Internet

If I knew how to navigate pulling FM for the day in solidarity I would... but instead all I can do is post a blog.

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Over the last few years, publications like Mother Jones and the New York Times magazine both have exposed us to the sugar daddy/baby phenomenon. Wealthy older men -- some married, some not -- plop their money down to entice young women to spend time with them, often with expectations of sexual activity.

However, as our economy has spiraled even further out of control, this activity is picking up steam. This past week we learned from the Huffington Post that the phenomenon has overlapped with the student debt crisis. The story describes several relationships borne out of economic strife and the desperation that accompanies the racking up of large amounts of debt to finance one's education. It also reveals that the increasing popularity of matchmaking sites like seekingarrangement.com have aided the sugar daddy/baby boom.

The Huffington Post piece spurred Bill Maher and his panel to discuss the issue last night.

The first thing that strikes me about this conversation is that it happened. We are so often saturated with positive portrayals of capitalism and what that economic system does for us (that whole American Dream thing) that when we hear personal accounts of the desperation it's wrought, our society -- particularly the establishment -- acts like it's some curious, extraordinary event. Now that the street economy is impacting elite college students, it's suddenly real and they are taken aback.

The second thing I am thinking about is the whole notion that American youth -- and Bourdain specifically mentions this at 5:15 -- just don't want to do jobs that they perceive as being below them. This narrative has been around a while, and it might be true of a certain demographic. But we're forgetting that most youth are in such a poor economic position right now that they simply can't live or survive on these jobs because they don't pay enough. And when there is a small number of other, barely better-paying jobs with benefits that are available, youth will hold out for those, even if they appear as a mirage on the horizon. And especially if they have the student debt that is simply no match for the low wage, no-health care jobs.

So, actually, the question Bourdain poses is unfair. "Why won't young people take jobs that are below them," should be rephrased: "Why won't young people take jobs that don't pay them enough?"

The question answers itself.

The sugar daddy/sugar baby phenomenon goes back to the need for (and absence of) well-paying jobs for young people. Imagine that.

Pew's study on Social Media and Young Adults has some really interesting findings: teens don't blog or tweet. According to the study, 14% of online teens blog. This is down from around 28% just a few years ago. As for Twitter, only 8% of people 12-17 use the service.

The study also found that 93% of young adults go online, with 63% of those using the internet daily. This is comparable to only 38% for those over the age of 65.

So what does this mean? We know that teens use the internet, regularly. We know they are active on social networks - they post comments (83% of online teens say they've posted comments on a friends' pictures), they communicate (although less teens now say they use social networking to contact friends), and more. They do not, however, create that much content.

Only 38% of teens share content in general, 21% remix content, and once again - only 14% blog. For adults, the numbers are even worse. The difference comes in the fact that the numbers for adults have come up in recent years. Teens, on the other hand, created more just a few years ago.

Some, such as Ben Parr, have come to the conclusion that teens just don't have the life experiences needed to create quality content. They are simply consuming. Even though I am a teen, I tend to agree with this rather negative view...Most teens are not interested in creating content. Instead, they are simply consuming.

Members of my generation are consuming more information in a day than one might have come across in a lifetime in centuries past. They're reading, watching, and listening. The number of teens who simply USE the internet (93%) are huge. These young people will be heading into college and jobs with a new and unique outlook, gained by exposure to such huge amounts of information.

Overall, the study is interesting, but there isn't much to feel bad about if you're a teen. The fact we're able to consume so much more content than previous generations means we will be creating much more high quality content of our own in the future.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project finds that while an older audience is moving to Facebook, Twitter is becoming younger.

Martha Irvine, an AP youth beat writer, wrote a story on this development a couple days ago, finding that while a significant number of youth are moving to Twitter, many of them are doing so grudgingly believing that Twitter updates contain too much minutiae for their tastes.

"Quite frankly, I don't need to hear if someone stepped in dog poo on the way to class or how annoyed they are that they lost their favorite pen," says Carolyn Wald, a University of Chicago junior who has not joined Twitter and rarely posts status updates on Facebook because "I don't want to assume that people want to hear those things about me, either."

One explanation for this surge is the increased availability of wireless devices for youth today. The study reports that the more wireless outlets youth have, the more probable it is that they will tweet.

There were two interesting research pieces from yesterday's First Monday:

Everyday life, online: U.S. college students’ use of the Internet

The goal of this study was to learn about how college students are using the Internet and to compare their use of it to that of college students as reported in 2002 by replicating and extending previous research. A survey of college students at 40 U.S. higher education institutions was conducted, along with observations and interviews at several Midwestern universities. For comparison to the general population a nationwide telephone survey was undertaken. The study found that Internet use had predictably increased but that college students continued to prefer using multiple methods of communication to stay in touch with friends and family. College students continue to be early adopters of new Internet tools and applications in comparison to the general U.S. Internet–using population. For U.S. college students, Internet technologies have become so ubiquitous as to seem invisible.

Political video mashups as allegories of civic empowerment

When the viral video “Vote Different” broke into the mainstream media in March 2007, the political video mashup became a notable media phenomenon. User–generated mashups threatened to cut through the U.S. news clutter that typically shapes election discourse. In this paper, political video mashups are examined as allegories of citizen empowerment during the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Political video mashups can act as tools of political advocacy, forms of political protest, and modes of political commentary. Finally, though they are already being co–opted by mainstream political campaigns, the paper addresses the potential of mashups to re–interpret political messages in ways that may encourage the active re–framing of political issues among twenty–first century citizens.

Following the success of Obama for America’s low-dollar fundraising effort many organizations are looking to replicate the strategy for their own campaigns. This post will look at some strategies you can use based on a current fundraising campaign I am working on: the Young Democrats Working for America raising money for YDA.

Our campaign is based on raising $25 donations for the Young Democrats of America through ActBlue.

One of our most successful techniques in promoting the ActBlue page has been encouraging supporters to share the link to the donation page using Twitter and Facebook status updates. We noticed a bit of a viral effect once the practice started to catch on, resulting in Twitter re-tweets and Facebook friends changing their statuses even without formally being asked to do so. Once a number of people changed their statuses we started to get a lot of saturation on Facebook’s news feeds, which helped build more buzz.

Another successful practice on Facebook was posting the donation page to our profiles. This was another technique that had a viral effect. Once people saw that 12 or so of their friends had posted the link in their news feed they were more likely to join in and do the same.

Group administrators were also able to send messages to their groups asking for donations to YDA.

Once the initial buzz was gaining steam on Facebook and donations started coming in, the ActBlue page gained in popularity and became the hottest page on the site, building exposure for our effort even further.

We were also able to use the ActBlue goal thermometer to post the page on supporters’ websites and blogs.

After the wholesale buzz creation was underway, the strategy changed to include online peer-to-peer asks. No matter how successful a buzz campaign is, a personal ask to someone you know is the most effective way to get a donation.

This is where Facebook messages, e-mails, and instant messages come into play. The key is to come up with the names of people you think might be able to make a small donation or at least spread the word about the campaign. Once you have your contact list you use the previous mentioned tools to reach out to them and make the ask. Some of those people may even be willing to become bundlers for you and reach out to their own network for small donations.

While this post is intended to talk about the online methods for low-dollar fundraising, it is important to note that they should be combined with phone and in-person contacts as well.

Have you had success using online methods to raise money through low-dollar contributions? Share your experiences in the comments.

Recently, news broke that President Obama's new Director of Citizen Participation would be Google's Katie Jacobs Stanton. Kudos to the new President for sticking to his word that active citizenship would be at the forefront of his administration. Stanton was behind some of the Google applications that can be put to wholesome democratic use, such as Google's Moderator tool. Stanton's background is in technology, but what experience does she have in the way of citizen participation? A simple Google search doesn't turn up much, but maybe that's by design. To be sure, her knowledge of Google applications and other products can help turn the White House into the most connected and engaging executive office ever.

As Peter Levine points out in his post about young people and education, most young people do not attend college. As we know from the 2008 election and past elections , young people with some college education, especially current college students, are much more likely to vote than young people with no college experience whatsoever. In other words, college go-ers don't need much help from the Obama Administration to get involved. If anything, online Millennials will probably innovate new technologies and applications that increase their online influence. Stanton's help may quicken this process, which means that online Millennials will have a disproportionate voice in government when compared to their peers. At this moment, low-skilled and lower educated youth are suffering the most from the economic downturn. January's unemployment rate will be released tomorrow (February 6th) by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, so be on the look-out, data-geeks. December 2008's unemployment rate for 16 to 18 year old youth was a whopping 20.8 percent, a one-year high--compared with 7.2 percent for the entire nation.

College students and recent graduates are experiencing a tough job market as well, but they have strong advocates on Capitol Hill and elsewhere that are fighting to include certain higher education provisions into the stimulus package. I'm in favor of these provisions, but where is the clamoring for the unemployed teenage youth and low-skilled workers that are being laid off in droves from large corporations. Where is their lobbying group? Which Senator or Representative is the "Champion of Under-served Youth Everywhere?"

I'm calling on Stanton to use her office for the most good by incorporating the ideas and wants of young people that don't go to college. People that are generally left-out of the democratic process, sometimes by choice and sometimes by design. (She can do this with technology, and this task will be easier once the promised broadband technology reaches every part of this nation.) One way she can succeed is to tap into existing networks. Groups like the Hip Hop Caucus and The League of Young Voters focused much of their GOTV and voter registration efforts on young voters with no college experience, as well as non-White urban youth--one of the least likely demographics to attend college. As the Director of Civic Participation, Stanton should work closely with the Corporation for National and Community Service--the government agency responsible for AmeriCorps--to create a citizen corps that does not recruit heavily on college campuses, but in rural towns and urban centers away from the ivory towers. Moreover, Stanton should form a working group that includes a diverse sampling of citizen-centered organizations in order to design programs that engages directly with America's most under-served populations. Research organizations such as CIRCLE and the National Conference on Citizenship can help measure the effectiveness of these programs.

Millennials that are comfortable with technology and have college experience voted for Obama by a wide margin over McCain, so it's no surprise that Obama should cater some of his policies to that demographic. Stanton's appointment seems to be a step in that direction, but she should take this opportunity to bring serious change to America for those who need it most. As the Director of Citizen Participation, Stanton's measure of success should be how high she raised the lowest bar. We'll be watching...and working with her, too.

I'm finally starting to feel better and catching up on things today. Here's some must-read stories from the last week of 2008:

• Jose Antonio Vargas writes that politics is no longer local, it's viral, in his latest piece making the rounds among the technorati. He hits the nail on the head when he writes:

  Looking back, I realize that it was on that Thursday night that a new political reality was cemented in my head. In the past, we've thought of politics as something over there -- isolated, separate from our daily lives, as if on a stage upon which journalists, consultants, pollsters and candidates spun and dictated and acted out the process. Now, because of technology in general and the Internet in particular, politics has become something tangible. Politics is right here. You touch it; it's in your laptop and on your cellphone. You control it, by forwarding an e-mail about a candidate, donating money or creating a group. Politics is personal. Politics is viral. Politics is individual.

  And we're just getting started.

• Also in the Post, Eli Pariser of MoveOn writes that both MoveOn and Obama are tapping into the same thing - people power and the voices of ordinary Americans.
• Over at Open Left, Chris Bowers has an excellent plan to help activists to take advantage of the first Democratic President and friendly congress in over a decade. This is something all youth organizations should be following, and contributing to.
• According to PEW, when it comes to where American's get their news, the Internet has surpassed all mediums except television.
• Want to work for the new administration? Filling out a form on Change.gov is only the first step. The Politico has a rundown on the sophisticated strategies that advocacy organizations and interest groups are using to influence the hiring process.
• Finally, The New York Times notes that as teen unemployment skyrockets, so is teen violence. The paper calls on the Obama administration to address the problem.

Today, all across the country, thousands of young activists will be protesting Prop 8 and the other anti-gay marriage propositions that passed last week. These protests are being organized in a decentralized fashion via Google Groups, Facebook, and wikis.

While most of the organizing is decentralized, the initial impetus for the protests came from a 26 year-old Millennial - Amy Balliet:

Seattle activist Amy Balliett, founder of web-spawned phenomenon “Join the Impact” realized that the site ‐ at that point, only a two-day old project ‐ had reached a certain critical mass, logging 50,000 hits per hour. The “impact” was crashing servers.

Little did she know how viral this thing would become.

“Join the Impact” began as a blog post and email template by Willow Witte, a friend of Balliett’s who had sent the missive to inspire friends after the passage of California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition 8.

The success of similar propositions in Arizona and Florida, as well as an anti-gay adoption measure in Arkansas, only added gravity to the situation. Witte encouraged contacts to forward the note to their local LGBT groups to solicit plans of community action. Balliett responded to her friend’s email saying, according to a post on the site, “We shouldn’t wait, we need to mobilize now, and we need to on a national level, at the exact same moment, throughout the country.”

And mobilize they did: this past Friday, Nov. 7, ‘”Join the Impact” hit the web. Five hours later, the site logged 10,000 visitors. Apparently a lot of other people shared the young women’s desire to turn despair into resolve.

By midnight, 20 cities’ worth of young volunteers had signed on to organize protests against the discriminatory propositions.

The next evening, Nov. 8, the site had tripled its hits.

By Monday morning, a plan had emerged: Cities around the country would organize their own efforts to coordinate a synchronized protest for Sat., Nov. 15, 10:30 a.m. PST. The movement became officially global with hits from the UK and France, and by Nov. 11, over one million visitors had come to the site.

A friend of mine in California who is following all this said that most of the organizing going on around Prop 8 is being driven by young people, who were the only age group in California to oppose Prop 8.

I don't have time at the moment to go into anything near the detail this deserves so I recommend that you go and read Nancy Scola's reporting on it at Tech President. Calitics will also be covering Join the Impact protests throughout the day.

This is probably the most significant example of young people using technology to organize around a specific issue (not a candidate) since the pro-immigrant rallies organized via MySpace and Text Messaging in 2006. This is an important development in itself and for the LGBT community, and it's something that all activists should be watching and learning from whatever their issue.

I'll try to give this more coverage via a post-mortem when I get back online tomorrow.

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."