PolicyByBlog

Some recent BLOGWARS-related speaking events:

I was a keynote speaker at the iModules Software User Conference of about 250 college alumni relations officers in Kansas City. My topic was "The Powers of Blogs for Outreach." [07.09.08]

I was interviewed by WILL Radio (NPR Affiliate in Urbana, IL) about blogs and politics in the 2008 campaigns. The mp3 download is at: http://will.illinois.edu/focus580/weekly/ [06.24.08]

Sharing information quickly: that's a basic aspect of blogging or any other new social interactive media. A good example of the positive possibilities of such a rapid dispersal of data comes from Jim Groom, who is an instructional-technology specialist and adjunct professor at the University of Mary Washington. He was attending a presentation at the University of Richmond when suddenly, the campus experienced a lockdown after a report that a gunman had been sighted at the library. At the time Groom was in a basement room and could not get a cell phone signal--he could however twitter, the short-blog format venue where you can quickly upload 140 character messages.

He describes his twitter "tweets" in his blog after the events...

"I had no internet access on my laptop, and asked Tom to log me into a UR computer so that I could get a sense what was going on. I went immediately to Twitter, as did several other folks from UR who were holed up in a different computer lab. It was bizarre gauging what was going on through their tweets, almost a sixth sense. Soon enough, I started tweeting what was going on in the room (as did others) , and I found the act to be really soothing. People at UR were sharing information and giving advice to one another, while the larger network from around the world was sending regards, prayers, questions, and their well wishes. I had a very powerful sense that those "others" were there with us from beyond that lab, or even the UR campus. I can't fully explain why that felt so good, someone even offered a Safety dance from abroad, nothing like a laugh during a moment of untold strangeness."

The opportunities for people to twitter during emergences are obvious. The problem will be, of course, trying to figure out signal from noise, that is, what data are accurate versus inaccurate or worse, disinformation.

Political candidates are twittering their calendars with short comments: Here is Barack Obama's Twitter page.

I got a chance on my DAILY SHOW appearance to mention when I first started working on my book, BLOGWARS. Here are more details--partly drawn from BLOGWARS itself. In my mind there were three points of origin of the book.

1. In 1996, a colleague and I conducted one of the first studies of presidential campaign Web sites. Our main finding was that they were mostly online "tackboards," posting information rather than developing content that exploited the hyperlinking and interactive qualities of the Internet. We stated, however, in the conclusions that: "It is currently possible, though no candidate has done this, to host an online talk show where the candidate fields questions from users throughout the nation." Then, as an afterthought, I began looking at "personal political Web sites" created not by the campaign apparatus—political consultants, managers, advisers, or parties—but by individuals who supported the candidate or some cause. Many were raucous and crude, but it did seem that personalized mass political communication was finally possible. Here were ordinary folks—dry cleaners, cops, high school juniors—grabbing a bullhorn and insisting, "Listen to me, I have something to say!" about presidential politics, terrorism, the Supreme Court, and so on. If you had Web access, you could read and interact with them for your own enrichment or bemusement.

2. In 1999, I first noticed something called a "we-blog" (pronounced wee-blog) and then a "blog." In January 1999, Jesse James Garrett (Infosift) uploaded the names and URLs of the then twenty-three known weblogs. In the spring of 1999, Peter Merholz, host of peterme.com and an Internet analyst, announced, "For What It's Worth I've decided to pronounce the word 'weblog' as wee'-blog. Or 'blog' for short." He recalled that he "enjoyed [the word's] crudeness . . . its dissonance. I like that it's roughly onomatopoeic of vomiting. These sites (mine included!) tend to be a kind of information upchucking." His readers and correspondents adopted the term.

3. Taking summer off to study pre-Caucus votes in Iowa in 2003--I was then teaching at LSU--from the vantage point of Ames, Iowa, I gauged the impact of blogs on the campaign of Howard Dean for president. (To clarify: I was researching, not working for Dean). I appreciated that something innovative and exciting was changing political communication as I knew and taught it. People were (a) bypassing regular big media, (b) creating mass communication messages without formal training (like, say, attending my journalism school), (c) reaching, in some cases, large audiences, (d) inviting others to "wiki" or coauthor accretive knowledge, and (e) producing a range of effects on contemporary public opinion, political campaigns, public affairs argumentation, and even governmental policymaking.

And so the real investigation that became BLOGWARS began…(more to come)…

Just finished taping The Daily Show. I was interviewed by Stewart himself. What stuck me was how the discussion about blogging was pretty straight and without any real mockery. I argue in BLOGWARS that 2008 is the year blogging has arrived—becoming part of journalism, entertainment media, and, of course politics. Well, I think one sign is that instead of making fun of bloggers as geeks and freaks Stewart himself stated that many talented people blog and that blogs were no longer a fringe phenomenon. That's a significant leap from the past. Lets spin back to when that was not so. Bloggers recall the March 2005 segment of The Daily Show that made fun of blogs and blogging via a satirical segment on "$ecret$ of New Journalism $ucce$$."* Jay Rosen, an NYU professor and one of the early academic proponents of blogging was interviewed by TDS correspondent Rob Corddry: it was one of those ambush affairs.

So it's lucky for me that blogs have some so far!

By the way, in person Stewart is gracious and really puts guests—like, say, nervous academics—at ease.

The Daily Show Blog picked up this post now shows the older segment (which was from 2005, not 2004 as I recalled): compare and contrast!

Modified: 07.10.08

I am scheduled to be on the DAILY SHOW with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central this Thursday (May 8) to talk about political blogging and my book, BLOGWARS. Everyone's first piece of advice for me about being a good guest: Don't try to be funny. I think I can manage that…

The Daily Show has become an institution of American politics very much linked to a culture where people--especially younger voters--seek out political information from non-traditional sources. [A KU student (Nathan Rodriguez) in our school's master's program is writing his thesis on the show, to some extent based on his time as an intern.] The show is part of the political culture it satirizes and, in some cases, influences it. The show is considered a source of information, an explainer of politics, and of course a "speaker" of (funny) truth to power.

TDS's effects are hard to quantify: Think in terms of Saturday Night Live's "effect" on the Clinton-Obama race! However, there is a small but growing area of research that looks at its role in politics and political socialization. A 2004 Annenberg Election Survey found that TDS viewers have "higher campaign knowledge than national news viewers and newspaper readers—even when education, party identification, following politics, watching cable news, receiving campaign information online, age, and gender are taken into consideration."

Jon Stewart was rated the fourth "most admired journalist in America" in a 2007 survey by Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. Another Pew study found that regular viewers of The Daily Show and its sister Colbert Report had among highest levels of knowledge about news and public affairs among any group of new consumers.

Other research is finding that the show helps explain politics to people who may not know much about politics. Think infotainment with an educational component.

Because I'm a political historian I like to find parallels between present and past. Jon Stewart in some ways is performing a very old political function--that of the court jester.

Today, we think of jesters as smart-alecks in dangling-bell hats cracking jokes at Renaissance fairs; but the post of jester at a noble household or government court was long considered a crucial one for good government. The court jester had many names throughout history, but the job profile goes back at least several thousand years. The first century CE Roman statesman, philosopher and writer Seneca tells us that in households of means there would be a slave whose special task it was to taunt and critique his masters and generally be saucy and insolent to the wealthy and powerful.

In the Middle Ages, nobles—and indeed the king himself—employed a jester, or fool. He would have an uncertain and largely uncensored place at the banquet table, in meeting rooms, and in the halls of the court. He could interrupt great counselors of state, making piquant or provoking comments, pointing out fallacies in arguments, reporting his own contrarian observations from experience outside the court, and generally speak wry truth to overstuffed power. The ideal fool is best drawn in literature by Sir Walter Scott in his medieval novel Ivanhoe: Wamba, son of Witless, is an equal opportunity infuriator to prince, baron, and banker.

The king could also trust the fool not to be a sycophantic yes-man, and it was the duty of the same to deliver bad news. There is a famous case drawn from the Hundred Years War, when England had defeated France in a great naval battle. The nobles of France were afraid to report the truth to their king, so they incited the court fool, who announced to his ruler that the English sailors were great cowards because they refused to swim in the ocean like the brave French seamen.

I realize that the role of the jesters and saucy slaves has been romanticized: They probably did not have much real power. But I have to think that their influence was also one that few political leaders wanted to admit to.