E-democracy – thoughts and perspectives – Keynotes II (EDEM10 Conference)
Keynotes, Day 2, EDEM10 Conference
The Promise and Contradictions of E-Democracy, Obama Style
Micah L. Sifry (Personal Democracy Forum)
Sifry begins by drawing a distinction between the social media, Internet based mobilisation from Obama during the election campaign and the lack of such activity within the administration, since Obama’s victory. At first (for example the Transparency and Open Government directive), there was a strong sense of Obama moving towards digitally enabled collaborative and participatory government. But, we have ended up, Sifry says, with an administration that is centralised and traditional and dominated by the big institutions.
Sifry demonstrates that the USA is now in an era of mass participation in the electoral process; gives the example of the Vote Different citizen advertisement pro-Obama and against Clinton. Sifry asserts that Clinton campaign was a monologue – not a conversation; scripted and led from the front by Clinton; Clinton was ahead clearly in 2007 and Sifry claims the Internet was the key factor which pushed Obama ahead. Relations between citizens and activists, not just between citizens and the leaders/ politicians are what the Internet enables; that said, the mass mobilisation effects did depend a lot on Obama’s personal qualities and the particular spirit of the times. Fundamentally, though, the mass of the population – even over 60 – are all now getting online. “people are not just going online to access information: they are doing it to participate” (based on Pew ILP data). Data on Obama campaign – 13 million email addresses; 200,000 events; 75,000 related (self-made) webpages; 4 million donors; 2 million people on myOB social site; $750 million raised, 2/3rds online – so clearly this campaign worked.
Simple argument here, based on pretty clear data, that Obama was compellingly successful in mobilising people for his electoral cause – not just giving money, but organising activities, linking between the campaign and the voters. It’s clear that Sifry has identified the key point: social media not only recruits, and funds, it also empowers a cadre of activists, turning followers into micro-leaders.
Starts the next part of the speech with a deeply offensive image of Obama which was made by the Tea Party and is being distributed, via social media, by the rightwing of US politics. The point is: social media is not just ‘the good guys’. It can go in both directions and there is perhaps less grass-roots that Obama might like to claim.
Sifry now starts to unpick the mythology of the ‘small donor’ myth of Obama. The trend in US politics is who raises the money, from big business, in the year before the election wins. This is true for Obama – he got 36%, Clinton only 30%. Obama also has an overall donor pattern that is similar to McCain and others. Howard Dean, in fact, had all the ‘small donor’ ($200 or below). Obama might have tapped into some additional funds, but principally his campaign was funded in the normal way.
Turning to the grass roots campaign – shows video of Obama expressing his hope that the network he has built around his campaign will be sustained “I want to continue that after the election”, he says. “I want to revamp our Whitehouse website…I want people to be able to say, today, this issue is going on…Creating the kind of situation where, if people want to get involved, they have the information they need”. Not just Internet, however, he focuses also on town hall meetings and getting leaders out from Washington to visit the people – “the more we can enlist the American people to get involved, the more we can move forward”. Ties this sort of participatory behaviour to fighting the Washington special interests and institutional structures.
Reviewing this myth, he cites one of Obama’s key campaign managers – at first, the campaign didn’t really appreciate what they were doing, and perhaps even saw some social media use as simply a way of creating a positive spin for the campaign through traditional media. Plouffe is cited saying his view of the campaign’s email havesting was “we had essentially created our own television network, only better”.
Sifry reveals here that the Obama campaign did not, itself, understand or deploy social media so much as discover it, and then harness it, all the time seeking to turn it back into something which is controlled, managed, and top-down and hierarchical. Once again, the Internet blindsides the centres of power because it threatens their identity as the experts of media manipulation
Sifry then turns to analyse the way Obama behaves as President – highly critical of the level of control from the Whitehouse press office (less press conferences than Bush); also critical of the trivialisation of participatory forums online by Obama. Notes, too, the way the special interests (such as the Tea Party) have attempted to hijack some of the open government debate. Looks at the way very few people have actually participated in the open government dialogue, though some valuable information gleaned.
Sifry is trying a difficult trick – to see both positives and negatives in the way the Obama administration has done ‘open’ online digital government. Speaks of the duality of “Obama”. It is clear that the duality is partly to do with the fact that there are many players (various departments and agencies), that some e-government topics / uses are not very contentious or perhaps appeal to the ‘rational’ in the public. A good analysis, if perhaps needs to explicate the way in which e-government has a series of dimensions – political, rational, expressive and so on – which don’t always fit together easily.
Sifry now reports that the kind of engagement Obama promised has not really occurred and indeed those things which have been done have not had any impact on the populace. Asserts that there is now a loss of trust; that the administration has not been ready to cope with, to embrace the “loss of control” which social media requires. Uses a slight analysis of health care speech by Obama to show that the “we” and “us” of the campaign has morphed into “I” and “you” now that he is President. And yet, Sifry cleverly identifies that the participants themselves have “walked away” from their responsibility to stay engaged.
So, conclusions. The Internet doesn’t empower anyone; we empower ourselves. One-to-many and many-to-one are easy; many-to-many is hard. Describes the Internet’s technologies for collaboration and networking as “weak tools”. Ends up, really, with a technologically oriented approach – it’s the tools that are the fault.
Sifry’s analysis is very useful here. He doesn’t explicate it, but hints at the reasons for the failure – that opposition and campaigning is not the same as government and administration. The promises were easy to make, and were – through the force of the campaign – easy to build on, but the realities are much more complicated. Furthermore, he astutely undercuts the reality of the ‘social media’ campaign idea – in fact it was only marginally so, or (perhaps) was seen by grass-roots participants as participatory while seen by the campaign management as not at all like that. It is therefore slightly unusual to see him conclude that we need better tools. I am wondering whether, in fact, the point is this: all online tools are weak tools and thus what matters is the intersection between strong ties outside of the Internet, with ‘weak tools’ to sustain and expand those ties across distance. And, in discussion, Sifry to some extent showed the problem: the tools can be made stronger – at least in the USA – in electing candidates, or shaping the candidates to stand, but become less effective when those candidates are serving politicians.
Discussion: media….“the government’s ability to be media is incompletely understood” (that is, how to mediate a conversation) ; discussing the failure of the mass media, the bias, the extremes and immediacy of cable news and the way the mediasphere in US politics is adapting to change by emptying itself out of authority through reporting and demanding authority through opinion (“truthiness” – reference AoIR Conference keynote 2009)
And, interestingly, a lot of Sifry’s discussion of successes with social media were couched in terms of ‘and it made an impact on the mass media’: so, is this too media-focused?
Discussion: “weak tools”…“politicians really do respond to money in the USA” – discusses how tools, especially around money raising and making visible the aggregation of micro-contributions, can show politicians why and how people are giving; yet still, Sifry notes, the problem is this: what happens when the political candidate is elected – do they remember what the participation meant and why they received the voter support?.
Discussion – Obama campaign had massive plans for transition of themselves to administration and no plans for transition of the grass roots to a supportive governmental grass roots campaign. Cites the fact people were calling up their local Dem office and saying ‘what do I do now?’ that Obama has won… there was nothing. Concludes – most Obama people do not believe in and are hostile to grass-roots empowerment: Democrat party is cynical of their own voters – even despite the evidence of Obama’s success.