not being disgusted enough by our contemporary world to take to the streets. In Mike's rebuttal of the piece and indeed many of us who spoke out against Friedman's uneducated assumptions, it isn't that Millennials aren't taking to the streets, indeed they are, they are just virtual streets

Kohn is bothered by the virtual part. She agrees that young people feel "deeply connected" with causes - things going on in Darfur, Tibet, you name it.... Bus she fears the online activism will "erode the community values [Millennials] seek"

"On the one hand, they have grown up with new technologies that have helped the world connect more easily; on the other hand, they have been raised alongside the rise of hyperindividualism in American culture that has isolated us from each other and the world around us...

But social movements are based on collective action. The American Revolution, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and every significant social change movement in between and since has relied on community organizing, building mutually responsible communities to challenge the status quo."

Kohn says that the internets are very individualistic. Seems Kohn hasn't heard of Web 2.0. I don't know about ya'll but we are collectively communicating right here on the tubes. And this blog is fed into facebook - which if you haven't seen it is this SOCIAL networking site where all these people who went to school together, work together, or associate in the same causes collectively chill together on line.

For example, Invisible Children started out just on MySpace and Facebook, living through social networking sites, this organization brought awareness and action to a cause among an age specific group of people. Now, young people are serving to help walk these children to safe houses daily, people are donating online, showing the film, and raising awareness about something no one was talking about a few years ago.

IC isn't the only one. Save Darfur is another cause that I hardly think would have the passion and power that it does today without a mobilized group of people online. If you look at online donations on Change.org or the FB Causes application you see that Save Darfur has raised $2,657 on Change with 1997 actions and $24,000 on the Causes Application on Facebook.

Young people have a lot of power and that power can take place on-line or off, each action is just as valid and just as powerful and appreciated. No one should be allowed to get away with diminishing that.

Rock the Vote and MySpace released a new joint competition this week geared to increase voter registration online with their online widget.

According to CNET

Here's how it works: from now through August 14, bands with profiles on MySpace can install a tool on their pages that lets their fans register to vote. The first 25 bands to have 150 people register to vote through the tool will have their music featured in custom playlists on TouchTunes digital jukeboxes--you know, the kind you see in bars--and then the grand prize winner will get to be the opening act at Rock the Vote's "Ballot Bash" concert at the Democratic National Convention in Denver on August 25. They'll also get some new guitars courtesy of Gibson...

MySpace is hoping the contest will spark the interest of some of the many small-time bands that have a presence on the site and have used it to build up loyal fan bases. "Not only will the competition link MySpace's thriving music division with an active and successful field effort but it will also offer small bands, a core constituency of MySpace, the chance to open up for top talent," Lee Brenner, executive producer of political programming and director of the "Impact" political channel on MySpace, said in a release Tuesday. "This competition with Rock the Vote is furthering the democratization of music and the ability of bands to engage their fans through MySpace."

Colin Delany of ePolitics has an interesting article posted today: Has Facebook Jumped the Shark as a Political Tool?

His determination? When it comes to functioning as a mass communications tool or living up to the media hype - Yes. When it comes to building community and fostering group formation through one-on-one conversation - No, assuming you do it properly.

Facebook is a useful tool, but it's not the new killer-app, at least when it comes to political campaigns. Email, online fundraising, and online video still wield far more influence and the best uses of Facebook come when it can integrate into one of those other functions. In the end, it seems to be all about expectations and execution. Delaney's article is a good read on that account, and even comes with a few handy best practices that all online campaign operatives should keep in mind.

• Anastasia Goodstein notes an interesting divide among social network users - those who replicate their offline social networks online, and those who use social networks to expand beyond their geographic communities into more niche, culturally based communities. Definitely worth thinking about if you're an online organizer. - Ypulse
• Project Vote notes that the VA is keeping wounded veterans off the voter roles. - Open Left
• John Ashcroft gets pwned by a college student on the question of waterboarding. - FireDogLake
• Alan Rosenblatt gets an up close look at MTV's Street Team '08 and declares the channel "still on the cutting edge" when it comes to political news We tend to agree, MTV has done impressive work so far this cycle. -TechPresident
• The Harvard IOP survey is getting more media play today. Check out write-ups in the Seattle PI, Boston Globe, and a blog post by IOP Director John Della Volpe.
• I haven't stopped by in a while, but looks like HillBlazers, the Clinton youth website, is a little more robust these days. So is her whole internet presence, argues Xavier Lopez-Ayaia. -TechPresident
  

Seriously, this is the guy who's going to have "the most participatory website ever?" He hates social networking and thinks music is keeping kids away from civic action . . . I'm sure it's got nothing to do with the efficacy of those petitioning organizations or the fact that many of them are more interested in harvesting your address and cell phone so they can list build and fundraise off you . . . but I guess it's too much to ask Ralph to reassess the activist models he himself pioneered.

If you want to know why Nader will pretty much be irrelevant this year, this kinda hits the nail on the head. (Hat tip to Micah at Tech President).

• The Nation notes the negative impact that complex voter registration laws have on youth turnout.
• The Wall Street Journal makes sense of the race for delegates in the Democratic nominating contest.
• Threat Level, the Wired politics blog, has a great piece in which Sarah Stirland interviews participants in the MTV/MySpace Super Dialogue about how online organizing is changing politics.
• NetSquared interviews Ben Rigby of Mobile Voter about his new book, analyzing best practices in online advocacy. Definitely worth a read.

Recently, there have been an extraordinary number of dismissive, sneering media attacks on America's young people and the utility of the internet in politics.  This website has tried to correct the condescending, disdainful narratives time and time and time and time and time and time again but yet the haters persist.

One fine example, The New York Times' columnist Thomas Friedman recently put on an album of Captain Beefheart, got sentimental, then in turn, regretful; and so he lashed out at whippersnappers, his infernal computer, and those geeks who like infernal computers. 

"But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won’t cut it. They have to get organized in a way that will force politicians to pay attention rather than just patronize them. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms."

Bobby Kennedy didn't travel between farms or factories by horse-drawn carriage  - and there was no teaching of songs! Would journalists who also covered the AFL's growth in the 1890s or of California's Wobblies in the 1930's have rolled their eyes at RFK's silly methods?  Martin Luther King always made sure to have newfangled mechanized-photo-graphic picture-illustrators present at his heavily stage-managed lunch-counter sit-ins.  No planned riots and not a single engraver was invited! 

Absurdly, Thomas Friedman's beef with the do-gooding college children of the millennial generation is that they're just all too Facebookey. "But Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country's own good." Really? Online equals... quiet?  What then would Rip Van Friedman think about this:

Youths silent rally met with force in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Ahsan Pirzada and his high-school buddies spread the word via Facebook, e-mail and cell phone text messages: Let's meet at McDonald's after school on Monday.But not to hang out.

About 100 students pulled out banners, taped their mouths shut in symbolic protest and marched silently toward the office of President Pervez Musharraf. Before they had gone 1,000 yards, truckloads of police, including an anti-terrorist squad, swooped in and dispersed the threat, hauling about 50 teens to a police station.

Using facebook, twitter and cell phones they did a flashmob protest.  (That alone is enough politics 2.0 to literally blow Friedman's head off his shoulders.) 

"We know that many people cannot afford to join us," said Samad Khurram, a Harvard University student who stayed home this semester to work in the pro-democracy movement. "At least 30 percent of Pakistanis are surviving day to day on their wages. They can't afford to take off a day to protest" or to risk indefinite arrest.

Thomas please note, an undergrad organized a political cause using the internet's free tools, such as online petitions, emails, webby gizmo for cell phones "twitter" and the dread facebook...  the result of this online organizing: offline action for thousands. 

"This is how people are really networking, expressing themselves," said Adnan Rehmat, who heads Internews Pakistan, a Washington-based media watchdog group. "People are sending messages of solidarity, relaying information about protest sites, that sort of thing."

Matthew Segal is the founder and executive director of the Student Association for Voter Empowerment — (SAVE), a student-led, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to removing access barriers and increasing civic education for young people. He is also a senior fellow and national challenge coordinator, overseeing policy and lobbying efforts with the Roosevelt Institution — the nation’s first student think-tank.

I must confess: when reading Thomas Friedman’s article “Generation Q” (on 10/10/2007), I couldn’t help but think of a lyric from Bob Dylan’s song “Troubled and I Don’t Know Why,” in which Dylan sings, “Oh what did the newspaper tell?/ Well, it rolled in the door/ And it laid on the floor, /Saying, ‘Things ain't going so well.’” And with all due to respect to Bob Dylan, the times are not a-changin’ in regards to media coverage. Now more than ever, the media can’t wait to uncover the latest scandal, blast someone’s slippage of words, or report on the latest celebrity murder trial.

In other words, it’s easy to talk about how deep a hole we’ve been dug in, it’s easy to carp our optimism when times seem like we should be down and dejected, but in truth, it’s the pervasive negativity of the media that disillusions our peer group—stifling political participation. Mr. Friedman wonders why volunteering in the Gulf Coast region and signing up for Teach for America is so popular. It is because, unlike in politics, youth can enter these fields without risking media annihilation or partisan smear.

What Mr. Friedman has failed to notice about Generation “Q” is that our blogging, think-tanking, and social networking frame news more positively. On these “passive” websites, youth encourage one another, read each other’s thoughts, and spread the word about an interesting service project or a voter registration drive they want help administering. We are more productive than ever before; filling an auditorium is doable by simply creating a Facebook event, rather than spending hours taping up posters all around campus—not to mention the waste of paper. Websites like Facebook are not the activism itself, but merely the means for mobilizing such activism.

So let me ask this question: why don’t we see a story in the New York Times about college students and their efforts to bring organic food to their dining halls? Why doesn’t Fox News run a story about high school students pressing their administration to use renewable energy sources? Where is the news coverage on the newly established youth-led non-profit organizations?

More significant than the possible answers to these questions is the need for these stories to receive increased coverage. Such publicity would inspire more young people, stir more creative juices, and launch more activism. However, in order to achieve this, the media needs more courage— the courage to stop writing about tendentious political gossip and start celebrating youth innovation and creative accomplishment.