User:Kgarrett

I "attended" the MIT conference on Saturday February 24, 2007 via webcast. I planned to attend both of the panel discussions, but when they cut away for the coffee break my Quicktime connection was lost, and I tried everything to get it back on for the participatory democracy segment, but to no avail. That was disappointing, since I participated in the participatory democracy panel in class, and was eager to hear what the panel members would say at MIT. When I couldn't get my audio/video connection, I tried to get back onto the question tool, thinking I would be able to follow the conversation there. But that didn't work either. Alas, I only got to "attend" the first panel discussion.

Luckily, the first half was amazingly thought provoking all by itself. I think we were only assigned to talk about one thing, but I can't help myself:

The moderator from Reason Magazine mentioned that we might want to re-frame the debate to get the most out of the Web 2.0 phenomenon as it pertains to democracy. He suggested that rather than YouTube "learning from" and being changed by democracy, we should ask how democracy can learn from YouTube. I think his description was apt that YouTube is more like a bazaar with a lot of competing voices and a lot of rich things going on, while democracy as we have had it in the past is more like American Idol, with one person being filtered out and ending up on top.

So, instead of finding the one person who is least offensive to 51% of the population, YouTube allows a lot of real talent to stay in the limelight. You don't have to be non-offensive, because you don't need the backing of a TV network to get out there. You can be risky and divisive and exciting, and still get a following on YouTube. Perhaps, as people get used to participating in the YouTube culture, they will be more likely to expect politics to operate in the same way. Perhaps we will be more willing to listen to the third party candidates who haven't been vetted by the networks. In fact, maybe that's where we'll look first, knowing that the networks are probably going to show what appeals to the lowest common denominator.

Somebody on the panel also mentioned the democratization of bandwidth. That wasn't a new idea for me, but I liked that term for it. Rather than a few "oligarchs" controlling what everybody hears, and rather than all content going one way, now everybody controls what others can hear, and the conversation is two (or more) ways. Hillary Clinton and Senator Dobbs have the right idea with online town hall meetings. They see the trend going in that direction as a result of this democratization of bandwidth. They just haven't implemented it yet.

Somebody else mentioned the ability of the online community to bring different groups into conversation. There is a tendency in politics to have knee-jerk reactions and just assume that I am on the good side and you are on the bad side. So we don't listen to each other. And Sunstein is correct that we are able to filter out everything with which we disagree when using the internet. However, the net also enables a dialogue that people can't have when it's just them in their living room absorbing what comes to them over the networks. Maybe people don't/won't engage with each other, but at least the internet makes it possible if they want to. Anybody could hop onto an 'opposition' blog and start a conversation with the blogger, or with other readers. More dialogue is better than less, in my opinion.

Another big shift that somebody pointed out is that "participatory culture/politics" in the days of the radio and TV was just candidates debating each other. That was a big deal at the time for us to see Nixon and Kennedy going head-to-head in front of us. Now, the rest of us are fitting into the mix. Now we debate each other. And if others want to listen, they can. There are a lot more voices (which could be a Babel problem) but it's at least interesting that the whole notion of participatory democracy has changed. "Participating" used to be just watching others participate at the live studio audience. Now we're all there. That enables (and really demands) a paradigm shift. If people will realize that they're involved, maybe they'll actually do something about it.

One of the panelists mentioned something we talked about in class last week: that bloggers and the rest of the new media online can be just as captured as the networks were. I liked the imagery of the king paying the roaming musicians to sing songs that complimented the king. Today, big companies pay for advertising spots to make them look good. And there's no reason to believe that won't happen online too. Already, there are companies that will pay bloggers to say positive things about products. And that may actually end up being more insidious than the big networks taking orders from advertisers. At least, in that space, we expect advertising and can hold the networks accountable by looking at financial statements etc. But with bloggers, we expect them to be independent and not beholden. So when they tout a product (or, more significantly, a candidate) then we take their advice as if it was coming from a friend. Maybe someday we'll lose that naivete and realize that bloggers can be bought too.

The last thing that I heard that really got me thinking was the Yahoo lady talking about reputation systems online. That's something I wanted to talk about last week, but we ran out of time. For one thing, these reputation mechanisms can help people sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of good vs. bad (truthful vs. lying) bloggers. But maybe more importantly, if such reputation mechanisms became really widespread and people began to expect to be able to vote on everything just like the vote on each other at eBay, people will simply get used to expressing their opinion. In a world where everything is fed to us and we have no opportunity for feedback, we learn to just take things as they are. We just say "well, there's nothing I can do about that." But if people learn to realize that they can at least put in a vote, and probably even express their outrage in a way that others will hear it online, then they'll get used to doing that. And they'll begin complaining about the government instead of just saying "there's nothing I can do about those people in Washington." And if they realize that voting gives them power, maybe they'll actually go and vote in elections. In other words, what excites me about this concept is not so much its implementation online, but the ability it has to bring about a paradigm shift so that people take that feedback mechanism and apply it to politics. A lot of people expressing their opinions leads to a lot of power to keep the government accountable.