It’s over and so it’s starting

Quite a hiatus here as far as the blog posts are concerned – but then again that’s not really something extraordinary around here is it.

So the long race for the presidency is over. It will be interesting to see how Obama’s presidency will fare – I know, the higher the expectations, the higher one might fall, but still I’d like to believe that doing at least somewhat better than the previous administration won’t actually be that difficult. Obama’s win is grounds for optimism, I believe.

But for the moment, nothing much changes in the day-to-day execution of the research project. I’m no longer downloading new material, but digging through the already archived data and trying to analyze its contents. It will still be a lengthy process.

Apart from the Twitter survey for next week’s conference, Chantal Mouffe’s “On the Political” has been keeping me busy lately. I have now finished it. I think it’s really important in that it stresses the necessity of conflict in human relations, or rather, the constitutive nature of conflict in human relations; and points to the importance of collective identity and alterity (the we / they distinction which, according to Mouffe, always has the potential to turn into an antagonistic conflict).

However, if I agree with her in criticizing Habermas for his overlooking of particular aspects of communication and identity formation, I also think that there is a key element missing from her thesis, notably the description of just how exactly agonistic politics could work in practice? What are the institutions and processes through which conflicts can be given an agonistic way to play out? And, most importantly, if parties – adversaries – agree only on some basic common premises that make political communication possible, but they don’t expect problems to have rational solutions, then how should argumentation take place? What kind of arguments should one use in a debate where they set off with the premise that the outcome will not be justifiable by rational arguments?

If Mouffe is right in that Habermas overlooks the importance of conflict (although I think she slightly exaggerates Habermas’ perceived near-sightedness), I also think she is wrong in overlooking the importance of reason and rational debate in political communication.

Mouffe, Chantal (2005): On the Political. New York: Routledge. (In the “Thinking in Action” series, edited by Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney.)

AR; the internet in the 2004 US presidential campaign

In an article recently published, Cristian Vaccari provides an interesting overview of the role of ‘net in the 2004 presidential campaign, based on interviews with senior aides to the campaigns of George W. Bush and John Kerry. It’s always good to hear it from the horses’s mouth.

The main conclusion of the article is that the 2004 campaign could be seen as a watershed: the internet has irrevocably become part of every aspect of the campaign (spreading information, mobilization of voters, organization of supporters etc). One of the main development from previous campaigns is the sophistication of audience differentiation: instead of providing one set of information for everyone, campaigns distinguished between members of the audience in function of their level of engagement (“interested,” “engaged” and “active”), and offered different kinds of information and activities to these groups.

It’s not over yet (but it is)

In theory, on paper, and officially, the Democratic party still has no presidential nominee – but after winning the Montana primary last night and clinching the endorsement of a score of superdelegates, there hardly remains much doubt about Barack Obama picking up the nomination.

This comes as no surprise to the communities of the social news sites I’m analyzing. Sure, it’s no scientific evidence in itself, but I still thought it would be telling to copy here what the leading news item was on Digg on 11. 5.:

I find his picture – from the Diesel Sweeties Newsblog -, and the fact that it has become a leading news item on Digg (with 2341 votes), iconic in a way. Paraphrasing the LOLcat-meme (the practice of attaching funny, anthropomorphizing captions to pictures of cats and other animals), it tells a lot about the trends of personalization of political issues, the ‘net-mashup-culture, and probably the Digg community in general.

Social news sites react to the ABC-debate

Social news sites were highly critical of what was seen as low-quality journalism by ABC; but it is hypothesized that this criticism was also motivated by pro-Obama sentiment.

On April 16, ABC News broadcast a televised debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, moderated by Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. You can read the transcript of the debate here, courtesy of The New York Times.

(For those of you unfamiliar with the format, it goes on like this: the moderators ask a question, after which each candidate has a given amount of time to respond; interrupting the other is in theory not allowed, but once a candidate has finished his or her answer, the other has the chance to reflect on what was said.)

After the opening statements of the candidates, the moderators dealt, in their questions, with 8 personal topics (such as Obama’s relationship to Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Clinton’s allegations about her trip to Bosnia), and 6 topics related to current issues: Iraq, Iran, taxes, gun control, affirmative action and gas prices. In total, more time (about 53 minutes) were given to discussing personal topics than to current issues (about 37 minutes). Topics such as health care, immigration or broader trade and economic policies were not mentioned in the debate.

Among others, the Washington Post, The New York Times, the Time magazine, and, as the comments on ABC’s website testify, a significant part of the audience deplored the debate as superficial, sensationalist (but uninteresting) and unsubstantial.

Inspiration, not aggregation? [updated]

Alexander van Elsas posted an entry about problems faced by, and possible future of, content aggregation; summing up nicely the questions that I myself trying to answer (though without putting it all into the context of a model of public sphere).

If content is aggregated using people, then we get a “democratic” version of the web. It filters out the stuff that the community likes best, leaving the more obscure or less liked stuff behind us. But I’m no[t] so sure that the stuff that comes up this way is always the best stuff. If anything, democracy principles to select information, also lead to predictable and similar content. There isn’t room for obscurity or weird stuff. The people that are in such communities will end up selecting only part of what is out there, governed by themselves and the social community they are part of.

This might of course be true – at least in some cases -; what I’m working on is to find some evidence confirming or refuting this claim, focusing rather not on “obscurity and weird stuff”, but on the appearance of competing views.

Anyhow, in Elsas’ view, aggregated content is becoming just as overwhelming as non-aggregated content; and to make sense of it, we won’t need better filters or meta-aggregators, but inspiration; meaning in this case influential, wise and insightful personal… guidance?; or as he puts it, “storytellers.” Well I’m not exactly sure what he means by this, but he promised to elaborate on the topic later.

[Update: He did.]

In not really related news, The Economist seems now certain that Barack Obama will (or at the very least, should) pick up the presidential nomination of the Democratic party. They are not the only ones; polling firm Rasmussen came to the same conclusion, and just yesterday the campaigns of John McCain and Obama have announced that the two are thinking of holding a series of informal debates in the summer, which strongly suggests that McCain’s staff is also convinced that Obama will pick up the nomination.

I’m sure it will be interesting to see how the patterns change on “my” social news sites once we officially know who the Democratic nominee is.