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SPECIAL REPORT

Online Extra: "A Major Change in the Political Equation"

Howard Rheingold predicted the rise of online advocacy groups. Now, he
talks about how they're affecting Election 2004

Source: Robert D. Hof, BusinessWeek Magazine

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_13/b3876132.htm

When technology writer and consultant Howard Rheingold wrote Smart
Mobs: The Next Social Revolution in 2001, his notions about the rise of
spontaneous groups linked by the Internet and mobile communications
were a little tough for many people to understand. Not anymore. Howard
Dean's Presidential campaign built upon Rheingold's ideas, using the
Net to organize surprisingly large groups of backers -- and get them to
contribute millions of dollars.

Still, Rheingold thinks that's just the start of a long battle on the
part of activists of all stripes to seize some of the power now wielded
by political professionals and large media companies. He recently
talked with BusinessWeek Silicon Valley Bureau Chief Robert D. Hof
about this topic. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow:

Q: What's the essential impact of the Internet on politics today?
A: Most people know that you can connect with people with whom you
share an interest via the Internet even if you don't know them, even on
the other side of the world. The Dean campaign, of course, used
Meetup.com, which brought Internet capability to the face-to-face
world. You can find people who share your interest in a particular
candidate, who live in your neighborhood, and want to get together
face-to-face.

That brings the unique capability of the Internet to connect people
with shared interests, together with the ability to perform some kind
of action in the face-to-face world. It becomes collective action when
that group of people decides they're going to put some money into a pot
and send it to a candidate, or they're going to do some work for a
candidate.

So our standard political activities of organizing to support a
candidate and organizing to raise money can be done much faster and
cheaper. The Dean campaign was able to use e-commerce engines to raise
large amounts of money very rapidly from small contributors. Raising
$100 million by getting $1,000 contributions is the way it has been
done. If you can raise $100 million by having a million people send in
$100, suddenly the game changes. That's got to be a permanent and major
change in the political equation.

Q: Does this benefit one party more than another?
A: It's not owned by any particular party. In fact, years ago, the
religious right pioneered a lot of the use of technologies like
databases to keep track of constituents. I expect this to be used by
all parties.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? As long as you play by the rules,
I would rather have a large number of people participating than elites
-- or what the founders called factions -- controlling it.

Q: Smart mobs involve the combination of the Internet and mobile
communications, but so far, in U.S. politics at least, we haven't seen
mobile phones play much of a role.
A: The mobile telephone doesn't enter into that at all. Where the
mobile telephone is important is when you have something that happens
in a widely dispersed area in a limited period of time, such as getting
out the vote. You can use it to coordinate volunteers or professionals.
You can use it to provide feedback to a fine degree that wasn't
possible before.

Q: What other role can smart mobs play in politics?
A: This is even being used in Kenya and Ghana. What was interesting
there was that in those places, you have an infrastructure problem and
a corruption problem, so the question of whether the votes were
corrupted between the remote polling places and the central counting
stations was dealt with by observers at the polls with telephones, text
messages, sometimes in combination with radio stations.

There's also some effort in the U.S. for people at polling places here
to use a combination of the Internet and mobile telephones to report
any kind of irregularities that can legally be disputed. So there's a
role [for these technologies] in keeping elections honest.

This is not owned by any particular faction. Anyone who wants to make
sure that, whatever the rules are, [they're] adhered to now has the
ability to deploy a smart mob. You can get your volunteers out in the
field and report to a central headquarters, which can then broadcast
the information to many people.

Q: Does that guarantee a more democratic result in elections?
A: I don't think you can necessarily draw that conclusion. You know,
fascists used mobs. You can fool some of the people some of the time,
and all you need to do is fool them at the right time and get them out
to act on that. So I wouldn't confuse the democratization of the
Internet with necessarily healthy activity for democracy. That would be
projecting magical thinking onto the technology.

Q: So what are the benefits to using the Internet in politics?
A: I do think it gives an opportunity for more people to be involved in
the process, and that's sort of the idea behind democracy.

A lot of people flocked to Dean because Dean allowed [former campaign
manager] Joe Trippi and [campaign Internet director] Zephyr Teachout
and the others to deploy these Internet-based tools to enable
self-organization. So a campaign that didn't have a lot of money and
was not blessed by the Democratic National Committee was able to
organize 150,000 meetups.

It takes a lot of money and a lot of organization to do that from the
top down. People felt empowered by that. They weren't left out of the
process.

Q: Why didn't all this help Dean win the nomination?
A: I don't think that the pros and the volunteers came together
effectively on the Dean campaign. Let's say you've got to reach retired
steelworkers at the Elks Hall or the African-American church ladies
down at the Baptist church. Well, if you could match up appropriate
volunteers from their neighborhoods and give them guidelines for how
they could persuade those people, you now have a combination of knowing
who specifically you need to reach to win this election and the
self-organized volunteers in the vicinity.

I think sending a 23-year-old from California to talk to farmers in
Iowa isn't going to be that effective. But if you can match your
volunteers, who have self-organized at no cost, with the task that
needs to be done, I think that could be a powerful combination.

Now, it's difficult to treat volunteers like slaves. Typically, the
amateurs get to stuff envelopes and run phone banks. If they're going
to self-organize Meetups, contribute millions of dollars, and have a
blog in which they're making suggestions, they're going to want to have
a bit of a say.

Q: What advice have you offered other candidates aiming to mobilize
smart mobs for their campaigns?
A: The pros and the candidate have to agree that they're going to give
up some decision-making power to the volunteers. It doesn't mean you're
going to let them run amuck. You can give them guidance. You can say,
"Look, wear a suit to the church." You got someone whose father was a
Teamster, send them to talk to the Teamsters. Don't send a 23-year-old
to talk to a 60-year-old. You can give them talking points that are
effective ways to persuade people.

If you have to send down orders through a hierarchy, then you have a
less responsive organization than one in which you have
self-organization out in the field. So there are some inherent
advantages to what the Internet and mobile communications afford to
people. But those advantages have to be deployed with political savvy,
or they will be ineffective. They are not in themselves going to
guarantee anything. You can waste that money, as Dean did, and lose.

Q: Blogs have given voice to once-marginal, sometimes extreme views.
Is there any danger moderate voices might get drowned out?
A: You got a million or 10 million bloggers out there. A bunch of them
are nutcases. A lot of them are at the extreme ends. Many of them are
totally uninformed. Some of them are going to be decent journalists.
Some of them are going to be better than the pros.

I think there's a Darwinian process when you have a large number of
people doing it. If 10 million people are publishing their own opinions
instead of sitting slack-jawed in front of the tube, that's got to be
healthier for the public sphere. The mass media have disempowered
people from the process and made them feel disempowered.

Q: What could make blogging more useful to the masses?
A: What's lacking is grounding in good journalism. It's a learned skill
that requires some tutelage by people who understand it. I wish that
the people in the news business, instead of fearing the bloggers, would
help educate them.

You've got these rumor-mongers out there. Matt Drudge is the paradigm
example but certainly not the only one. I think he hurt his
credibility, such as it is, with the Kerry intern rumor. The next
intern he turns up, I don't think he's going to find a lot of
respectable journalists risking their reputations to follow it. So I
think there's a kind of marketplace of credibility online.

Misinformation and disinformation and bad information can now travel to
more people much faster than ever before. The only hope is that it
comes from more channels than ever before.




________________________________________________________________________
Howard Rheingold howard@rheingold.com
http://www.rheingold.com http://www.smartmobs.com
What it is --->is--->up to us