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Obama The Interactivist - Part 2

Posted by John on November 14th, 2008, 1 Comment

By now we all know that the election of the first African American president was an historic achievement. But Barack Obama’s election was historic for another reason too: Obama’s victory marks the sudden, disruptive arrival of networked culture on the world political stage. In fact, Obama will be the first president of networked America, the first Digital President of the United States.

When Obama stated, in his Grant Park speech on election night, that his team had run “the best campaign ever,” he was not boasting. Obama’s campaign team took him from fringe candidate to the White House and achieved staggering milestones along the way: $600 million in campaign donations; nearly 4 million individual donors; a centrally coordinated grassroots effort that saw an estimated 6 million volunteers getting the Obama vote out on election day. The numbers are staggering.

How did he do it? How did Obama generate such unprecedented levels of public engagement, enabling him to battle so effectively in so many states? What was the rock on which Obama’s successful strategy was built? The answer is clear: the Internet.

In fact, one could even argue that Barack Obama was elected because he had a great website. Does that sound silly? It isn’t. www.mybarackobama.com, planned by Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, was in many ways the heart of the Obama campaign. This state-of-the-art online community was the primary vehicle and catalyst for tens of millions of individual donations to the Obama campaign. It generated an estimated 1 billion emails to members, emails that will be studied in communications courses for years to come as models of simple, direct and informative email marketing.

The website also offered easy-to-find and easy-to-use toolkits to promote local activism, and a platform for members to create and join action groups. The Florida Veterans for Obama, for example, garnered 5157 members, hosted 521 events, made 19,598 calls and raised $27,982.59 during the campaign. There were over 35,000 of these self-organizing groups that cost the campaign nothing in terms of time or money, but that contributed energetically to its success. Scalability and hyper-efficiency are two of the key qualities of networked communications and the Obama campaign thoroughly understood their power.

Interestingly, the single largest group that formed on Obama’s community website during the campaign was created to attack him on a point of policy, including posts encouraging members to vote McCain unless Obama stopped supporting Bush’s controversial surveillance bill (FISA). So what did Obama do when he was directly challenged in the middle of his campaign on his own website? Seemingly very little. He did not “feed the trolls,” as the old Internet adage goes. Nor did he respond with a knee-jerk command-and-control reaction such as deleting the group or its members, which would have been disastrous. Instead he watched and waited, comfortable in the knowledge that some disagreement is inevitable on any community website, and that should the issue blow up, having its epicenter on his own turf would actually make it easier to deal with than otherwise. Ultimately, although unsatisfying to those who wanted him to change his position, Obama’s response was web-savvy, and clearly succeeded in minimizing the impact of the dissent.

One doubts whether the team running www.johmccain.com would have acted with the same forbearance, as McCain’s online campaign reflected his lack of understanding of networked culture. Remember, this is a candidate who admitted that he did not know how to use email, and who, for all we know, may never even have surfed the web. That www.mybarackobama.com was written using open-source code (PHP) while www.johnmccain.com was written in Microsoft’s .ASP language is not perhaps the defining distinction between the two men and their campaigns, but it is nevertheless a potent and relevant symbol of their differences both online and off.

The power to create, to connect and to share lies at the heart of networked culture as it lies at the heart of Obama’s idealism. Americans were drawn to Obama‘s inspirational character, intellectual acuity and moral leadership but the deep relationships that they felt with the man and his message were nurtured through online networking tools that put real power in real people’s hands. His slogans – “yes we can” and “the change we need” – were made manifest by an online platform that posited and enacted a revitalized American identity. In the end, history will show that it was Obama’s ability to align his inspirational brand with the Internet’s profoundly democratic character that gave him his victory, and that made an African American the first digital president.

Yet as Obama said in his Grant Park speech, his election is not an end but a beginning. The critical question then becomes: now that Obama has used the power of the web to get elected, how will he use it to govern?

Obama the Interactivist - Part 1

Posted by John on September 2nd, 2008, 3 Comments

Firstly - if you have not seen Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention last week, here is a link to the full speech. It will be 45 of the most inspiring minutes of your life.

Now, on to the post…

Barack Obama is multi-racial and multi-cultural, son of an African father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas (Dorothy’s daughter who ran away to Oz and stayed there, because there was no place like home, no place better than Hawaii anyway). Obama has been socialized into many cultures - American, African, Indonesian, Hawaiian, Harvard Law, Black Chicagoan, lefty unionist, and elected officialdom, among others. And he has learned from each of these, learned to speak the language of each of these cultures, to see the world through the eyes of the Law Partner as well as the laid-off machinist, the single mom (like his own) and the soccer mom, the Black teen in the hood and the new immigrant and the Ivy Leaguer and the minor official, to sympathize and dream with each, and in so doing to demonstrate the shared experiences and needs that connect those of us who would otherwise feel divided, in so doing to replace enmity with compassion.

This we know. And those of us whose hearts are not too hardened by rejection, or corroded by media-fuelled cynicism, or poisoned by bigotry, welcome his willingness to dream, and to lead.

There are those who claim that he does not lead, that his words are empty rhetoric. Yet his words are truly the essence of his capacity to lead. His ability to speak truth to power, to listen to a multitude of voices and to distill their sighs and cries into his own, is the most powerful form of leadership that can be. Speaking as Obama does is leading by example.

In their collective blindness mainstream media suppose that leadership consists of something other than speaking and listening effectively and decisively. That it consists of something other than taking public responsibility for oneself and for others. That it consists of everything except this. But they are wrong. Everything follows from the stories we tell ourselves. Everything follows communication.

It was the power of communication (in this case the widely promoted lies about weapons of mass destruction) that got us into the the war in Iraq in the first place. Bush’s power was not divorced from the dishonesty that ruled in the mainstream media during the leadup to the invasion of Iraq. His actual power was his ability to create that climate of dishonest communication. Just as it was the power to influence communications in America that resulted in the popular support for the pre-war policy of depriving Iraq of medicine, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.

This is why Obama’s willingness to return the power of public speech to the citizens of America and the citizens of the world is so important, so transformative, and so powerful. “But,” some will say, “he is the one doing the talking, he is not returning anything to anybody. It is all about him.”

But here too they would be wrong. When, in his acceptance speech in Denver, Obama said: “What the naysayers don’t understand is that this election has never been about me. It is about you” he was not just spouting a clever turn-of-phrase. He was using some of that African knowledge that has shaped him. And what is the essence of that African knowledge? It is the knowledge that the individual who gets on stage to speak, to preach, to blow, is not there to speak to people but to be spoken through. That contrary to popular belief, call-and-response is not about the preacher calling and the congregation responding. It is about the congregation calling and the preacher responding. And what the community is calling for is healing. The true leader has an ego strong enough to carry and transmute that burden of need into a song of purpose and possibility, but humble enough to be responsive to the merest suggestion of need, and thus to be directed by the needs of the community that has called him/her into being. That is the power of the bluesman, of the jazz artist, and even some rappers, though sadly few MCs have the humility to heed the call.

So Barack Obama’s words are not ‘just words’. They are leadership incarnate. It is his ability to unite people through his words that will bring him to power. And it is that same ability that will yield tangible results once he is elected. Will they be the results he has promised? Perhaps not. He is admittedly setting the bar extremely high. And yet George Bush has set the bar so very low that we have nowhere to go but up.

Barack Obama is aiming for the stars because America desperately needs him to.

Great Thread on iDC

Posted by John on August 17th, 2007, Leave a Comment

I’ve been part of a terrific listserv for a couple years now. For those of you too young to remember listservs, they are an old-fashioned email-based form of community forum, many of which still thrive in the e-hinterlands, including the this one, run by the Institute for Distributed Creativity. And it rocks.

A lot of very very smart people contribute to it and the conversations tend to very sophisticated, very informed and often very provocative. Ok, I will admit that I do my part to make sure the provocation quotient remains comfortably in the red. ;)
Which brings us to a most excellent thread that has been running on the list for the past couple of weeks. It’s titled “Immaterial Labor and Life Beyond Utility” and I’ve contributed several posts to the thread. We’re hashing out some fascinating ideas relating to the character of the socially networked ‘experience economy’, its relationship to wealth and to the environment, to Marxism, to “sovereign media’, the Italian mercato, the French philosopher George Bataille, the mechanics of YouTube and beyond. Very interesting stuff. For me it has been an excellent forum to articulate some of the theoretical issues underlying our new secret project, which is definitely plugged into the ‘experience economy’.

To tell you the truth, I’m kind of proud of some of my posts, but rather than simply pasting them in here, where they would be out of context, here’s a link to the iDC thread archive, where you can find the entire discussion. If you’re interested in the topics mentioned above, check it out here.

Community Media Fund

Posted by John on March 13th, 2007, 1 Comment

I was sent an email recently that was written by Mark Surman, Director of Telecentre.org, with the subject heading: Get involved: Help create new Community Media Foundation from CTV / CHUM merger. The gist of the email was an appeal to Canadian new media activists to lobby the feds to promote the idea that the merger of two of Canada’s largest online and broadcast content players should only be approved if accompanied by a commitment to invest substantially in community media in Canada. This is a great idea and should be supported. The email includes a form letter that you can personalize and instructions about how to send it to the CRTC. Hit me back and I’ll forward it to you if you are interested in learning more.

I think community media is in dire straits in Canada at present and that the CRTC has a responsibility to be proactive in addressing the profound lack of leadership in this area, particularly with regard to online content. One of the great incongruities of online macro-economics is the disincentive Canadian access players (i.e. cablecos and telcos who own Canada’s broadband infrastructure) have in investing in Canadian content. See, in radio and TV, there is a symbiotic relationship between content producers and content distributors. Without the artists and labels, radio cannot survive. And similarly, without TV producers, broadcasters can’t operate. But this basic interdependence breaks down in the online sphere, where the broadband ISPs can sell access to the entire www without feeling any impulse to invest in the creation of content. And by and large, they don’t. When it comes to creating Canadian content champions online, as we have done in music and TV and film, Rogers’ track record, dating back to the days of Wave, @Home and Excite all the way up to the present, is pitiful, dwarfed only by Bell’s brainless lethargy for pure backwardness and stultifying disinterest in Canadian content, community-driven media and p2p creativity.

8 years ago I created a non-profit called the Community Media Lab that produced a number of online projects with street kids and other young folks. Since then the void in this area has only become more and more obvious, and yet almost nothing is being done to address it. When Alan Rock’ $3.5 billion Telecommunications Highway initiative was disemboweled by Paul Martin we lost a huge opportunity. It wasn’t a good plan, containing a measly $50 million for community media, but it was a start. Today Canada is wasting its global competitive advantage as a multilingual, educated and supremely wired environment because of the failure to invest in those strengths. Community media is one important area in which Canada could easily become a global leader, but our complacency and greed is blinding us to the necessity and the opportunity to look ahead, look around and look within. But there’s still a chance to turn things around. Let’s see if we can’t use our networked power to inspire some movement at the political level.