PolicyByBlog

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 begin my new Oxford University Press book BLOGWARS by claiming, only half facetiously, that there are good reasons not to write a book on political blogs and the rise of interactive social media's role in campaigns, elections, and public affairs and policy-making. My analogy is that d escribing political blogging in a book that took three years to research and write and another year to publish is like reporting a NASCAR race with stone tablets. I think I captured the origins of politicking via social media like blogs (and now YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc.) through October 2007, and so far my predictions of the 2008 race have been pretty good. New stuff is happening so fast, though, that it's hard to keep up.

But that is the point: A blogger's work is never done, nor, I hope, is that of a student of blogs. Bloggers cannot coast or rest on their laurels; their readers will abandon them or, worse, ask why they are failing them. Blogs are always unfinished, their work always to be continued, revised, and extended later. Books are supposed to be different. In a sense all books are orphans. Only in some screwball comedy movie is it possible for an author to change his mind and run into bookstores and add new material.

With BLOGWARS, however, Oxford Press' author's blog and the Internet allow me to "follow up" in a way that previous generations of authors could only do in second editions. In a way, it has to be so. The age of the author writing the non-fiction book and walking away from her re aders is dead: long live the afterpost! I say this knowing it is against the instincts of most authors, including me: When I finish a book (BLOGWARS is my seventh) I want to walk away and be done with it…but that model of authorship can't sustain itself anymore. If you want to write non-fiction nowadays you have to keep writing it long after the bookstores have your tome on the shelf.

I say "non-fiction" because I think fiction authors have higher ground to stand on when it comes to terminating a book's paper and virtual life. Have you ever read a great novel, been very satisfied by its conclusion, and then felt betrayed when an author comes out with a sequel, which you wonder was a product more of paying a mortgage than respecting the creative muse? There is a sense of finality about literature, and there should be. I have no interest in reading "Moby-Dick: The Adventure Continues" and I certainly don't want to see "new chapters" of an old novel added by authors or hired hacks.

But non-fiction is about uncovering truths as we know them, and every subject, whether the sex lives of the Hittites or political blogs, has new facts emerging that readers should know about. And, of course, readers have information that often can help the authors clarify their knowledge.

So, non-fiction authors have a duty to keep at it, and the blog is the most efficient vehicle for such interaction.

This week I am presenting at the BlogWorld & New Media Expo, 2007 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas. I will moderate two panels. Created by blogger Rick Calvert, BW will be the first business expo to showcase blogging as well as the other interactive "new" media. The array of talents and sponsors is impressive.

The first panel , on Thursday, Nov. 8 will focus on "The Power of Political Blogosphere." The scheduled panelists include: Hugh Hewitt, Pam Spaulding, Dave Nalle, Taylor Marsh, and Brad Friedman.

On Friday, Nov. 9, I will moderate "Political Blogs Vs. The Political Press" featuring John Hinderaker, Brad Freidman Mary Katharine Ham, and Taylor Marsh.

Here are the current drafts of my presentations.

UPDATED

As of this writing in winter 2006, there is a paradox in American politics. On the one hand, we are fighting an unpopular war in Iraq--at least as measured by public opinion polls. (See below for more on this complex question.) On the other hand, there is no visible large-scale anti-war movement in the traditional sense. Many explanations are possible for such a seeming contradiction. Practically speaking, the lack of a draft relieves most young people of a sense of personal connection to the struggle in Iraq. But the Internet in general and blogs in particular have provided an outlet for activism and for creating organizational links between people distant from each other in space but sympathetic in politics, so that one could make a case that there is simply no longer a need to take to the streets. Perhaps the “whole world” is marching and watching via blogs, YouTube, Facebook and MySpace?

But there is another side to the story of war-related Internet activism: the propagation of the anti-anti-war cause. Proving that all blogging is global, the blogger "Zombie" of the blog Zombietime specializes in posting photographs taken at anti-war and anti-Bush protests, mainly in the San Francisco area. Images of men and women parading as skeletons, as suicide-bombers, bare-breasted or in drag, and sporting signs such as “Lesbians for Palestine,” “I love NY even more without the World Trade Center,” “Death to America,” and “Bush must Die” or variations thereof find gleeful reposting or hyperlinking throughout the conservative bloglands. Perhaps once upon a time a group of naked middle-aged and old people marching in Berkeley in support of “breasts, not bombs” would have attracted little or no press attention except locally. (This particular demonstration was indeed covered only in the alternative left press of San Francisco.) Among rightblogs, however, these images are repeated, discussed, and referred to as decisive visual evidence of, as one rightblogger put it, “the freaks and kooks” that make up the anti-war movement. Can blogging make or unmake a social movement? For the answer, watch the blogs, not the streets!

To cast further light on these phenomena I interviewed by e-mail “Zombie” of “Zombietime.”

When and why did you start ZT?

The whole thing started on February 16, 2003. I had just bought my first digital camera the day before, and I had not yet used it. Coincidentally, I had intended to go to an anti-war rally that Saturday, and I thought to myself -- hey, why not bring the camera and test it out?

It seems a little hard to imagine in retrospect, but I was attending this anti-war rally in all sincerity, sympathizing with its goals. At least so I thought. I had been "left-wing" (for lack of a better term) all my life and had been to many protests of various sorts over the years. I was sort of going to this one out of habit. The Iraq War had not yet started -- the goal of the protest was to prevent it.

Yet somewhere in the back of my mind I was feeling ambivalent. The events of 9/11 had kindled new political feelings in me, but they still weren't completely formed, even over a year later. I was going for the purpose of protesting the war, but was that really how I felt? I was confused.

I walked to the protest in kind of a fugue state. And when I showed up, my world changed. I was shocked and mortified by the messages people were carrying. There were overtly anti-Semitic signs, banners blaming 9/11 on conspirators in the U.S. government, guys dressed up as suicide bombers, and all sorts of craziness. I took out my new camera and started clicking away. By the time the march was over, I was a changed person. If that was what the "Left" had become, then I wanted no part of it.

Keep in mind that at this stage, I still did not have a Web site. In fact, I knew absolutely nothing about how to make a Web page. Zero. But when I got home and uploaded my pictures to my computer, I thought to myself: if only everybody could see what I just saw. It would open people's eyes. It was only then that the thought struck me to make a Web page with my photos on it. The Internet service provider I was using at the time offered free "users' pages," so I spent a day or two teaching myself a couple of rudimentary html codes, and I put the pictures on my "user page."

Even after I had done that, however, no one knew about the page but me. A month or so later, I discovered (rather belatedly) the world of blogs, and when I started making my first comments online, I mentioned my photos. I was amazed at the reaction I got! People raved excitedly about them.

But, oddly, that was it. For a full year I didn't go to any more protests, or take any more political pictures. I thought this single Web page of images was a one-time thing.

Then, a year later, on the evening of February 10, 2004. I was walking through the University of California campus in Berkeley, when by chance I passed by a building with a large crowd of people in front, apparently waiting to get inside to attend a lecture. But something was odd -- various people in the crowd were screaming at each other. I also noticed that there were a lot of people wearing kaffiyehs and hijabs, and also people wearing yarmulkes. I stopped to watch for a while, and all the arguments seemed to be about Israel, terrorism, Islam, and so on. I asked someone what was going on, and they told me they were protesting an appearance by [foreign policy scholar] Daniel Pipes, who was scheduled to speak in just a few minutes. Now, at the time, I had never heard of Daniel Pipes. On a whim, I decided to stay since I had my camera with me that day. I recorded the arguments before the lecture, the disruption of the event itself, and the threatening behavior of the anti-Israel crowd afterward.

I figured out how to make a second Web page on my user site, and uploaded the pictures. This time, the response was explosive: various blogs themselves made posts out of my pictures, and linked to my page. I got tens of thousands of visitors within a few hours of putting the pictures online. Generally, most people's blog entries at that time were simply a re-posted newspaper story, or a free-form rant. I discovered then that people were hungry for "original content," the raw meat of newsmaking.

That was the day when I truly emerged as "zombie" -- February 11, 2004, when my Pipes photos first got noticed by thousands of people. I experienced a "paradigm shift," to use the technical term. From that day on, I fully embraced my "zombie" persona and went to document political events whenever I possibly could.

I didn't actually start "zombietime" until later that year. The photo reports on my little free "user's page" became immensely popular, and I overstepped my bandwidth limits exponentially. My ISP basically kicked me out for overloading the system, so in September of 2004 I launched "zombietime.com." The word "zombietime" doesn't mean anything -- I was hoping to use simply "zombie.com" but obviously that had been taken long ago. So I just came up with a random memorable new word. The rest is history.

You post pics/items on many subjects, but what would you say is the main “theme” of the blog?

There are three themes. The first, obviously, is a platform to expose the craziness that has emerged on the left side of the political spectrum since 9/11. The second theme grew out of that: it became abundantly clear that my photo essays were revealing aspects of these rallies and events that were not being covered by the mainstream media. I would post photos and videos of extreme lunacy at some event, and then the "legitimate" media would come out with their own story on the same event, and it would be a total whitewash -- they would hide what really went on. So more and more I made it my mission to expose not just went on at this or that rally, but to show how the media is biased in covering it. I emphasized my point with a mini-essay I called "Anatomy of a Photograph," showing how a photo of a protester published in the San Francisco Chronicle was intentionally misleading. That mini-essay got a massive amount of attention, showing that the public is also hungry for incisive media analysis. So, that has become the second theme of zombietime -- analyzing media bias. Thirdly, I have used zombietime and my reputation as zombie to promote the notion of "citizen journalism" -- individual non-professionals who go out and report on the news themselves. I have encouraged and trained many "acolytes," or people who have asked for advice on how to emulate what I do. My long-term goal is to create an army of "zombies", exposing the truth around the world.

I’m writing a bit about the political education functions of blogs: what would a reader--say, one of my students--learn from ZT that they would NOT learn from mainstream media?

What you'll learn from zombietime, hopefully, is that the media intentionally doesn't give you the whole story. Every newspaper article has a "slant" that is often impossible to perceive, because the bias is created through the omission of critical information. Since 92% of reporters classify themselves as "liberal" (according to a survey I saw recently), the slant of stories is almost always "left-wing."

Tell me about an event/incident that you covered that you think was very newsworthy, but was not covered in the local/national big media.

Well, as mentioned above, it's not that I'm covering events that the MSM doesn't cover at all. Frequently, there will be a small article or two about whatever event I'm covering, but the mainstream articles will leave out all the crucial information. A good example of this is the Tookie Williams execution vigil, on December 12, 2005. There was media from all over the world outside San Quentin that night -- hundreds and hundreds of journalists from the print, television and online media. And yet not a single one of them reported on what I reported on: the violent assaults against the handful of anti-Tookie protesters in the crowd; the sheer insanity of many of the pro-Tookie crowd; the deification and glorification of Tookie by the speakers; and so on. My photo essay not only records what went on that night, but also records how the media purposely failed to report it.

Why do you think the protests you cover are largely absent from MSM?

Because they make the anti-war left look bad.

How do you “cover” protests?

There's really nothing interesting to it. Living in the Bay Area as I do, it's easy enough to find out about all the upcoming political events -- they are all publicized widely. So, I'll just note down in my mind an interesting upcoming event, and if when that day arrives I have some free time and the gumption to go out "zombie-ing," I'll grab my camera and head out to the protest. That's all there is to it, really. Since I was a lifelong "liberal," I effortlessly blend into the crowd, so that's never a problem.

As for my regular daily schedule, or what my profession is, or how I operate at the rallies themselves -- I can't reveal that kind of info. Sorry!

There is a lot of work in my field (see below) on how protesters put themselves in a problematic situation where on one hand they WANT media attention and try to look/sound outrageous to get it, but then find themselves looking ridiculous on TV which may be counter productive to their cause. Do you get a sense that some of the folk you picture are putting on a show to shock or simply expressing what they really feel?

To be frank, I think that most of them are insane. Actually, literally insane. In the spring of 2004 there were a lot of soccer-mom types attending the anti-war rallies, but what happened is that they saw the virulence and irrationality of their fellow protesters, and never came back. Since that time, every subsequent protest has gotten smaller and smaller, as the sane people peeled away. By now, at the end of 2006, the only people that go to these rallies are the hardcore lunatics.

I know that may seem harsh, but I have lived in this milieu my whole life, and just about everyone I know is a radical. So I'm not speaking as an outsider, criticizing the "freaks." Speaking as an insider, they really are out of their minds. Yes, that includes many of my friends as well -- they may act normal one minute, and then go off the deep end the moment any political topic arises.

So: are the protesters simply trying to shock people, or are they expressing what they really feel? The answer is "Yes" to both, because what they really feel is the need to shock people. That is the essence and the extent of their emotions at these events. Adolescent fury.

What would you consider was your greatest picture-taking coup in protest coverage?

That's a tough call. You're putting me in a "Sophie's Choice" dilemma here, to choose one of my "babies" at the expense of the others. I can't do it! Too many to choose from. Just go to zombietime.com and choose your own favorites!

If you had to give advice to people planning to hold an anti-war rally--who want to be taken seriously, but not mix their message with silliness and irrelevancies--what would it be?

Well, to be frank, I don't want them to be taken seriously, so I'm certainly not going to give them strategic advice. My first and only suggestion is: cancel the rally. Because the very essence of a rally as a political statement undermines your legitimacy in most people's eyes. If you're out in the street chanting about this or that, you are guaranteed to alienate most observers, merely by the form of your communication. Anti-establishment political rallies are tainted as a concept.

Update from Zombie responding to this post pre-publication: Regarding your introductory paragraph, it contains a few concepts and theses that, to me, unconsciously buy into the media's false picture of contemporary history. You say, for example, "On the one hand, we are fighting an unpopular war in Iraq." I disagree with the assumptions behind that statement in no fewer than three ways.

Firstly, by my analysis, we are in fact no longer fighting a war in Iraq. The Iraq War lasted only a few weeks, during which time the US forces overran the country, defeated the Iraqi Army, and seized control of the government. War over. Everything that has happened since then is either a "mopping up" operation, pacification police work, and/or trying to suppress a separate internecine civil war that broke out two years afterward. So, though I know I'm going against commonly accepted wisdom, I would challenge the very concept that the US is fighting a war in Iraq right now at all.

Secondly, the media is now stating that the "war" (as they put it) is "unpopular," based on the results of the mid-term elections, with the Democrats gaining some seats. The presumption is spouted everywhere that the election was a referendum on the "war" -- a notion that I reject. Midterm elections are NOT national elections -- they are a series of local elections all scheduled to happen at the same time. If one looks at each of the Democratic gains in Congress, one can see that about half the seats were picked up because the Republican candidate was involved in some kind of damaging scandal, and the votes were more about personality and integrity than each candidate's political positions. And most of the remaining Democrats who won did so by running to the right of the Republican candidate. Only in a handful of cases was the Iraq "war" a campaign issue, and in those races, there was no clear victory for the anti-war side (Lamont lost to Lieberman, for example, and Webb and Allen ended in a virtual tie). The left-wing media wants us all to believe that the vote was a referendum against Bush, but I reject that as sheer "spin" with no basis in fact.

Lastly, To the extent that the "war" is "unpopular," it's not for the reasons that the media is portraying. There is an anti-war movement, to be sure, but that's only half the equation. There's another huge segment of the population that is unhappy with the way the war is conducted because it is being waged too lightly. They want to see the overwhelming use of force, not the PC pussyfooting around that is the current modus operandi. Most polls ask the misleading question, "Do you approve of the way Bush is conducting the war?" and they get a 60% to 65% "Yes, I disapprove" response. But those polls are purposely designed to NOT ask the follow-up question, "Do you think the war is being waged to forcefully or too lightly?" I've seen just a handful of polls that did ask follow-up questions of that sort, and they all revealed that half of the disgruntled respondents were to the right of Bush.

Editor's response to Z's response: You raise some topics that people will want to read more about. Indeed the very term "anti-war" is misleading because it conflates many variations of opinions about "a war." During the Vietnam War, for example, a substantial amount of people "opposed" to the war said they were actually opposed to the WAY it was being fought--not hard enough! By the loose definition Barry Goldwater and Abbie Hoffman were anti-war...

For the complexities of what are "pro-war" and "anti-war" opinions and/or images see:

Kernell, S. (1978) "Explaining presidential popularity," American Political Science Review, 72, 506-522.

Milstein, J. (1974) Dynamics of the Vietnam War: A Quantitative Analysis and Predictive Computer Simulation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Mueller, J. (1971) "Trends in Popular Support for the Wars in Korea and Vietnam," American Political Science Review 65: 358-75.

Mueller, J. (1973) War, Presidents, and Public Opinion. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Perlmutter, D.D. (1998) Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Framing Icons of Outrage in International Crises. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Perlmutter, D.D., & G.L. Wagner. (2004) “The Anatomy of a Photojournalistic Icon: Marginalization of Dissent in the Selection and Framing of ‘A Death in Genoa.’“ Visual Communication, 3(1): 91-108.

For more general treatments of the Vietnam-era anti-war movement see:

Garfinkle, A. (1995) Telltale hearts: The origins and impact of the Vietnam antiwar movement. New York: St. Martin's Press.

Gitlin, T. (2003 ed.) The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Update--01.01.07

As a longtime viewer of both shows, it is both surprising and easy to understand why The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have garnered such a large and loyal following. They utilize a methodology that is familiar to bloggers: filtering through a number of “news stories” and providing a provocative caption for the action. The back-to-back shows have become “must see TV” for many viewers that are dissatisfied with mainstream sources of information, again a common reason that people flock to blogs for insight.

The current issue of The Rolling Stone features Stewart and Colbert on the cover, bearing the title “America’s Anchors.” The interview itself demonstrates the utter ease with which the duo uncovers the humor of any situation, from the moment that Maureen Dowd set the recorder down: “’I had one like that in 1973,’ Colbert notes. ‘I thought it was a chaise,’ Stewart says. ‘I was going to lie down on it. I suppose there are two gerbils in there slowly paddling, and that's moving the wheel.’” Wrote Dowd, “He asks if I also brought a calligrapher.”

Just this week, The Daily Show made note of CNN’s interviews with various bloggers at a so-called “blog party.” Clearly amused by the situation, Stewart commented that the occasion was short on “party” and long on “blogging,” and enjoyed that CNN was asking a blogger about blogging who was at a blog party, following it up with the comment that they would probably “talk about the interview on their blog later.”

And while there are certainly “fan sites” for both shows, there is actually a bona fide blog for fans of The Colbert Report which was established “to aggregate topical news articles and buzz from the blogosphere featuring Stephen Colbert into a comprehensive web site, as well as to feature archived articles, videos and other files for reference and educational purposes.”

Back in the golden days when The Daily Show had Colbert on staff, he did a report on the state of the blogosphere. As a “traditional” reporter, he discovered that “The vast majority of bloggers out there are responsible correspondents doing fine work in niche reporting fields like “Gilmore Girls Fan Fiction” or “Cute Thing Their Cats Do” or “Photo-shopped Images of the Gilmore Girls as Cats.” That’s great. But where I draw the line is with these attack-bloggers. Just someone with a computer who gathers, collates and publishes accurate information that is then read by the general public. They have no credibility. All they have is facts. Spare me.”

The scintillating satire continues as Colbert “mocks” bloggers for “sitting at home in front of (their) computer,” while “true” journalists are busy “busting my hump every day at the White House. Transcribing their press releases. Repeating their talking points. That’s how you earn your nickname from President Bush.”

It should go without saying that Colbert illuminates the central complaint of many: that the media is too accommodating and has become too ingratiated with the political elites to objectively and effectively perform their duties. This “outsider perspective”—a characteristic shared by some blogs—caused the Rolling Stone to consider that Colbert and Stewart “may truly be the most trusted names in news.”

Stewart notes that The Daily Show is “based in frustration over reality.” One could reasonably expect that many bloggers began under similar circumstances.

For years, it seems that American culture has engaged in both hero worship as well as a morbid curiosity about the sordid details of the lives of celebrities. For awhile it seemed that politicians were mostly off-limits. What The Daily Show and The Colbert Report have accomplished is that they are able to humanize the inscrutable. Through their scathing critiques of institutional idiocy and the biases of mainstream media, they have “scratched the itch” of the body politic.

Colbert is still basking in his newfound sense of legitimacy: the Peabody award, an Emmy nomination, the “Top 50 most influential people” list, and—most recently—the fact that all 28 incumbents he interviewed in his show were re-elected this past week. It is only natural to conclude with his thoughts on the burgeoning “legitimacy” of the blogs: “with legitimacy, the bloggers will gain a seat at the table. And with that comes access, status, money, power. And if we’ve learned anything about the mainstream media, that breeds complacency.
Or whatever.”

[This post was written by Nathan Rodriguez, PBB Research Associate]