Harvard invited me to interview Joe Trippi at an Internet & Politics summit they're convening this week, and I'd like to throw it open for questions here at DailyKos.
We're having a "keynote luncheon" conversation on Thursday, which should be available for public viewing. (Some of the other sessions with Obama staff are private). Then the real fireworks come on Thursday night, in a "War Stories" panel with the leaders from both presidential campaigns (Axelrod, Plouffe, Schmidt and Davis, moderated by Gwen Ifel). Anyway, for Trippi I've been thinking...
about a few general themes:
Contrasting 2008 to 2004 for web politics
Assessing the evolving media coverage of US movement politics
Analyzing whether the Obama campaign helped shift public notions of volunteering
Pressure efforts and open government in the Obama administration
What else can you think of?
The organizers also asked participants to submit a paper in advance, taking a stance in a "working hypothesis" on whether 2008 was a turning point for Internet politics. I said yes, of course, and here are some of the points I made:
This is the first time a presidential candidate successfully used the web to: upset a frontrunner in the primary; recruit broad-based support in the general election; route around traditional media on a national scale; completely obviate the post-Watergate campaign finance system; and foster novel forms of activism to stimulate people not only online, but across the three screens that mediate modern life....
[However,] the national volunteering rates for this presidential campaign actually dropped compared to last cycle. The share of voters who say they "volunteered" on a presidential campaign fell compared to 2004, from nine to seven percent, in Pew's post-election survey. ("High Marks for the Campaign, a High Bar for Obama," Pew, Sept. 13, 2008). So is this year's mass activism actually a mirage?
No, quite the opposite, for reasons that suggest our model (and discourse) of political engagement is in flux. Here is one hypothesis: It is precisely the success and accessibility of new, alternative activism opportunities that create the appearance of a decline in volunteering. In fact, only traditional volunteering is receding.
Traditional volunteering, such as registering to help in person at a local field office, has dipped slightly (at least as a proportion of the voting public). Meanwhile, a new range of decentralized volunteering and online activism is catching on. It simply does not register in traditional survey questions.
Activists themselves may not perceive that they are "volunteering," even though they are contacting voters for a candidate, or acting with encouragement from a campaign. Forwarding political messages -- whether by email, text or video -- is essentially a volunteer act designed to impact the election. It spreads a candidate's message to persuade or mobilize potential voters, just like calling voters off a list at the local office. (See, e.g. "The Obama Campaign: A Great Campaign, Or The Greatest?," Sarah Lai Stirland, Wired, Nov. 30, 2008)
It goes on, but you get the idea. And of course, I'll be writing up the public parts of the conference from Boston...