Scrutiny

I just saw a presentation of an amazing online resource called Metavid. It is overseen by Warren Sack at UCSC and designed largely by his students Michael Dale and Aphid Stern. Its funded by the Sunlight Foundation and a grant from the NSF.

The site houses every second of video footage from the Senate and House floor since January 2006. All of it is searchable online by the text of the speech (scraped from the closed captioning of the CSPAN broadcast), the name of the speaker, the session. You can search, with a really simple and effective interface, not only for what a certain person said on a certian topic on a certain date, but also cross-referenced by some of the information the Sunlight Foundation offers — so, you could request any mention of “health care” by anyone recieving more than X dollars from pharmaceutical industry donors.

Any clip can be very simply embedded into a blog or website. You can jump to the stream of footage and indicate the start and finish point of the clip you want, and that can be added to a blog or website. You can help label clips for content, or even repair text errors in the closed caption transcript. You can combine clips (in an astoundingly nimble drag-and-drop interface) together, and put the montaged clip into your blog or website.

I’m really, really impressed.

Maybe I’m in a grouchy place, from jetlag or lack of coffee or too much coffee. But I think I’ve decided to never use the term “Web 2.0″ again, except maybe to speak critically about it as a construct. I know its almost as popular to bash the term as to use it, so I’m not cutting any edge here. But I’m finding it exhausting in this conference, and I realize that I may have used it in my own presentation - in fact, I’m not even sure if I did or not, which is disturbing.

This is partly inspired by David Berry’s talk, in which he critiques the term as an “imaginary technology,” one that, in fact, was meant not as a category but as a manifesto of principles when Tim O’Reilly first coined it. David made an excellent point, which is that it is dangerous for scholars to turn to study a phenomenon, and do so by accepting a term manufactured to describe it, and manufactured by interested parties. (I particularly loved that he kept calling it “2-point-naught.”) But its also a reaction to the way this term has so insinuated itself into this conversation. Precisely because the conference called itself “Politics 2.0″ has made it such this term, on a regular basis, gets used by presenters as not a manufactured term, or even a set of principles, but a matter-of-fact category of technologies out there.

It is a singularly useless and shamefully promotional term, and plays into our worst habits as academics, intellectual laziness and over-simplification as insight.

I just think its pretty exciting news: WikiCandidate just got covered in New Scientist, and subsequently got picked up in an AFP report. Which means its now been heard about by a whole lot of people, and the site is finally getting  lots of hits and some real activity.

Fenwick McKelvey, a graduate student from Ryerson, working with Greg Elmer, posed an interesting question after our panel. What do we mean exactly when we talk about a new media “platform”? I use the term, but probably not in a particularly analytical way. I suppose in my mind, I was thinking of “platform” as sites that act as vessels for user contributions: YouTube, Flickr, even Craigslist, eBay. Wikipedia suggests that the term does not refer to such sites, but to hardware or software platforms that allow other tools to run, but I feel like I have often heard it used to describe sites that host content, not just tools.

This is worth thinking through. In fact, the main point of my talk today may actually beg that very question. I suggested that there’s a paradox for new media platforms for political involvement, where they may offer up their site as a certain kind of space, but it is the users who end up defining in powerful ways what the site offers and what kind of deliberation it hosts, because each subsequent user arrives at the site filled with their contributions, may only be true because I am thinking about new media “platforms” that have to be offered up first as an empty vessel, a la YouTube or Flickr. But of course, in those cases, the site provider can post their own content if they so choose, and may have at the start in order to get things going — though as the site grows, their contributions are dwarfed by the content provided by others. In our WikiCandidate project, we did not want to “prime” users in any way by putting even space-holding text — but this is an artifact of our particular desire to see what gets built, and to be able to ask communication questions as well as technology and politics ones. I could imagine other sites, like Remix America, where the very point is to fill the site with a certain kind of content, in order to encourage further contributions.

Is “platform” on of those terms, like “peer” or “amateur,” that is being adopted because it does some very particular cultural work in this mew media environment? Is it another discursive way to appear open, to make a promise of technological neutrality? The metaphor of a platform is a pretty compelling one: it raises you up, but it is flat and without walls, so its open to all and privileges no one. Its also worth remembering that the term has been long used in the political venue, in terms of a party’s platform, to suggest that the candidate stands on these principles. Is it a term that needs unpacking, as well as being more analytyically rigorous about it when we do scholarship on such tools?

I’m currently attending the Politics 2.0 conference being held at the Royal Holloway University of London, organized by Andrew Chadwick. The Wikicandidate project that my students and I have been developing made it a natural fit, and we were lucky to have a really good audience for our panel. So while I’m here, I may throw some thoughts to the blog, about the implications of new media phenomena for political involvement.

One issue that emerged from our panel and the discussion that followed, is the tension between engagement and consensus. There is a tension in the ideas about public political involvement and the “public sphere,” between whether the value of public participation in debating the issues of the day is the value of engagement for its own sake, or engagement in order to accomplish something, to reach consensus or resolution. I don’t know Habermas’ body of work as well as I should, so I don’t know if he addressed this directly or not. But it seems to be a persistent but often implicit question when we actually build for political involvement. Are we building spaces for people to come together to debate, because debate is a good thing, because it makes us better citizens overall, because it is the symbolic heart of democracy as an ideal? Or, are we building spaces for people to come together to debate because we want that debate to accomplish something, to reach a resolution on some pressing issue, to take an informed vote on some bill, to set the agenda of an governing body? Or, are we building spaces for people to come together to debate because we want people to reach consensus, to agree?

One point a made in my presentation was that wikis, and especially as instantiated in Wikipedia, seem to emphasize consensus over engagement for its own sake. Though some trumpet Wikipedia for its collaborative nature, the priorities at Wikipedia are about the resource produced – I think Wikipedia would prefer an encyclopedia entry that is fair and accurate but written by one person, to an entry that’s flawed and incomplete but built by many. And the wiki is technologically designed to highlight the consensus produced over the discussion that produced it: the tool foregrounds the entry and backgrounds the discussion, history, and edit functions. (You could imagine an alternative-universe Wikipedia where, when you go to the entry on “democracy” you’d arrive first to the page where users debated how to present the concept of democracy, then could click to see what they came up with. This is just as technologically possible as the one we have, but already seems counterintuitive. Its not so far from the way a Usenet threaded discussion on democracy would look.)

So if there is a tension between engagement for its own sake and engagement for the production of consensus, and remains an open question about which has greater value (or what combination of the two we require), new media platforms are being built today that decide on an answer to this question, without the question being asked.

One of the most important steps we can take as scholars is to demand that, as new answers are being offered to old questions, the question at least gets asked.

I liked this brief discussion on the design of Obama’s campaign website, especially his use of the Gotham font. Since my students and have been working on WikiCandidate for the last few months, a lot of our discussion have been about how to design the site to most closely approximate the sites set up by the current presidential candidates. We’ve tried to draw from all of them to find what is apparently the convention these days for candidate sites — not far from the conventional “content management” site, the obvious profusion of red and blue, plus some surprising commonalities of site categories, button location, and aesthetics. But I have to agree with Heller and Collins, Obama’s use of the Gotham font does do something for his site that the others do not quite match.

I think I could be a font nerd, if I knew a little more about them.