The 2016 Election as Casual Game: Pokémon Go, FiveThirtyEight, and the Paradoxes of the Quantified Citizen

The Norfolk Pagoda is a grim place on election night as the sun is setting. The Chinese restaurant that might attract patrons other than the addicts milling around the waterfront has been shuttered for the better part of the year. Among the people circling its garish umbrella you can overhear discussion of gambling interventions and money problems. Some of these lost souls talk about trouble with the law, especially those fending off the constant temptations of trespassing.   But mostly those gathered at the pagoda are immobile and silent. Parents interact little with the children they have brought, and couples do not hold hands or nuzzle. The casino mentality is obvious as the obsessives in the crowd only become energized when there seems to be a run of positive results on their screens.  Lots of players wear sunglasses despite the shadows and clouds in the scene, perhaps because they have not been sleeping.

This may be the ultimate place for local Pokémon Go players to gather who have hit rock bottom. I came here as a level 25 player a few days ago and am now a level 26. Participation in this game designed for mobile smart phones has forced me to interact with the Trump supporters that I have been avoiding on social network sites like Facebook. I found the pagoda through Reddit, which I normally steer clear of because of its toxic misogyny.  My local Pokémon Go gym is a Confederate shrine so I only collect the game's colorful animated digital characters rather than participate in the full range of behaviors associated with the tournament culture of battling other players that the game's affordances seem to encourage.

For the last few months Pokémon Go has been my escape from the grim prospect of a divisive U.S. election and the toxicity of online discourse.  I know a lot of us in FemTechNet have been playing the game with ritual devotion, and I know it was particularly appealing to former co-facilitator T.L. Cowan, who led the group's experimental pedagogy initiatives.  Certainly crowdsourced resources exist for instructors interested in teaching with the game, such as the voluminous Pokémon Go Syllabus.

As someone who writes about the digital rhetoric of political life (with both a capital "P" and a small "p"), it has been a time of anxiety and conflict.  Since I try to be a conscientious researcher and am teaching a course on digital journalism, I have been reading Breitbart.com, the Twitter feed of Donald Trump, and the online apparatus of Fox News.  All of this makes me feel terrible and demeaned.  It is an information stream that focuses on hatred of college campuses and of women who are judged as being undesirable potential objects of the male gaze. To resolve my anxiety I constantly refresh data from the website of fivethirtyeight.com where I could see supposedly objective results from polling statistics and quantitative projections that offer a seductive possibility for factual correlation.

Pokémon Go has offered a respite of imagined digital meritocracy as I evolved my Pikachus and Magikarps in what seemed to be a relatively color-blind, age-blind, and gender blind environment of site-specific participation.  Living in Colonial Williamsburg, where the algorithm has located a treasure trove of digital assets to be located, I often talked to other players who were scouring the landscape for rare specimens.

My friend and colleague Ian Bogost has done a lot of thinking as a game scholar about how civic virtue could be shaped and rewarded by digital cues.  His analysis of the Howard Dean for Iowa game points to the possibilities of gratifying the acquisitive obsessions of the quantified self by tallying good works by canvassing neighborhoods, passing out pamphlets, and waving signs.  Yet he disagrees with noted new media scholar Henry Jenkins, who asserts that games and fan culture might offer good models for democratic participation as touchstones for a participatory culture.  Bogost adopts a more critical stance when it comes to what gamers learn from gaming and the status of game design and user practices as morally ambiguous forms of cultural expression.

For example, like any example of procedural rhetoric, there are workarounds for those who want to avoid the healthy behaviors of outdoor social interactions that the game supposedly rewards.  Pokémon Go seems to encourage exercise by rewarding walking, but a player can also acquire candies for one's digital familiar crawling forward in a commuting vehicle stuck in traffic.   Ideally it is could spur intergenerational outings, but the same effects can be achieved in parallel play.

As a symptom of retreating from political realities to the digital world, Pokémon Go became a laugh line on the election trail.  Hillary Clinton's comment about not knowing "who created Pokémon Go" but wishing that the same tech wizards would create "Pokémon Go To the Polls" was certainly cringe-worthy, but it took place in the context of praising the growth of tech sector jobs and lauding algorithmic literacy.

What FiveThirtyEight and Pokémon Go may appeal to is a desire for magical thinking and a wish for intimacy with the dataveillance of our mobile devices.  While these election results come in this evening we need to understand the ways that digital technologies promulgate false consciousness without succumbing to moral panics about digital distraction and media seduction.  Although casting a vote in a polling place is supposed to be a defining moment of exercising agency instrumentally, generally by wielding a tool as we feed in a ballot to a Diebold machine, this election for me has been more like a casual game to be engaged with digitally in short bursts by providing input to sentient devices during the course of many days.  As Jesper Juul has pointed out, such games may not be fun, and casual games may involve powerful commitments, dreary labor, and the slog of routine.

Bogost has pointed out that in his essay "The Tragedy of Pokémon Go" that Pokémon Go had many less commercially successful predecessors.  In recounting the genealogy of alternate reality games, he also observes that it is a profoundly flawed game that depends on exploiting an intellectual property franchise.  In short, according to Bogost, the game "both a delightful new mechanism for urban and social discovery, and also a ghastly reminder that when it comes to culture, sequels rule."  I was always a fan of Bogost's mobile game Jet Set, which was about geography of airports and made light of the absurdity of security screening procedures and the place-making work of souvenir acquisition.  Critics complained that by mirroring real life it wouldn't be fun enough to turn a profit.     

A Tale of Two E-mails

Regular readers know that I am a big fan of analyzing the rhetoric of anti-Obama viral e-mails. I think that e-mail is often understudied in analyses of Internet politics, because it depends on one-to-one communication and is less associated with youth culture or the practices of early adopters, unlike the politics expressed on blogs, social network sites, or microblogging sites like Twitter.

But it is important not to ignore when thinking about real communication and real elections, especially since such e-mails are probably going to reach the largest pool of likely voters in the over fifty contingent.

Let's look at two different Obama e-mails in circulation with week and examine their rhetorical techniques. Both end with a call to forward the e-mail to others, both are intended to sow doubt about the president's integrity, and both suggest dark possibilities of conspiracy and violence (associated with Chicago gangsterism and Manchurian Candidate puppetry respectively).

E-mail One

Rod Blagojevich is the former Illinois Governor who tried to sell Obama's seat in congress.

Obama was asked, by the press, if he had ever met Gov. Ron Blagojevich.

Barack Obama: "I only saw Rod Blagojevich one time ... and that was in the stands and from a distance at a Chicago Bears Football Game."

during a rally in Chicago , April 16, 2007.

To understand the next 4 years, you have to understand the world according to Chicago

While Chicago is a city in Illinois , it is almost a completely different country when it comes to politics, with a whole different set of morals and language.

There are only three rules and a few Prime Directives which anybody can understand. You don't even need an attorney to understand them --and if you need an attorney, well, you know too much...so look out for Rule #3!

RULE #1...No matter what you see, hear, or do; --you don't know anybody and you don't know nothing!

RULE #2...If you capture something on tape or camera¦ -- it doesn't reveal nothing!

RULE #3...If you know what everybody knows in Chicago¦ --well, you still don't know nothing.

The PRIME DIRECTIVE in CHICAGO ...No matter what the vote. "Democrats win the election. Now pay close attention!

It's very simple....we'll illustrate. Remember, you know nothing.

These two? They don't know each other! They said they didn't.

The fellas in this picture "They never actually met face to face. What fellas? We don't see nothing!

The guy on the left? For all you know he's Santa Claus.

And the guy on the right... well, he's the Easter Bunny! That's all you need to know.

Go to your eye doctor...your eyes are lying to you! Ca'pish?
Remember Jimmy Hoffa? He knew too much and now,

well, now no one knows where he is.

Is the big picture clear? Not these pictures!

Remember, You've already forgot them...

Now, ain't that simple? They don't know each other and they never met!

How is that possible? 'cause they said so! And don't forget it!

P.S. If you pass this on to your friends, don't forget,

you know nothing and they will know nothing.


E-mail Two

WHO the Heck IS HE ???

IS THIS TRUE?????

Read this....

I did some of my own research after reading this. Why was his law license inactivated in 2002?

Why was Michelle's law license INACTIVATED by court order?

There is only one Barack Hussein Obama according to the U. S. Census and he has 27 Social Security numbers and over 80 aliases.

The one he uses now originated in Connecticut where he is not ever reported to have lived. No wonder ALL of his 'records' are sealed!!!

It just gets worse!!!

At least we only have 2 1/2 years of this mystery man left before we can replace him.

Was He There?

Who IS He?

I have always wondered why NO ONE ever came forward from Obama's past saying they knew him, attended school with him, was his friend, etc.

NO ONE, not one person has ever come forward from his past.

VERY, VERY STRANGE.

This should really be a cause for great concern.

To those who voted for him, YOU HAVE ELECTED THE BIGGEST UNQUALIFIED FRAUD that America has ever known!

This is very interesting stuff. Sort of adds credence to the idea of The Manchurian Candidate thing having happened here!

Stephanopoulos of ABC news said the same thing during the 08' campaign. He too was a classmate of BO's at Columbia class of 1984. He said he never had ONE class with him.

Was he there?

While he is such a great orator, why doesn't ANYONE in Obama's college class remember him?

Maybe he never attended class!

Maybe he never attended Columbia?

He won't allow Colombia to release his records either.

Suspicious isn't it???

NOBODY REMEMBERS OBAMA AT COLUMBIA!!!!!!!

Looking for evidence of Obama's past, Fox News contacted 400 Columbia University students from the period when Obama claims to have been there, but none remembered him.

Wayne Allyn Root was, like Obama, a political science major at Columbia who also graduated in 1983.

In 2008, Root says of Obama, "I don't know a SINGLE PERSON at Columbia that knew him, and they all know me.

I don't have a classmate who ever knew Barack Obama at Columbia. EVER! Nobody recalls him.

I'm not exaggerating, I'm not kidding. "

Root adds that he was also, like Obama, "Class of '83 political science, pre-law" and says, "You don't get more exact or closer than that.

Never met him in my life, don't know anyone who ever met him.

At the class reunion, our 20th reunion five years ago, who was asked to be the speaker of the class? Me. No one ever heard of Barack!

And five years ago, nobody even knew who he was. The guy who writes the class notes, who's kind of the, as we say in New York, the macha who knows everybody, has yet to find a person, a human who ever met him.

Is that not strange? It's VERY strange. "Obama's photograph does NOT appear in the school's' yearbook' and Obama consistently declines requests to talk about his years at Columbia, provide school records, or provide the name of any former classmates or friends while at Columbia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Allyn_Root#column-one

NOTE: Root graduated as Valedictorian from his high school, Thornton-Donovan School, then graduated from Columbia University in 1983 as a Political Science major (in the same class as Barack Hussein Obama WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN IN).

Can it be that BHO is a complete fraud??

More intrigue concerning "The Man who WASN'T there."

I m sure the truth will be found out, but too bad not soon enough!

Please do not give up on ousting the people at the top. We must go on, and continue sending these out to everyone. Pass this on to everyone on your e-list. Pass it across America!

The Analysis:

Although neither e-mail has made it into 25 hottest urban legends on Snopes.com, several fact-checkers have certainly found fault with both. At the Obama Watch website that posted the "I don't know nuttin' -- the Chicago way" photo examples last year, several commentators posted objections that Obama never claimed not to know Blagojevich, so the extended refutation with images of the two together didn't have much argumentative power. The e-mail that originally appeared under the saltier title of "OBAMA - WHO THE HELL IS HE???" appears on a blog that doesn't allow comments that is credited to a "Certified Prof. Locksmith & Security Consultant, conservative blogger, computer geek, defender of 2nd Amendment, truth, justice and the American way!" Yet Snopes has disputed the claim that Obama wasn't recalled by any of his Columbia classmates, and other fact-checkers have cast doubt on the eighty aliases statistic, and the fact that Wayne Allyn Root is a libertarian ideologue hardly makes him a neutral source. (And since I know people who knew him at Harvard Law, I don't think he's a likely Manchurian candidate; one can't help but wonder if it is a kind of perverse spam advertising campaign for the company mentioned: Enoch Engineering Services to draw clients to their niche market.)

But it isn't matters of fact that makes these e-mails compelling. What is interesting to me is that they almost completely abandon conventional paragraph structure in favor of a rhythm of single lines with repetitive syntactic elements that turn exclamations and rhetorical questions into lyrical devices.

Race by Any Other Name

During time for networking, one of the more interesting conversations that I had at the Gov 2.0 Expo was with Shireen Mitchell of Digital Sistas. Mitchell described her work as a social media consultant and trainer specializing in issues involving women and people of color as target groups. She agreed with Craig Watkins that black technology users are often early adopters who are poorly understood by firm believers in antiquated notions of the digital divide that necessarily imagine urban youth as needing technical education. But she also described how insulting she thought Facebook was in claiming that it could get demographic statistics about race despite not having a data gathering checkbox by assuming that an index of common surnames of African-Americans would tell the story.

A Stiff Upper Facebook

Canadian expatriate Matthew Fraser has been posting a number of interesting links about this week's election in Britain and the potential influence of Web 2.0 technologies.

The Guardian quotes Fraser in a story that announces its own thesis: "2010: The first social media election."

On Friday, will we be declaring that it was Facebook wot won it? Or Twitter that tipped it? Though the idea seems outlandish – such sentences would have been meaningless during the 2005 election, as Facebook was still restricted then to US university students, and Twitter didn't start until March 2006 – this will very probably be looked back on as the first "social media election".

So what difference, if any, has it made? For a start, if you watched the past three Thursdays' debates on a single screen – just your TV – then you were experiencing the campaign in a past mode, even though the debates are a new format for a British audience. That's because thousands of people, and especially first-time voters, were watching them on two screens: the TV screen and their mobile phone or computer, which they used to monitor and respond on Twitter and Facebook, giving instant reactions to the candidates' appearance, words and policies.

The article acknowledges that social network sites are still not as accurate as time-tested polling methods, because they skew results toward the young, the liberal, members of politically homogeneous groups, and tech-savvy subpopulations. Nonetheless, it looks like Facebook's own election is calling it for Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats.

It will be interesting to see what other speakers at Gov 2.0 will be saying about the race later this month.

Poll Tacks

As Britain goes to the polls the giant search engine company Google is publicizing the Google UK School Election, which promises to promote civic values and provide lesson plans to fulfill curricular standards, all while promoting its brand with primary and secondary school students.

Although the ballot box is generally thought of as a private space for exercising one's personal political conscience, clicking on Google's "privacy policy" shows a very different ethos.

We have 5 privacy principles that describe how we approach privacy and user information across all of our products:

1. Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.
2. Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
3. Make the collection of personal information transparent.
4. Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
5. Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.

This Privacy Center was created to provide you with easy-to-understand information about our products and policies to help you make more informed choices about which products you use, how to use them, and what information you provide to us.

Although the company promotes visits to its supposedly independent Data Liberation site, one is not likely to find that actual cookie removal tools that the EFF recommends for anonymous Google use.

PowerPointing Out the Issues

The Washington Post reports in "RNC's finance director behind controversial fundraising pitch" that a "confidential and crude" PowerPoint presentation that included a depiction of President Obama as a socialist Joker embarrassed the party enough to inspire leader Michael Steele to publicly apologize for their gaffe in digital rhetoric. Although the presentation was originally attributed to a low level "staffer," the actual author was veteran Republican political operative Robert Bickhart. The PowerPoint presentation, which is available at this website from Politico.com, also contains Photoshopped images of congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, along with heart-shaped diagrams that situate "true believers" and arguments for putting "fun" in "fundraising."

The Bad News (One) Bears

This week democracy activists are bemoaning the Supreme Court's decision to allow unlimited spending by corporations on political campaigns in "Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission." Having read Oliver Wendell Holmes in graduate school, I can't say I was surprised by this ruling in favor of "the personhood of corporations," although I was appalled to see how Justice Kennedy used the language of free speech and resistance to censorship to justify the closer connection between power and money that will invariably result from overturning a century of election finance regulations.

The website of plaintiff Citizens United, a conservative interest group that also launches invective against the United Nations, Hillary Clinton, and the ACLU, along with its "limited government" rhetoric, advertises its YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Twitter feed.

What much of the coverage is missing, however, is the role that the advent of the Internet plays in the logic of the court's reversal of prior law aimed at containing corruption and conflict of interest.

With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters. Shareholders can determine whether their corporation’s political speech advances the corporation’s interest in making profits, and citizens can see whether elected officials are “‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests.”

Check out the weird justification for corporate blogging and Internet astroturfing that the decision also contains.

Soon, however, it may be that Internet sources, such as blogs and social networking Web sites, will provide citizens with significant information about political candidates and issues. Yet, §441b would seem to ban a blog post expressly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate if that blog were created with corporate funds. See 2 U. S. C. §441b(a); MCFL, supra, at 249. The First Amendment does not permitCongress to make these categorical distinctions based on the corporate identity of the speaker and the content of the political speech.

Meanwhile, transparency activists saddened by the decision are reminding their supporters of the need for more data visualizations that show complex financial transactions between corporations and political stakeholders. Citability.org is also hosting a Decodeathon to develop more free open source tools to make it possible for "publicly available government documentation be citable on the web on a paragraph level."

Real News about Government 2.0

Who cares if you friend Obama on Facebook? What does it matter if you follow the State Department on Twitter? How does watching the Secretary of Health on YouTube actually change your relationship with the government? How does adding another customer for a social network site do anything but build up corporate databases of user preferences? These are often the questions that I cynically ask about Web 2.0 technologies used by government agencies.

Instead, we could perhaps ask different kinds of questions about political participation and the regulation of commonly held files and networks. What form would Government 2.0 have to take to really change the relationship between direct and representational democracy? What resources for the public good do computational media create and challenge?

There are two stories from the week that point to ways that technology may actually be relevant to the political process. One case might be taken to be a cautionary tale, since distrust of electronic voting machines runs high, even though computational media may ultimately make citizen participation possible in the deliberative process of government.

This week there has been another leak of source-code from a the operating systems of voting machines from the Sequoia corporation. Those who are raising questions about this particular proprietary technology have created a wiki about the issues. Obviously suspicion of this particular technology runs deep enough that the video below suggests that electronic voting machines might just put one of their own into office.



The other big e-government news this week has to do with a much less controversial story: the allocation of computer IP addresses. After listening to a talk about IPv4 scarcity, this story about the implementation of the IPv6 system is actually something about which I can now hold a political opinion. The question is how to make this kind of an issue about the distribution of and access to critical technological resources as urgent -- although hopefully not as open to panic, satire, and conspiracy thinking -- as something actually covered in the mass media like electronic voting.

Click Around

In this video Virginia Democrat Charlie Diradour argues that the sight of his opponent, incumbent Republican Eric Cantor, Twittering during President Obama's speech on healthcare serves as a "metaphor for what's wrong with politics today." In announcing his bid for Virginia's 7th Congressional District, Diradour's ad features a number of screen shots from Cantor's Twitter feed along with familiar attacks on "ideology" favored by both parties. It is interesting that Diradour seems to oppose bad interactivity with calculating communication on a Blackberry, the privileged ubiquitous computing device of the political elite, with good interactivity that involves less motivated uses of computing technology in which a visitor simply comes to his website and is invited to "click around."

Thanks to Virginian Siva Vaidhyanathan for the link.

Voting with Their Feet

UC employees have been encouraged to use the Internet to register a vote of no confidence in University of California President Mark Yudof. There are several things that are striking about this online voting experience.

The first is that there are -- not surprisingly -- two choices. And yet that paucity of available forms of expressing preferences of political opinion for deliberative purposes need not be the case. As Chris Kelty has argued, computational media make possible many kinds of civic participation in which choices could be ranked or apportioned in much more complicated and nuanced ways. Dissatisfaction with Yudof's performance seems to be organized along a continuum in which it would be helpful to separate those with strong feelings from those who are only mildly irritated.

The second is that the ballot is written in three languages: English, Spanish, and Chinese. Members of the UC community tend to reflect some of the rich diversity of the state, and these are likely the top home languages among the current student population, even if the business of the university tends to be conducted almost entirely in English.

The third is that there is no authentication mechanism for verifying votes. Although UC students and employees have distinct network IDs, each campus uses a different system, so it would be difficult to provide a login for all ten campuses. Yet this potentially allows people to cast votes in the name of colleagues, students, and university employees who aren't actually participating in the system.

Meanwhile Yudof is encouraging UC grads, affiliates, and community members to Share Your Story by generating online form letters that express their gratitude for the tremendous social and economic mobility that the UC system provides and that makes it such a rich asset for the state.

July Surprise

I've written about the "Downfall meme" before here and here. Already there is a version that commemorates the resignation of Alaska governor Sarah Palin over the Fourth of July Weekend.

Getting Out of Dodge

As the Washington Post explains in "Sarah Palin's July 4th Message Posted to Her Facebook Account," the recently resigned governor of Alaska is using her notes on the popular social network site as a way to communicate with her base while she is out of the public spotlight.

It's interesting to see how the tone of her latest message moves from a meek request for the reader's indulgence to a complaint about the liberal media and blogosphere that she sees as persecutors, including the online wags who Photoshopped her family to appear like demons from hell.

If I may, I would like to take a moment to reflect on the last 24 hours and share my thoughts with you.

First, I want to thank you for your support and hard work on the values we share. Those values led me to the decision my family and I made. Yesterday, my family and I announced a decision that is in Alaska’s best interest and it always feels good to do what is right. We have accomplished more during this one term than most governors do in two – and I am proud of the great team that helped to build these wonderful successes. Energy independence and national security, fiscal restraint, smaller government, and local control have been my priorities and will remain my priorities.

For months now, I have consulted with friends and family, and with the Lieutenant Governor, about what is best for our wonderful state. I even made a few administrative changes over that course in time in preparation for yesterday. We have accomplished so much and there’s much more to do, but my family and I determined after prayerful consideration that sacrificing my title helps Alaska most. And once I decided not to run for re-election, my decision was that much easier – I’ve never been one to waste time or resources. Those who know me know this is the right decision and obvious decision at that, including Senator John McCain. I thank him for his kind, insightful comments.

The response in the main stream media has been most predictable, ironic, and as always, detached from the lives of ordinary Americans who are sick of the “politics of personal destruction”. How sad that Washington and the media will never understand; it’s about country. And though it's honorable for countless others to leave their positions for a higher calling and without finishing a term, of course we know by now, for some reason a different standard applies for the decisions I make. But every American understands what it takes to make a decision because it’s right for all, including your family.

She's also using Facebook to promote her political action group, SarahPAC, where she is soliciting funds for another national run.

What's also amazing about Palin's Facebook page is the lack of moderation and the brawling style of multiple voices engaged in polymorphous flame wars about religion, sex, money, and everything else associated with her campaign for vice president.

If Only We Could Vote for President 25 Times

Dodgers fans can vote multiple times for their favorite baseball All Star candidates; I wrote in the amazing Juan Pierre twice and then grew weary of seeing the tag line "Every vote matters, so vote up to 25 times!"

It made me think about what voting means in the age of "voting early and often." As the New York Times points out in a piece on American Idol, "as the show’s audience has declined in recent years, the number of votes being cast has risen sharply."

Pundits often bemoan the electoral naïveté and/or cynicism that these voting schemes seem to inspire, but I worry that the model of mass voting provides such a common -- and obviously flawed -- counter-example to traditional one-person/one-vote/one-candidate schemes, that no one will feel moved to use new computational technologies to try out alternative forms of deliberation, such as Condorcet voting, for example.

(Note also that fans buying tickets are told that their online authentication of themselves as human by typing in two words also helps the Internet Archive digitize their collections and thereby improve on fallible OCR technologies that attempt to read characters in now defunct typefaces.)

Closing the Laptops

Iranian president Ahmadinejad denies calling for Facebook ban and claims that the blocking of the popular social network site that is being used heavily by his opponents to reach younger voters is merely coincidentally happening just before nationwide elections. Recently, the London Telegraph argued that "Facebook is the best hope for democracy in Iran," a claim that might sound strange to users of the site who have expressed dissatisfaction with the state of their digital rights as content-creators and private communicators.

AFP reports in "Iran blocks Facebook over presidential hopeful: Ilna" that lack of access was almost certainly politically motivated to thwart Mir Hossein Mousavi's ambitions for the highest office in the land. In addition to a Facebook page with over six thousand supporters, Mousavi's campaign has a YouTube channel that includes an animated pie chart video that challenges the government's prevailing view of majoritarian politics in Iran.

Iran seems to also have its own designated Facebook page, where government supporters can post YouTube information graphics videos that paint a positive picture of the Iranian economy or stories about sexual liberation enabled by the rise of the imams. Note that their blog does allow comments, where one reader pointed out that the number of deaths of children in the crackdowns prior to the Iranian revolution was dwarfed by the deaths of parents and grandparents in the cultural revolution of the fundamentalist aftermath.

Smear Campaign

In the NPR story on how Women Take Their Place In Kuwait's Parliament, newly elected Kuwaiti legislator Aseel al-Awadhi complains that her political opponents used ubiquitous recording devices to capture some of her lectures and then post them on YouTube to discredit her as a representative who would be overly Western or opposed to Sharia law. Since in the United States college professors have expressed similar fears about vengeful students or conservative plants eager to catch faculty supposedly expressing outrageously biased liberal opinions in their classrooms and lecture halls, I thought it would be interesting to attempt to investigate the YouTube offerings about al-Awadhi, despite being obviously hampered by the language barrier.

I discovered that Middle Eastern news coverage focused on al-Awadhi's own use of YouTube, where she announced her candidacy and maintains her own YouTube channel.

Blonde Ambition

If you don't remember the truly forgettable "McCain Space," the social network site for the 2008 Republican candidate that was supposed to bring him victory with the younger Internet-savvy set, I thought I'd post a screen shot in commemoration of the doomed venture that was soon colonized by the white middle-aged lovelorn and life-weary almost as soon as it was launched.

The only person on the McCain team who seemed to know anything about social media was McCain's daughter who was featured on McCain Spce but was probably more important to the campaign as author of her McCain Blogette blog.

As the Huffington Post notes in "Meghan McCain: 'Old School' Republicans Are 'Scared Shitless'," she's now dishing out some frank talk that argues that the Grand Old Party has far more serious troubles than its failure to capitalize on the Internet, when "she called out those officials in the Republican tent who insist that tactical improvements, technology and brass-knuckle politicking are the path back to relevance."

"Simply embracing technology isn't going to fix our problem," she said. "Republicans using Twitter and Facebook isn't going to miraculously make people think we're cool again. Breaking free from obsolete positions and providing real solutions that don't divide our nation further will. That's why some in our party are scared. They sense the world around them is changing and they are unable to take the risk to jump free of what's keeping our party down."

Now Meghan McCain is getting attention on Twitter, some of it probably of the wrong kind in the mind's of the party's handlers. For example, stories like "Meghan McCain Caught On Twitter: 'I Would Have Been a Horrible First Daughter'" seem to suggest that she's undermining Republican history one hundred forty characters at a time.

In writing for The Daily Beast, the young blonde McCain suggests that there's more to be learned from the Twittersphere about personal character, rhetorical appeals, and political style than mere gossip-mongering. "Karl Rove, Twitter Creep" argues that Rove's Twitter feed shows his lamely executed machinations and calculations while her father Senator McCain's feed displays the enthusiasm of a novice user genuinely concerned with communication to a wide-ranging constituency.

You can check out Meghan McCain on Twitter (and her exchanges with liberal celebs like Perez Hilton) for yourself.

Talk to Me Baby

NPR's story, "Obama Teams Spread Out To Tout Plans," discusses how the Obama campaign's hybrid of web-based and door-to-door persuasion is being retasked for defending the President's economic agenda. However, critics are questioning how well BarackObama.com's "Organizing for America" initiative is functioning now that the focus is petition-signing and constituent-calling. Station reporters discovered that many were "rusty" or having difficulty sticking to their talking points in getting Obama voters to go back online. Obama's website is also being used for other volunteer efforts, such as getting aid to flood victims in the northern midwest via links to a Red Cross website.

Not all candidate-named websites are maintained, of course, even if the site contributed to an election win and a stint in the presidency. It is worthy of note that GeorgeWBush.com now simply forwards to the Republican National Committee. And the awkwardly named cg96.org, which was the hub of the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign now goes nowhere at all. (Screen shots still visible here.)

Anyone Who Sues Me for Libel Can Post an Entry on This Blog

Nobody loves a scandal as much as I do, so I was sorry when a particularly juicy sounding one involving then presidential candidate John McCain and a female lobbyist disappeared from the headlines. Now, a year later, the New York Times has announced that a lawsuit from the woman in question has been settled with neither side paying damages or making retractions. The only ground given by the NYT appears to have been allowing her lawyers to have this Shakespeare-quoting public statement posted to the paper's website.

It's interesting to see how official websites for public institutions such as those for newspapers or congressional districts are now perceived as areas for potential spaces for shaming, face-saving statements, admissions of guilt, and other discursive compensations for perceived infractions of the social contract. But does this mean that the easiest way to write for the New York Times is to sue them for defamation?

Networks and Organizations

Geert Lovink's second lecture for the UC Irvine Critical Theory Emphasis on "Tactical Media Strategies" opened by acknowledging the contributions to his thinking by his collaborator David Garcia, with whom he authored the "ABC of Tactical Media." He also introduced his somewhat provincial Orange County U.S. audience to websites like Nachtkritik and next 5 minutes and provided the historical context of the fall of Berlin wall and the rise of NGOs to help explain what tactical media was.

The central issue for Lovink, as he unpacked the subject, was managing the "shift from a social movement to a more formal way of organizing" to create a "more flexible form of political resistance" and "escape pressures to industrialize. He argued that these "new forms of organization" were well suited "to deal with long periods of time in which there were no social movements to speak of." What he called the "networked condition" of "activism and politics" could be read as "a response to a crisis of political organization" when "political parties and trade unions" had failed and "anarcho-syndicates" seemed to be unsustainable. In examining this condition, Lovink asked if it was "part of the problem or part of the solution" and seriously inquired if it was an "obstacle to revolution" or a facilitator. To emphasize the current state of theory struggling to understand this condition, he pointed out the planning for the all-star On the Idea of Communism Conference to be held in London next month with Alain Badiou, Michael Hardt, and Slavoj Žižek, which will examine "communism as metaphysical project" rather than deal with the thornier issue of "the question of organization" or the way that actual initiatives like the World Social Forum are dominated by "official global society."

He told the story of Indymedia as a cautionary tale rather than as a heroic forebear. He described it as a "product of late nineteen-nineties effort" that was "remarkably conservative in approach and outlook." (Barbara Warnick has presented a much rosier view of the Indymedia phenomenon in Rhetoric Online.) Instead, he suggested it was more useful to look at "where things can get stuck" and how this "contributed to networks" such as those created for and by the protests in Seattle in 1999. Looking at the stodgy design of the site, he asked, "How could it relate to Web 2.0?" He argued that Indymedia was "stuck on alternative news gathering" and its contributors had failed to see themselves as "social subjects and not just quasi-journalists." In other words, he asserted, they needed to get "beyond merely telling the truth." The Indymedia group also had "problems with displaying the complete social network," despite the fact that there was a lot of "technological knowledge in eighties" that could be used in "interesting, creative, and subversive ways." He cited the work of Howard Rheingold on smart mobs and the importance of engaging with "different forms of social mobilization."

Of course, he argued that awareness of such social mobilization couldn't just be restricted to "good" social mobilization. He mentioned "right wing populism in the Netherlands," groups "hunting migrants using mobile phones" in Australia, and digital jihad in countries like Lebanon and Egypt.

All of this could go beyond simple "hit-and-run" with "anonymous servers," given the availability of "cheap do-it-yourself equipment" that kept the "parameters permanently under construction" since the "camcorder revolution" and other technological shifts in access. He told audience members who might have been uninformed about the role of such networks in the former Yugoslavia about how the dissident Serbian media was sustained by the Internet broadcasting done by B92 after genocidal strongman Slobodan Milošević thought he had destroyed all their broadcasting capabilities via radio and television.

Post 9/11, Lovink said we should be keenly aware of the "impossibility of creating truly global network" and were testing "how loose can a network be" as we tried to calibrate "how we can disconnect from each other" and manage "not communicating." Lovink encouraged critics to turn their attention to how moderators function and this "edge of structure and falling apart," even if he had discovered that this philosophical orientation made him "not very popular" with the ICT and Development community, although it enabled projects like the Incommunicado as a response to the Geneva and Tunis conferences of the World Summit on the Information Society.

As a useful case study, Lovink discussed in detail the research done by Bernardo Sorj on Viva Rio, which brought telecentres to the favelas in Rio de Janiero with the idea of becoming self-sustaining by fostering literacy, contact, sociability, and culture in places like the Rocinha favela in which people actually pay for the services. Lovink also alluded to the "free" prototype of the São Paulo telecentres, which has been used as a model by advocates of open source Gnome desktop software. Lovink's informants also explained certain limiting factors, since those who used the computers tended to be from the favela's upper echelons, the influence of criminality remained, and the CDE system of franchising with a package of products could introduce other complications. Lovink encouraged an "integrated view of the progress of the slums" rather than "digital inclusion as aim in itself."

Lovink reiterated that it was "difficult if not impossible to admit that the process has failed" in many digital initiatives and turned to the One Laptop Per Child program as a prime example. Lovink conceded that the machines themselves represented a number of exemplary design goals, particularly in its energy efficiency, robustness of open source software, and rethinking of hardware architecture, but he expressed his concerns that OLPC merely perpetuates the developmentalism that has been critiqued in India and Latin America and a lack of reflection about the idea of empowerment itself. To illustrate his point he showed the website of One Laptop Per Child News where critics discussed problematic aspects of the initiative.

In concluding, Lovink asked, "Do we have a shared critical agenda? Activists, programmers, and scholars?" He suggested that new technologies like Xing make it possible for activists to create their own social network sites rather than rely on third-party commercial sites with dubious corporate agendas. After all, it may be as much about "notworking not networking" and "disruptions in flows" he argued. To illustrate his point he showed links to the participants in the Institute of Network Cultures' upcoming Winter Camp, which includes a number of activists working with open source and locative media who are entering the realm of material goods, such as Blender, Bricolabs, and the makers of the FLOSS manuals.

James Kotecki, Private Citizen

Although he doesn't have his own Wikipedia entry any more, James Kotecki did have a noteworthy career as an Internet celebrity, which began with critiques of candidates' use of YouTube from his Georgetown dorm room and concluded with his last daily webisode for Politico.com. During his two years of Internet fame, he promoted participation in the CNN-YouTube debates and was profiled in several major newspapers.

Last Fall Kotecki came to my digital rhetoric class via our campus's teleconference facilities. You can see his answers to questions from students in this series of videos in which they asked him about how he sees the evolving relationship between YouTube, fake news programs on television, social networks, and politics.