rasmuskleisnielsen.net

A bit of self-promotion:

My talk at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society is available in a variety of formats here. Thanks again to Lokman Tsui for inviting me.

Kate Brodock from the Other Side Group blogged a few notes on my talk here.

Last week, Henrik Flor, who writes for politik.de, interviewed me about online technologies in American and European politics. Some of the points we touched upon are summarized (in German) here.

I was at the International Communications Association’s annual conference in Chicago this past weekend. The whole thing spans five days and draws about 2,500 participants, so I obviously can’t pretend to summarize everything, but here are a few highlights:

* Cliff Lampe and his various collaborators at Michigan State (Paul Zube, Jessica Vitak) are doing interesting and rigorous studies of online communities. Keep an eye on their work for valuable reality-checks on all the hype about Facebook et al in politics.

* Joe Turow from the Annenberg School at UPenn is in the midst of a very interesting project exploring how a combination of technological and organizational changes in the media buying sector (advertising et al) is shaping our information environment and the news media. It is in its early stages, but seems incredibly rich already.

* Claire Wardle, Andrew Williams, and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen from Cardiff University presented a first slice of what looks like a great, great multi-site ethnography (plus more) investigation of how the BBC in the UK deals with user-generated content. I’ll be following that one closely.

Next week, I’ll be presenting some work in progress at the Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Workshop that Lokman Tsui and Ben Peters help organize.

It is so much in-progress that I have already changed the title (replacing the rather ungainly “mobilizational” with “mobilizing” after a gentle nudge from a native speaker–thanks, Chris). So here it is:

Mundane Tools and Mobilizing Practices in Two U.S. Congressional Campaigns

The mobilizing potential of the Internet has been highlighted both by both social scientists and professional practitioners. A wide range of new tools have become ubiquitous in political campaigns—ranging from state-of-the-art websites to something as prosaic as email. But we still do not know what internet elements are most important for mobilizing practices. Based on participant-observation in two congressional campaigns in the United States, web research, interviews with professionals and activists, and analysis of secondary sources, I will argue that it is not campaign web sites as such, or the Internet in general, but specific “mundane mobilizing tools”, particular things like email and search, that are most intimately involved in mobilizing practices. Contrary to the specialized and emerging tools that have received the most scholarly, professional, and journalistic attention, mundane mobilizing tools are not designed specifically for political use, but instead derive their affordances from the fact that they (1) connect with existing infrastructures and communities, (2) allow distributed communication, and (3) are already familiar to users.

Aaron Shaw and Coleen Kaman will also be presenting. I’m looking forward to the seminar and the conversations.

I caught the second half of Politics Online 2009 yesterday (conference wiki), and presented some of my own work too (thanks to the organizers and to everyone who showed up, it was a very interesting and useful discussion).

The conference was interesting and worthwhile, and involved too many bits and pieces to pull together quickly here, so I’ll just offer one more general observation.

There seems to be a similar logic at play amongst both practitioners and academics working with new information and communication technologies and their role in political processes, namely a somewhat problematic polarization of the conversation.

One set of quite vocal people have more or less bought the idea that everything has changed, and thus very reasonably focus a lot of their energy on all the new stuff. They therefore have a lot of ideas, observations, and data, and they are not afraid to speak up (in both academia and amongst professionals attention is, after all, a valuable thing).It would be easy to call these people believers. A subset are true believers…

Another set of people remain highly skeptical of the idea of a general change, still thinking of online elements et al as neutral tools to be used in politics as usual. These people rarely show to conferences like Politics Online 2009, and even if they did, negative findings rarely lend themselves to interesting presentations, so I wonder how much play they would get. I could call these people skeptics, and a subset would be luddites.

Then there is the remaining group, in between, something that strikes me as a majority both in the academy and amongst professionals, people who have not made up their minds to join either of the two camps, and are more comfortable voicing their confidence and doubts in one-on-one conversations than as speakers, and who are therefore neither visible voices nor conspicious by their absence. Let’s call them doubters.

Events like Politics Online, and its academic equivalents, serve one purpose very well, pushing mainly the conversation internally in the first group of believers, and shedding some much-needed light on everything new, but I am still looking for events dominated neither by the believers or even by the the last group of skeptics, but entertaining a  substantial and fact-based three-way dialogue of some sort.

I’ll be at Politics Online 2009 in D.C. Monday and Tuesday, presenting with Dave Karpf from UPenn at this panel. Alan Rosenblatt from the Center for American Progress will moderate.

The paper behind my presentation is “The Labors of Internet-Assisted Activism”, available here.

I hope for a lively discussion as I take this argument from the academy to a more professional environment, and look forward to the rest of the conference too.

Cliff Lampe, from Michagan State University, was one of the presenters at a conference on user generated content hosted Friday by Eli Noam’s CITI. There were many interesting speakers at the conference, but I’ll just post a note about Lampe’s work since I had not heard of it before, whereas many of the other presenters are fairly well-known.

Lampe presented a couple of basic empirical observations on why people leave online social networks based on ongoing research. This is an important angle to counter-balance the immense amount of attention directed at succesful sites, site that people join. The basic points Lampe made are worth repeating, and here they are.

* people leave for better service elsewhere.

* people leave due to changes in life circumstances.

* people leave after conflicts with administrators.

* people leave after conflicts with other participants.

They all seem intuitive, but so does all sorts of other things, and these intuitions seems to be backed by data.

Think about how differently they effect various social networks, depending on permeability, population size, demographic concentration, etc. For example, an elected official trying to maintain a network much smaller than the one that was generated around President Obama’s campaign might not have to worry much about “better service” or changes in life circumstances within the span on one election, but should probably think about just how fragile a smaller cluster is to potentially destructive or paralyzing conflicts.

– – – addendum, promised Lampe to mention that this is work in a very early stage. so there it is.  – – –

I have a piece (in Danish) about the relationship between the Democrats and the labor movement on page 28-29 of the last issue of “Vision”, basically trying to describe some of its importance and complications to a Danish audience.

The communications colloquium that I organize at Columbia hosted Lisa Keller from SUNY Purchase today. She spoke about her recent book, Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London.

In it, she looks at the different compromises made in the late nineteenth century in the two cities between demands for public order and the principles of freedom of assembly and speech.

Her presentation was wide-ranging, and the discussion too, and the book sounds very interesting, particularly as its comparative perspectives highlights the contingency of the different states of affairs that have been established, in Keller’s view a more control and order-oriented one in New York, and one leaning towards greater freedom, even at the cost of a little disorder, in London. The comparison is of course particularly interesting given New York’s reputation as a very liberal city, and London’s notoriety for CCTV surveillance and the like.

Two observations on the Midwest Political Science Association 2009 conference.

First, there is some interesting stuff in the pipeline.

For me, the highlight of the conference was another slice of the massive and diverse data set on the diffusion of new technologies among members of congress that David M.J. Lazer, Kevin M. Esterling, and Michael A. Neblo have collected and are working on. Last year’s presentation on “strategic obfuscation by members of congress” was fascinating. Their paper for this year’s conference was on the adoption of various web tools by members of congress for their official homepages, which suggests that adoption of various web tools is strongly driven within state delegations, especially among co-partisans within states (much more so than by, say, characteristics of the representatives’ district, or systematic party differences). Keep an eye out for more stuff, which they say will be listed here. They say they are planning something like 3 books and about 15 articles (!), so there will be enough for everybody…

Others deserve honorable mention too, Matthew Hindman sounds like he has a fascinating study of the structure of web traffic underway, based on Hitwise data, basically supplementing his existing work with a more dynamic modeling; Markus Prior is working on the origins of political interest based on some quite rich data from Europe; Toni Pole, presented a couple of interesting surveys of blogs, including one study suggesting that campaign blogs are used more for negative attacks against opponents and for mobilizing volunteers than for other purposes, but that there are notable differences from candidate to candidate; Hannes Richter’s presentation on PEW and NES data suggests that the information effects of internet use are extremely limited; Eszter Hargittai and Nicole Joseph’s study of young adult’s news consumption suggests that blogs are of limited importance.

Secondly, the challenges for interdisciplinarity as anything but a buzzword for university administrators are striking.

I went mainly to political communication and information and technology sections. The lack of interest in and familiarity with work in communications studies, science and technology studies, and sociology seems pronounced in both areas. Matthew Hindman made the same point when he chaired an otherwise good panel with Ben Epstein, Jaclyn Kerr, and Doug Oxley. Political scientists too need to read outside their discipline, or they risk irrelevance and worse when it comes to emerging trends and technologies.

It is not hard to understand why there might be so little interdisciplinary dialogue going on–it allows people to draw more directly on the data, theories, and methods of their forebears, and hence both continue to accumulate insights in a language recognizable to their disciplinary peers. Also, there is enough to read and do in any particular specialized discipline, field, sub-field, and debate, so why spend time keeping an eye on what the neighbors are doing? One answer to that might be that useful engagements with the questions of our day and age requires it, because they are not all neatly nestled in the boxes offered by the division of labor amongst the sciences. Anyway, that’s what I tell myself as I continue to read and learn from political science, sociology, science and technology studies even as it means I perhaps cannot read as much of the communication literature as I should…

I’ll be at the Midwest Political Science Association 2009 conference this weekend. My paper is called “Personalized Political Communication: The Overlooked Ground War”, and it is available here.

Re-reading it I am reminded that it is at least three different texts, (1) an incomplete literature review, (2) a genealogy of a particular strand of political communication research, and (3) fodder for a discussion to be resumed when my empirical work for my dissertation is done.

Comments et al welcome. Looking forward to input at the conference.