Internet

Bumped. --Mike

A little over two weeks ago at my blog, I posted about McCain's use of the Internet -- or lack thereof. Here's a reminder of remarks McCain made in a New York Times interview.

Q: But do you go on line for yourself?

Mr. McCain: They go on for me. I am learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon, getting on myself. I don’t expect to be a great communicator, I don’t expect to set up my own blog, but I am becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need – including going to my daughter’s blog first, before anything else.

Q: Do you use a blackberry or email?

Mr. McCain: No

We now have more information regarding McCain's training program. He's now moved, albeit imperceptibly, forward in his quest toward mastering the internet and becoming, uh, modern. These are remarks he made to the San Francisco Chronicle.

GOP presidential candidate John McCain, fundraising in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the nation's technology capitals, acknowledged Monday that he isn't a "tech freak" or entirely comfortable with the Internet, BlackBerrys or e-mail. But he strongly disputed criticism that he is "out of the loop" as unfair.

As former head of the U.S. Senate Commerce committee, McCain said, he has been a driving force to oversee legislation that helped the Internet flourish - even as he is still learning to get comfortable with it himself.

"Am I a tech freak? No," he said in an interview Monday with The Chronicle. "And I don't like to text message because I'd rather call somebody on the telephone."

"I do understand the importance of the computer. I understand the importance of the blogs," he said.

McCain said he is well aware that technology "does drive the news. It is changing the shape of the news. ... It's changing the information age, and I've got to stay up with it."

He added, "But I am forcing myself ... let me put it this way, I am using the computer more and more every day."

Well, that's great. So anyone that happens to be very comfortable with email is a "tech freak." And anyone that likes to text message is antisocial. At this rate, John McCain just might be ready to use a PC when everyone leaves for Mars.

Anyway -- why is this a big deal? Two reasons.

1.) The Internet is our technological infrastructure. And as an American, I want someone in the White House who is comfortable using this vital resource that will continue to be even more in our lives with each passing day and year. If we have someone leading us who is merely "staying up with it," what are the odds that person is going to put the Internet and technological development as a budget priority, no matter what they say in interviews with newspapers in the middle of a political campaign? Not good. I want someone that doesn't have to "force [himself]" to use the Internet, someone that understands its inherent value.

2.) Check this out:

When our next president takes over, as you can see, he will be in charge of leading one of the most civically engaged generations in this country's history whose engagement is mostly due to the Internet. Whether people like it or not, the Internet is a central piece of this new style of activism. Georgia10 at Daily Kos wrote a diary a few weeks back amid the controversy about whether or not this generation should be using the Internet as a form of activism. Georgia10 explained very patiently that the Internet and civic engagement for Millennials are linked -- they are one and the same. She used a study released by the Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet to illustrate this link.

According to some observers, the Internet may have considerable potential to reach and engage opinion leaders who influence the thinking and behavior of others. According to the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet, "Online Political Citizens" (OPCs) are "seven times more likely than average citizens to serve as opinion leaders among their friends, relatives and colleagues...Normally, 10% of Americans qualify as Influentials. Our study found that 69% of Online Political Citizens are Influentials.

By electing a president who has no clue about what the Internet is, what its potential is, and its impact thus far on heightened civic engagement among the youngest Americans, we are actually undercutting one of the lone reasons for optimism in this country. We're still mired in the Iraq War, we're ignoring a War on Terror, and the economy is still slumping (about which McCain knows little as well). But we can use what's going well for us. Right now, our youth's increasing civic engagement is going well; but the Internet is a vital piece of that. Far too vital, in fact, to elect a president that will merely "stay up with it."

Streaming LIVE!!

Update: When I was listening to Maria from Voto Latino answer part of Sarah's (someone not me from the audience) question w/r/t their outreach to the Latino community through myspace - she comments about how Latinos don't use facebook as much as they use MS and the impact of music and local dj's etc. on the community...

I wanted to say at one point that the common mistake from orgs that want to develop their own SN sites to be hosted on their websites is that 1. thats a waste of time, but 2. those that chose to just go with what they've got (meaning using existing online options) they ignore MS as a resource.

I can't remember if it was Kevin or Tony Cani who said while we were talking about this that MS is just ugly - if you agree you need to get over that. It isn't just Latinos that are using myspace its a number of minority voters, non college graduates, and high school seniors. Taking MySpace out of your SN outreach ignores a huge population of people. Which, clearly, you don't want to do.

I'm still playing a bit of catch-up and just came across this excellent and thorough rebuttal by Georgia10 to Sally Kohn's op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor excoriating Millennials as a generation of individualistic, ineffective online activists.

Kohn responded to Georgia in the comments, saying (in part):

Still, I think it is critical that we place internet activism in context --- yes, valuable as one new tool in a broader toolbox of strategy but one with limitations. Mouseclicks and Facebook pages replacing door knocking and house meetings removes an important element from our political activism: relationships. Power is about relationships; and challenging power is about the ability to mobilize relationships toward a common purpose. This is what Alinsky was talking about (as Georgia10 cites); this is the lesson of every political and social movement before and after.

The emphasis here is mine because that is the crux of what is wrong with Kohn's argument. Sally is setting this up as an either/or proposition and creating a false dichotomy. There is no hard evidence showing that internet activism decreases offline activism. This is not a zero sum game in which there is a limited amount of activism and every minute spent "clicking a mouse" replaces a minute that would have been spent knocking on a door.

In fact, the opposite is true. According to a report on youth civic engagement in 2006by CIRCLE (pdf):

Internet Use and Civic Engagement

We separately asked about the frequency with which people go online, whether for news or other purposes. According to our survey, 69% of young people reported using the Internet at least a few times per week, and 41% reported using it daily. In general, those who use the Internet at least a few times per week are more engaged than those who never use it, while those who use it daily are the most engaged. For example, among those who do not use the Internet regularly, 72% are disengaged, and 23% have not participated in any civic engagement activities we measure. In contrast, among those who use the Internet daily, only 49% are disengaged, and only 10% have not engaged in any civic activities. That remains true even when we take into account the effects of education.

The term engagement here measures a variety of indicators, including voting, community service, community problem solving, boy/buycotting products, canvassing, holding political conversations and more.

Statistics aside, there is hard evidence all around us that online engagement can produce just the sort of on-the-ground, community activism that Kohn desires. In 2006, tens of thousands of young immigrants and 2nd generation Americans took to the streets to protest harsh, anti-immigrant legislation in Congress. Those mass protests, which received national attention in the media and undoubtedly played a role in beating back the Sensenbrenner Bill, were organized primarily via MySpace and text messages. Without the internet, one of the largest and most successful student protests in our recent history - and one that did not address an issue of great concern to white upper-middle class elites - would not have occurred.

In her reply to Georgia, Kohn says that we need to consider the internet in context. I couldn't agree more, I just wish she'd taken her own advice.

PEW has released some interesting data on the news consumption habits of Americans, and they were kind enough to break out the 18 - 29 demographic in their analysis. By itself, the topline is pretty unremarkable: "young people get news on the internet," but there is a lot of useful information buried in the report

Pulling out some interesting findings:

• Cable news remains a very important distribution outlet for news if you want to reach young voters, but Sunday talk shows are virtually worthless for reaching young people.
• About a quarter of young people get their news through daily newspapers, but that influence doesn't translate online, where major political news outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post get relatively little attention from young people.
• Only 10% cite late-night talk shows (read: Daily Show, Colbert Report) as sources of information. This cuts against conventional wisdom, though it's not that surprising. Relatively speaking, those shows have a rather small, though granted highly influential and informed, audience.
• The Long Tail is a substantial source of news for young people - this means political blogs, blogs of friends, chat boards, email forwards - an amalgamation of sources that likely rely more on peer networks than and influence than broadcast capability. As the report notes:

However, even as the variety of campaign web information resources has expanded, there are indications that most internet users do not go online for the sole purpose of learning about the campaign. Rather, a majority of web users (52%) say they “come across” campaign news and information when they are going online to do something else. This practice is particularly prevalent among younger web users: 59% of web users under age 30 come across campaign news online compared with 43% of those ages 50 and older.

This seems particularly important because 52% is more than double the 20% who get their news from long-tail sources. This means that even for campaign news found via myspace, CNN.com, Facebook, or any other on-line source, odds are better than even that a young voter found that information through random searches or through exposure via a peer network.

Millennials are at a tipping point in their media consumption habits - particularly as it applies to politics. Broadcast outlets like the cable news networks remain important for the moment, but more and more it is exposure to news and information through online peer networks that is the dominant way of distribution information.

Hi, my name is Wes Morgan. I’m an online organizer with U.S. PIRG, currently based in Denver, CO. I graduated in 2003 from Calvin College with a degree in computer science (and a minor in Spanish). Currently I’m directing a program called Code for Change. Code for Change brings together young programmers (students and recent grads) to work on open source software projects that help build progressive infrastructure. For example, this summer we’ve been adding new features to CiviCRM, part of the CivicSpace project.

There are few things that give me more hope for the future of progressive politics in the U.S. than the Internet and the rise of the netroots. The fact that regular folks like us can use the Internet to speak out, take action, and organize others to do the same is amazingly healthy for democracy. We should hang on to this for dear life.

Sadly, as most good things are, the Internet is under attack by those who wish to bend it to their narrow special interest (usually profit-driven) purposes. Net neutrality is the label we’ve given to the fight against this attack, and it is critically important that we win it. U.S. PIRG has a page with information and actions you can take on net neutrality, and Mike Connery also has some great ways to help out in a recent post to Future Majority. However, when we define what we mean by “net neutrality,” we’re usually only talking about one aspect of what’s required to have a free and open Internet. I would argue that there are three equally essential pieces to this puzzle.

1. Open networks (traditional “net neutrality”)
2. Open standards governing how the networks operate (and interoperate with each other)
3. Open software implementations of those standards (open source)

More after the jump.