 Good afternoon. My name is Amy McCreath. I'm the coordinator of Technology and Culture Forum at MIT and the Episcopal Chaplain at MIT. And it's my good fortune to welcome all of you to this forum this afternoon here in the Bartos Theatre at MIT. It's been our good fortune at Technology and Culture Forum to co-sponsor this two-part series on the campaign and the media with the Communications Forum at MIT and with the Center for Future Civic Media. And I'm very thankful for the great work that the staff at both places have put into putting the series together. As many of you know, this is the second of a two-part series. And we first gathered here to discuss the campaign and the media at the end of September with another wonderful panel. And at that time, we had a tremendous discussion about a lot of aspects of this issue, some of the things that stood out for me in that discussion, which will probably continue as themes tonight, are, first of all, what media are breaking stories around the campaign and how much of the news about the elections that we see in the media is actual reportage and how much is simply talk or commentary on the facts. And does it matter? Does it matter whether the media are breaking stories and how that happens? Do people really care about the facts when they go to the polls? Or is their vote based on something else? We also talked at that first forum about Obama's campaign and its very savvy tactics using new media and whether that was going to make a difference, especially in terms of getting out the vote among younger voters and what the long-term implications of those techniques and that strategy would be. And finally, we talked about whether or not and the extent to which new media are having a significant impact on election politics and on the election process. So tonight, we're on the other side of the election. And I'm glad about that. I don't know about you. It was quite a fall. And I'm glad it's resolved now. And we are standing on the other side of it and able to look back on the events of election day and see from our perspective now how the campaign and the media came together. So tonight, we have a tremendous panel to guide us in this discussion. And I'd like to tell you just a little bit about each of the people up front. We have Ian Rowe, who is the vice president of strategic partnerships and public affairs for MTV. Ian oversees MTV's on-air, online, and off-air pro-social campaigns known as ThinkTV. And his work includes the 2008 Choose or Lose Campaign. He's been referred to as the conscience of MTV. You can tell us whether that's true or not. Prior to MTV, he worked with the USA Freedom Corps at the White House, the president's initiative on volunteer service. So welcome, Ian Rowe, to MIT. Sitting next to Ian, we have Mark Ambender, an associate editor at The Atlantic, and a contributing editor to both the Hotline and National Journal. Mark was the editor of Hotline on Call, a path-breaking political news blog. And he was one of the founders of ABC's The Note. His latest writings can be found on the Mark Ambender blog, which you may be familiar with. So welcome, Mark Ambender, to MIT. And next to Mark is Cyrus Crone, the director of the Republican National Committee's e-campaign. Cyrus was formerly the publisher and co-founder of Slate Magazine. And prior to joining Microsoft, he produced programs for CNN, including Larry King Live and Crossfire. So welcome to you as well. Welcome, Cyrus. Moderating the discussion tonight is Henry Jenkins. Henry Jenkins is the co-director of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, and the Peter DeFlorenz Professor of Humanities at MIT. He's the author of Convergence Culture, Where Old and New Media Collide, and many other great books on media and popular culture. So tonight, Henry will moderate our discussion. And we're going to go, I think, until 7 o'clock. If folks have lots of questions, there'll be time after the discussion up front. There'll be lots of time for all of you to ask questions and make comments. So when we get to that point, there'll be microphones and the aisles. And Professor Jenkins will invite you forward to offer your thoughts and your questions to this great panel. So with that, turn it over to Henry Jenkins. Thank you very much. Happy to see everyone out there today. Ever since I came to MIT 20 years ago, we've been organizing these forums on democracy and new media through the communication forum event. And every year, going into the election cycle, we hear pundits say, this is going to be the one. This is the one that digital media is going to transform American society. This is the one where power of old media gives way to the power of new media. And then the election ends. Whatever dramatic spectacular events take place. And the pundits then say, oops, I guess we were wrong. New media didn't make that much difference anyway. It really was old media and its agendas that set the tone for this campaign. Now mind you, these are pundits speaking through old media, for the most part, who've decided that new media didn't matter terribly much. But it's been a repeated cycle. And my own theory has been that they really are looking for the digital equivalent of the Kennedy Nixon debate. The problem is the Kennedy Nixon debate is an arch-typical example of broadcast media. Its power was people all over the country watching the same event at the same moment in time, rather than the dispersed, decentralized, social networking effects that are associated with new media as it has its impact. New media is never going to be felt in that concentrated way that something like Kennedy Nixon debate represented. What I hope we can do today, though, is to dig deeper into the myth and reality of the role of new media in this last election cycle, to sort of see what these three experts have to say about the role that new media played and to see if we can come up with at least a degree on some criteria that would help us to think more deeply about the role of new media. As I do what I think we have to dispel the myth that it's about simply new media and that it really is very much about the relationship of old and new media, that one has to think about as we go forward. So what I wanna do is begin by having each of the people in the panel sort of as way of introduction, just tell us what you've been up to for the last 12 months. You've been out there dealing with the thick of this thing from different vantage points. So why don't you just tell us a little about yourself and what you've been doing. So, Ian, why don't you start us off? Just a piece of information our research folks sent us I think is so illustrative of what we've been through. So we have a group of 18 to 22 year olds all across the country. It's sort of our private audience community. They were constantly asking them about a whole range of issues. And of course, related to the election, we asked them, so tell us three brands that really you associate with Obama versus McCain. Just to get a sense of how young people are positioning these two. And with Obama, the three brands were Apple, Innovative, Nike, Excellence, and Coca-Cola. Someone sturdy, all sort of top tier brands. With John McCain, the brands were Exxon Mobile, Tommy Hilfiger, and Ben Gay. And I think it's funny, but it's so illustrative of how our audience, I think, absorbed both of these candidates. As folks said, I have the job at MTV, which is all about figuring out how to use the power of our brand to engage young people on some of the biggest issues facing their generation. So we've done a lot of work around issues like HIV, global poverty, discrimination, global warming. But we clearly discovered way back in 1992 that the political process, particularly presidential politics, was a mystery to most young people. In that they rarely felt that presidential candidates were speaking to them about the issues that really mattered to them. We're speaking to them in a language that they could understand. Presidential candidates assumed young people weren't gonna vote, just this terrible cycle. And so we decided to step in back in 1992 to create a campaign called Choose or Lose, which solely existed for the purpose of mobilizing young people to understand the issues, to register, to vote, and really get candidates to speak to 18 to 29 year olds. And so 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004. So it's been a business we've been in now for some time and while everyone I think really was looking like this year, Obama, the phenomenon, we've been seeing an incredible upward swing since 2004 that young people have just been coming out in big, big numbers. In 2004, there were almost 4 million more 18 to 29 year olds that voted than in the year 2000. And then in 2006, in terms of congressional midterm elections, it was the highest turnout in more than two decades. So we were fully anticipating that come 2008, we would see big, big numbers. And again, in the presidential primaries turnout was double, triple, and quadruple in some states. And so we saw that there was this phenomena occurring. And clearly, and it's really been more than 12 months, and we started our presidential coverage essentially back in February of 2007. We had never, ever started a presidential campaign. I mean, in fact, usually we start our presidential campaign coverage of Choose or Lose in February of the election year. So we were fully a year before just given the incredible level of interest from our audience. And we also obviously had started to see the explosion in tools that young people were using in every other aspect of their life, the idea that they could now self publish and self organize around what mattered to them, whether it be music or hanging out with their friends, why wouldn't they do that around social issues and presidential politics. And so this whole idea of we were gonna have a national election, but there were a lot of young people that were really interested in local issues. Because in many states, many cities, who your local alderman is, may or may have a lot more influence over your life than necessarily who the president was. And so we saw with all these new technologies, we saw an opportunity to partner with the Knight Foundation around something called their Knight News Challenge, where we created an idea called Street Team 08, where we had 51 journalists, one from each state in DC, who sold job it was all year long to report on issues of importance to young people within their given state. And to really use all the technologies, whether it be, and I'll have a short video I'll play right now, use mobile technologies, use online, use Twitter, the basic premise was, go to where young people are already. And that we don't care where the media is consumed, but just reach them where they are. And it was just, and again, we'll talk about it more, it was a phenomenal experience to see these 51 report over the course of the year. And maybe with that, I'll end, we'll show the video and tons more to talk about. We all knew this election was going to be different. There's the explosion and the turnout at the Iowa caucuses and a movement among young voters in particular, unlike anything we'd seen before. And of course, some history making candidates from the get-go. But there was also a new way of covering the election. The technology that had just begun to revolutionize politics in 2004 had gone viral. Reporting, or some version of it, had become decentralized, networked, and more mobile than ever before. High-definition informality took a backseat to immediacy and intimacy for the YouTube generation. Street Team 08 was just one such experiment. 51 young, amateur newshounds representing every state in the District of Columbia, some with journalism degrees, most, not so much. Gathered in New York City for a two-day crash course in videography and journalist ethics. And then we returned loose, into the wild. We were to cover national news from a local perspective, and vice versa, and all through the eyes of young voters, from stump speeches in Georgia, all the way to stump speeches in Washington state. And I thought that was pretty darn good until I realized that San Jair on an American Idol won five million more than me, so... From showing how national issues affect local young voters... $600 travels a lot. I would use $600 to pay for rent. To sharing our community stories with the national audience. I think that our vote can really count now, because a lot of people are really embracing indigenous culture in indigenous ways. People who aren't indigenous, they look to the public. They look to the public. They look to the public. They look to the public. They look to the public. They look to the public. They look to the public. They look upon our people as people who've always known. And paying particular attention to one of our most important issues this year, the plight of our young veterans. And it just got worse, and I ended up having a relapse. I ended up actually getting behind the wheel of a car after I'd been drinking. I got into a wreck, and I got the boot. That's how I got out. I was a Marine Corps infantry. I served two tours in Iraq. As a veteran, I know it was difficult for me when I came out of the military trying to be a civilian again. I had to fight and scrape and pander the government to get me the things that I raped. And for the most part, not paying merely as much attention to Paris Hilton as you might think. Instead of talking about cheap celebrity drama, let's talk about our not-so-cheap $482 billion projected budget deficit for 2009. A new record, BTW. We also tried to push the edge of supporting envelope in ways only our technological generation can. On Super Tuesday, we used video-enabled cell phones to cover almost every primary state throughout the day, streaming live video from the phones to our website and from there to the cable network. This is my first time out there, and I'm only 23, so this is my second time voting in the election. It's my first time voting in a primary. Don't let anybody go to a campaign and actually follow around South Carolina. We even got one very elusive future VP candidate on one of our cell phones. Talk about involvement by Americans having to say where this nation kind of goes and for Alaska, you know, I hope we register on somebody's radar screen. Yeah, I think they're on our radar now. We did it again for the conventions, although by this time we were hardly alone. In Denver... How did you feel about Hillary's speech tonight? Honestly, I thought it was amazing. And Minneapolis on the inside. Oh, tell me about... And Minneapolis on the outside. My nostrils are burning too. My eyes are starting to water. Local, national, on the ground, on the web, and mobile. Talking to young voters as young voters where they are. This is politics in 2008. Is it improvement? Don't know yet, but I bet 2012 is going to be crazy. Paris Hilton, I remember the good old days when the budget deficit actually was 480 billion in tech. The national debt increased by 480 billion or so in October alone. But I have had the privilege of doing journalism in a new media format mostly on the blog for one of the oldest, most established old media brands in the country, the Atlantic, which was founded more than 150 years ago as a clarion call to the nation to fight against slavery. In addition to that, I was also a consultant for CBS News, so it really gave me a good mash of old media and new media perspectives. I just want to tell one very brief story about a story that I think illustrates a little bit the moment that we're in. It doesn't make me look very good, but about a week before the election Barack Obama's national field director, John Carson sent an email to several thousand Obama supporters who were living in Arizona and the email said our internal polling shows that Arizona is a really close race. We want to try and see if we can increase our field efforts there. We want to get people to volunteer. Somebody who received that email forwarded it along to me. I thought it was a fairly it wasn't a huge story, but I thought it was a fairly interesting example of what the Obama campaign was doing a week before the election, and of course illustrating, even if they were faking in a sense that they thought Arizona was competitive. So I put the email on my blog. I stripped out what I thought were all the identifying information of the person who received the email. But what I didn't realize is that every email that the Obama campaign sent out included embedded hidden geo-coding so that the link, the volunteer link, if you wanted to volunteer, even though it seemed fairly generic, it was something like barackobama.com slash Arizona every time you click through that link it would send a message to the Obama campaign central servers showing exactly whose email had been used to facilitate that link. So of course in journalism you never want to reveal your sources and again this wasn't something terribly huge. But the poor guy who forwarded me the email suddenly got lots of ribbing and teasing emails from Obama people asking why he had forwarded me the email. So again it's sort of an example of how I think even the practices of modern journalism haven't necessarily caught up with new media technology so I'm happy to talk about that and lots of other things. Well I stumbled into this election cycle somewhat accidentally. I spent 10 years at Microsoft and then went to Yahoo and was at Yahoo for two years and my job with both companies was to help politicians figuring out how to use those companies' products to influence elections. As an example working with Mitt Romney on a video mashup tool called Jump Cut that Yahoo had acquired working with campaigns to geocode their flicker photos and understand how that worked. I spent the bulk of my time helping Senator Obama and Senator Clinton think about how to integrate themselves into these networks and I grew up a Republican I'm an Army brat traveled around the world from military base to military base and really my core interest is the intersection of technology and politics and how the world is evolving but never did I think that I'd actually be a part of a campaign and one day I got a call from a friend who used to work at the Republican National Committee and said they need somebody that understands technology are you interested and I reflected on sort of what I was doing at that time and it was basically spending the majority of it helping Senator Obama and Senator Clinton and at that point decided that if I was really going to be in this election I may as well jump in wholeheartedly and went back to my party and moved across country and had a really fascinating experience the last 20 months. So let's jump right into the core issue of the panel. I'd like to start with sort of broad first principles so if we were going to make an argument one way or another about the impact of new media on the selection cycle what are the criteria we would use what in what way did new media make a difference I think we can agree it did but in what ways did it make a difference. I'm just going to say one thing that I think you saw right at the beginning of this cycle was a lot of old media platforms using new media technologies and essentially adopting the rhetorical styles and the style of new media and essentially trying as large conglomerates and corporations do to sort of muscle in on the territory of independent new media. So I think you at first have to make a distinction between independent new media and then the new media that was generated by the old media. I mean you had a publication for example like the Politico which was and is a fascinating example of a new medium startup that was that was originated by an old media corporation in Virginia and really made a huge impact and broke a lot of stories and so on and so forth so I think you have to make that distinction first. I mean I would say sort of brass tacks I think the number one criteria that you would look at is who voted and how many you know we have about 24 million 18 to 29 year olds voted which again it was about close to a 4 million person increase from 2004. We are strongly strongly believe that that is a big fact and nearly 70% of those voted for Senator Obama which was the largest gap ever between two candidates within our generation and we are convinced that has a big part of that is his use of new media and how he used it. It is just extraordinary. A lot of folks talk about it is very bottom up but it was actually very centralized but decentralized process this idea that everyone had sort of part ownership of his brand. It is so interesting. You know earlier about you know facts you know did people care you know one things about the internet not only does it allow greater distribution of information allows greater distribution of misinformation but even that Senator Obama mastered and probably most folks saw this website that they created called fightthesmears.com which we just thought was incredible. I mean here was a site that was set up for the deliberate purpose of highlighting a lot of the internet rumors that here before usually were used to destroy a campaign and yet it was used as a vehicle to give his supporters a way to be active in the campaign so are you going there? Yeah it's fightthesmears.com and the power of it is it literally lists in a very user friendly way all the most terrible rumors about Senator Obama. He's a socialist, he's a terrorist he wasn't actually born in Hawaii what else he's a Muslim and the beauty of this was that it highlighted and said you know what get the facts so you could go to this website learn the truth from the perspective of Senator Obama but most importantly on the left hand side if you scroll down a little bit there's a little widget that you could put on your Facebook page and your MySpace page help us spread the truth so then you became an ally in Senator Obama to preserve and protect his brand so every single person had a role to play in his campaign which is this level of thinking you know if you go to many his YouTube pages where all his videos were there you had the ability to actually donate to his campaign all of these very subtle but incredibly powerful and viral mechanisms to give every single person a way to actually engage so no longer this idea of just being a passive supporter you could give money but if you couldn't give money you could organize local beatups if you go to MyBoracObama.com you can find local initiatives that were happening and it wasn't that Senator McCain wasn't using these I think over time they finally started to adopt these tools but just the level of precision and thought that had gone before with Senator Obama I just think set up a foundation that just ultimately was just not they couldn't cover the gap. I'd be remiss if I didn't provide some historical context on the evolution of technology and presidential campaigns and we can harken back to the 2004 election GOP team leader which was the first development in trying to create a social network and environment to congregate the electorate was really I think if you go back and look the first true example that the Obama campaign revved on so I think the media cycle didn't really discounted the background that the party had and you know so this was the Bush Cheney team that had developed this the McCain campaign had a much different version and they basically developed brand new code instead of building on top of GOP team leader I'm not sure well at least from my vantage point we won't know the true impact of the election for our party moving forward until about another 45 days from now and that's because we've been doing some database work to analyze the impact of the internet to turn out the vote and tried to determine if that was the sole mechanism for influencing voters decisions and it's very difficult to create a control group where the internet's the sole determinant because you're being barraged by so many different media types the closest example we were able to get to that was in Louisiana during Bobby Jindal's gubernatorial race where we had taken our database I should just give you a little bit and give you some context on our database voter vault we have a voter file of every voter in the country if embedding tracking code and emails scares you knowing how much information we have in our database about voter behavior in terms of purchasing habits, decision making, magazines that you subscribe to cars that you've purchased etc and we have a database that has a database profile of voters and there's a company called Catalyst on the left who's doing this they hired the they hired the CTO of Amazon to develop their database and I'm not quite sure that they're at parity with the Republicans yet in their database technology but the long and short of it is we we took our database and we flagged those individuals so that we could then target succinct messages to them at the household level and in the Jindal campaign we served all sorts of different online media types to voters capturing their PII data and then after the election went and analyzed the Secretary of State's roles and determined that of the voters who clicked on one of our banner ads and gave us their information 76% of them voted compared to 48% statewide turnout so the delta there is significant in terms of what we were able to understand about the internet what we don't know yet is at the nationwide level how that same strategy impacted voters going to the polls and I guess I'll be able to answer that question more thoroughly in a month and a half but you can sign up I see you with some of you with computers Facebook, Twitter, whatever just what's linked up and I'll give you the results what you're basically saying is Barack Obama would have won even more had it not been for voter vaults technology something like that no but I actually want to bring that back because we are all technological fetishists here but we should go back to first principles which is that the Bush campaign in 2004 and the Obama campaign in 2008 I think were successful in part because they both managed to use tried and tested old media marketing techniques and merge them with technology you know one of the simplest insights of persuasion research on persuasion is simply that people are more likely to respond to people who look like them have lifestyles like them so the Bush campaign in 2004 organized its volunteer canvassing around what they called affinity groups people in certain areas who own guns would make canvass, they'd go to make doorknocks or they'd telephone or they'd send mail either directly or via email to people who also own guns in the same area the Democrats in 2004 just did not have the capacity to do that while the Obama campaign with 630 million dollars and very rapid technological advancement I mean the period that it may be interesting to see whether Democrats did catch up to Republicans because both sides sort of keep their cards as close to the vest as possible even after the election so you're not quite sure but what the Obama campaign was able to do is marry the technology, the economies of scale and modern marketing techniques so they had and they brag about an email database of just the Obama campaign alone of 10 million people about 4 million of those people were actually just email addresses and zip codes and the dirty little secret is that the Obama campaign was only able to figure out 85% of who those people are so they don't know because it's not the easiest thing in the world to marry somebody's email to their identity so that leaves 6 million people left 2 million of them were contributors about 2 million of them were active volunteers that means they actually did things through the variety of Barack Obama websites and on election day they had a million people using their technologies which again is again something to think about the economy of scale and they just had the money and the technological resources to do that but they absolutely did build on what the Republican effort was in 2004 and just to give one concrete example about it you had a place like Warren Michigan which is the birthplace of the Reagan Democrats where Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg famously did his polling and sort of limbed out this group of people called Reagan Democrats traditionally Democrats weren't able to figure out how to send for example if the target was a 53 year old mother of two Democrats didn't have the resources to send to that person's home or have the person make the telephone call you know a mother of two who was in her 50s this cycle they could do that and again this is an insight that Republicans had earlier than the Democrats and they had the resources to put it in reality and this cycle the Obama campaign had those resources and that's I think part of the part of the reason I think it's part of the answer to the question I mean there's so many different parts but I think that's part of it I'm just one more point on that I think one of the other interesting things that's happened since really Howard Dean's use of technology is data ownership and really controlling that I mean when you look at meetup.com and the fact that all of that data was third party owned now with APIs etc the ability to distribute via widgets etc and then collect and disseminate and parse that information makes it so much more powerful both parties used for example Facebook applications to very easy on Facebook if you wanted to make phone calls on behalf of John McCain or I think the McCain campaign did this you can tell me if they did Barack Obama you could just within five or six minutes you would get a list of people who you could start calling again the the efficiency of that sort of get out the voter or I should not have to vote but persuasion is something that this country has really has really never seen what was going on behind the scenes in the social networks I think far outweighed the value of the actual interaction on the networks themselves as an example you've probably heard of a company Southern California called Rapleaf social network data mining organization and the fact that we could send them information from our voter file and then they would spit back a spreadsheet with the individuals who matched that we're on had a public profile on a social network but then the ability to extend that out into that individual's group of friends that had public profiles on networks for targeting purposes was just a gold mine it was unbelievable what you could actually get to communicate with do you actually know what magazines I subscribed to if you log into voter vault you could see that I subscribed to X, Y and Z well that would come from the point I was just making was really more about the social network right but I'm just saying the ability to find I mean the just the peer to peer aspect of it but the fact that you're able to figure out precisely who someone is and who they hang around with who they're likely to influence from multiple sources whether you're mining from social networks or acquiring data through data resellers and this isn't unique to the Republican Party the Democrats had it through Catalyst but does that raise the privacy issue we live in such an interesting world right now yeah you know people thought Microsoft was bad and now we're seeing what Google Earth can achieve I don't know where the privacy lines are anymore all right well let's coming at this question from another angle which constituencies were influenced most directly by new media clearly much of the media story has been about young voters but I suspect there are also other constituencies that new media tactics have been engaging with apart from mapping all voters are there specific things for specific groups that we can point to in this cycle yeah a couple examples well and one thing I think we should certainly stress is that you know new media technology strengthened a candidate who had a phenomenal and consistent message I think sometimes we give too much credit to the technology and you know there's an overall strategy that exists and then you figure out the best tools to really deploy to engage your audience and so for example you know in the case of what example with Obama this whole idea of a new kind of government a new kind of way of listening to your audience so there was some particular legislation there was FISA legislation speaking of privacy issues that over the course of the early part of the campaign he had a position that pretty much allied with the more left position was anti-bush but after he won the nomination he basically took a different position on this particular piece of legislation and there was a revolt on mybarackobama.com literally thousands and thousands of his supporters created a group complaining and saying he'd been a traitor now you've won the nomination you've gone back on your word and to the point where he had to go on and started blogging to give his rationale as to why he had changed his particular position on this piece of legislation so this was a particular constituency very concerned around privacy issues had been in his camp but really thought maybe we should because at that time there were still some issues around Hillary Clinton and maybe she wouldn't pull out but I think it sent a huge message that he basically said look we're going to have to agree to I think that message and again both candidates could have used this technology it's no big deal to create now a community space but he used it in a whole new way to actually acknowledge a constituency that was very important to him and had a lot of influence over other constituencies but again his use of the technology I thought reinforced his overall message that this is a new kind of governance a new kind of way to bring you into the political process as a candidate and ultimately as a president and I really hope we do get to the point to talk about how do we think all of this affects how he's going to govern as president but again the technology sometimes given too much credit how it fits into an overall strategy and how it reinforces the message that he sent I think that's a great example of how a particular constituency I think was strengthened at a point where it really could have gone south for Senator Obama particularly in technologies of commodity and it's the cachet persona of the candidate that's going to drive the use of it I was I was daunted by the amount of user generated content that was generated in support of Obama and you know you can rattle him off whether it was will I am or Obama girl or so on and so on and you know the one piece of media that generated the most buzz around the McCain campaign were the McCain girls and that was actually something done by the Huffington Post that it took a couple of days for people to figure out that it was a parody so I think that had a lot to do with just the psyche of the youth attraction because this is where they're consuming their media and had such a presence there I want to talk a little bit about the Obama campaign's efforts in the African American community using both old media and new media at various points in South Carolina the campaign noticed that there was a resistance among older African American women to Obama's candidacy this was before I should say Obama won Iowa and that changed a lot of things but there was a resistance and a lot of the resistance was centered around the idea that he couldn't win and that the historical moment just you know African Americans had at times been so close to the dream and had always been taken away from them so the Obama campaign Michelle Obama had done several very successful speeches speaking directly to this subject and in order to reach older African American women in South Carolina the Obama campaign created VHS cassette tapes and CDs and they went to the B&B circuit which is the barbershop and beauty salon circuit and literally they would have volunteers go into barbershops and beauty salons with DVD players or miniature televisions and they played this speech from Michelle Obama and they credit and they did this a lot and volunteers spent tens of thousands of hours doing this and they credit this use of old media in part with helping to loosen some of that resistance an example of how new media the Obama campaign used new media one of the goals of the Obama campaign early on was to increase African American early vote African Americans historically have some resistance in part because of the legacy of you know of shenanigans at poll sites to early voting in person and the Obama campaign was determined to change this and post-election exit polls and services they were very successful at this but one of the things that they did was do a lot of voter registration and then as the early voting cycles began they were able to monitor through their data warehouse called Catalyst because Catalyst was able to figure out from the Secretary of State's office exactly who would request it or who because you could once you vote your name is checked on the voter rolls they could update that nightly so the Obama campaign could see exactly who had voted early and who hadn't and if you were one of their targeted supporters and you hadn't voted early you would get either an email or a telephone call saying hey maybe today is a good time to vote if you want our help you can send a van to help pick you up if you didn't vote that day they would get the information from Catalyst and say hey maybe tomorrow you can go do it so again just an example of how they were able to use both old media technologies and new media technologies to fulfill some of their specific goals and it's those examples and internal learning that will has forever changed politics in campaigning I'm the director of what we refer to as the e-campaign division people used to mock me because they would say well it's the internet well actually I now think e-campaign is more apropos because it's not the internet it's mobile and it's everything else so maybe that has come but the point I wanted to make is that I oversee a division whose responsibility is to think about technology but over the course of the last year and a half every division within the organization became dependent on us in some way shape or form to begin to evolve their methodology whether it was the finance department or the political department or the strategy department I think that at this point when resumes come in and it doesn't have C++ or Java on it they may be a political person but they're going to need to have those skill sets as well so hybrid hybrid skills are going to be critical I think for any division moving forward so far we've been focusing on the successes of digital media but there must also be downsides of the role that new media played in selection we already talked about smears whether we're talking about the idea that Obama is a Muslim or whether we're talking about Sarah Palin banning Harry Potter both of which are in case anyone in the room confused both false statements that circulated pretty freely this notion of unreliable information is real one I got an email from a multiple copies of an email from a leading intellectual media scholars about a story about Republican kids questions about Obama and it turned out if you traced it back it went to a particular church website that turned out to be a parody of a church website so the joke at the expense of a Republican was the gullibility of Republicans the joke that I got out of it was reading the gullibility of my liberal friends who also were incapable of seeing the difference between a parody and a reality so those seem to be emblematic to me the issues we have is we broaden who gets a circulate media are there implications about the reliability and trust and are there other issues people are arguing new media is making us more partisan that the blogosphere creates a more divided electorate with very little chances of the kind of purple state strategies which both Obama and McCain began the campaign cycle with to work so what do you guys see as the limits or the challenges we face as we look at this new media escape in this election cycle yeah I would say there are definitely huge risks I mean it's you know my mother-in-law I will say her entire internet and linear experience is essentially Fox News redstate.com Drudge report and I forget this right wing blogger her world view is very informed but clearly from a particular perspective and it's true you can operate and completely I think Barack Obama said once look if I watch Fox News 2 I think I'm a Muslim if that's how you're sort of consuming information so it's possible I think ultimately we do have to trust what I think overall did happen which is that people diversified their media sources and were able to get to the truth I mean yes there's more misinformation out there but there are more vetted resources that if someone does take the time you can actually find the correct story I mean in terms of mistakes of new media there's an idea of misinformation but the biggest mistake is not understanding how to make that work for you again fight the smears was powerful because he turned a huge negative into an incredible positive because again he gave every single supporter a way to support the campaign with Sarah Palin it was interesting when she first came out these rumors just instantaneously went across the internet her child first was revealed that her 17 year old was pregnant and then that her baby that she thought presumably it just had was someone else's baby like these rumors spread like wildfire and unlike what Senator Obama did with fight the smears there actually wasn't really an effective counterattack to use it as an opportunity to say look I think in her case she's played the victim role very well and said look we're being attacked we're being vilified this is the campaign these are the supporters of Barack Obama who's supposed to be changing politics look what he's done and I'm just it could have been actually an incredible opportunity for the Republicans to again change a negative into a vast positive none of this stuff was inevitable it was not inevitable that Obama achieved such a massive level of support amongst young people and winning the election again I think it's part of an overall strategy in fall of 2007 you know we did our first big event with Senator Obama then about a month later we did our first big event with Senator McCain we partnered with Myspace we put both of them on the channel with something called the presidential dialogue where we had literally millions of young people watching online on air all simultaneously the ability to submit questions real-time polling so as a candidate answered a question the audience was responding and saying you know what we don't like that answer and then that information fed back into the questioning and both candidates did extremely well and we were really excited because we thought we'd reach a threshold where we'd really be able to get both campaigns to have sort of an ongoing relationship and we spend a lot of time with Senator Obama getting their profiles set up and all the things that they were doing on Facebook and YouTube and it was somewhat painful but we got Senator McCain to set up their profile but it's amazing from that point forward we, I mean the Obama camp would literally literally updating their profile constantly new information events coming up new messages new policy papers constantly reaching out to their audience giving tools that their audience could use and it was like extracting pulling teeth with the McCain campaign so again it's the usage of the technology this was not inevitable and I think there's just sort of a presumption that Obama is a younger guy representative of the demo it was just sort of in the bag and it just didn't have to be that way I think a lot of it was just strategic decision making and lack of decision making I want to defend Republicans a little bit I do think to some extent it would just a little bit I do think to some extent it wasn't inevitable but given the choices it was fairly inevitable I mean John McCain represents a different a different generation and conception of America than where most young Americans are so it doesn't necessarily follow that the McCain campaign should have spent the same amount of effort on some of the stuff but just to talk about the paleon example defend McCain campaign a bit McCain campaign set up a huge team of researchers and lawyers initially to try and defend Sarah Palin from some of the inaccurate information that was going about but part of the problem was that as someone who was involved in the effort told me A. they couldn't keep track of whatever was saying because it was coming fast and furious B. there was enough truth in a lot of what they were saying that they couldn't they had a hard time convincing people that certain things were true and things weren't the other thing is when you're someone like Sarah Palin and have never really been a national public figure no matter how hard you try in this age of instantaneous information and YouTube you cannot you cannot competently vet someone who has not been in the public eye and expect them from day one to have a record that you can go back and say well she actually never said this it's impossible McCain campaign tried but I don't think it could be done much about her background that it would take months and months and months and dozens of researchers to figure out everything she ever said and did because again she hadn't been in the public eye before and I will say the fourth thing is that she didn't help matters she exaggerated the truth at a lot of times so were things that she told John McCain in their early conversations that turned out to have certain shades of nuance to them like the fact that you know she opposed the bridge to nowhere sort of it wasn't as if the Republicans didn't try it's just that this may or may not be interpreted as a slap at Sarah Palin but they really didn't have much to work with I'm actually going to switch gears completely we could talk about Sarah Palin I'm defending the fact that it wasn't if it didn't occur to them that they had to quickly fight the smears they just they tried and they couldn't no I really do want to switch gears Henry asked about some of the negatives from the campaign I want to address three of them and I think the first to your point was resource allocation we were terribly under resourced relative to the Obama campaign in just pure personnel and I'd like to sort of I my lens from this is from the national committee not the campaign so I wasn't privy to a lot of the decisions that were made but I'll try to arm your quarterback it a little bit you'll remember during the primaries when the campaign was essentially bankrupt they almost turned off the lights when they had to start making resource decisions I don't think the internet was the priority when in my vantage point as a technologist it probably should have been because that's where you can be most efficient with little then there was also that three month window between the time that McCann had effectively wrapped up the nomination and Obama and Clinton were duking it out and that was precious time that I think once again more back end work could have been done with technology to better influence the the race I can't stand squatters but we had to spend so much money around domain names this cycle for various reasons fight the smears the standalone site was interesting I want to give you one example of what happened one day perusing Obama's website there was a promotion on the homepage for meet Barack Obama and just for kicks I went and go daddy or somewhere and found that meet Barack Obama dot com was available and I mean here's meet Barack Obama promotion on his homepage staring you the face and they didn't acquire that domain so we went and got it and Henry if you want to go there you'll see what we developed from it but but it was a repository of all of our micro sites that we developed largely to generate earned media because it was so hard this cycle to break through the media cycle that we created dot com meet Barack Obama dot com sorry but people were you know people are going people are going to search engines and searching for meet Barack Obama thinking maybe he's going to be in their town and they stumble across through our optimized site you know meet Barack Obama and not until you get to the fine print at the bottom of the page do you see that this is a product of the Republican National Committee but at its surface it looks innocuous enough and in fact Barack book looks like something one might want to click on not knowing that it's a hit piece and if you go to it you'll see that it's a foe social network parody of facebook which our opposition research team used to send us content to basically display Obama's network of friends and so you can go and click on Valerie Jarrett and find out you know what her relationship to Obama is and who her friends are who their friends are so we created a facebook app for this and when we updated Barack book your facebook page would update that there was a so we were trying different things but there are two other things I want to discuss quickly one is the unprecedented amount of money that was generated online and I by no means say this to be accusatory but I think both parties need to take a look at how moving forward online donations are going to be utilized and the security that revolves around it as an example blue state digital who is responsible for Obama's fundraising efforts consciously chose to remove the three security code requirement from an online donation which facilitated the ability for gift cards etc you could create a script that would essentially distribute mass by spoofing your IP address the resemblance of a donation coming domestically when it could have come from a foreign national and this is not unique to the left or the right and I'm not a fan of regulation but I do think the FEC has an obligation to start to look at technology in a more demonstrable way as to how campaigns are receiving donations online because I do think that in the pro just being one example there were some negatives that haven't really surfaced yet lastly getting back to the resources and the fact that I think there was 130 person strong team on the Obama side compared to four on my staff we were getting comments from McCain supporters who were saying that they were posting comments on sites like the Washington Post and they were being removed and they couldn't figure out why and we surmised that what was happening is that people were going to pro McCain comments on BBS's and hitting that comment was abusive and after enough people did it those comments were removed so there was really nothing negative or disparaging being said about the opposition it was just using technology smartly to counter the other campaign you know well done I guess can I say one more thing about the negatives most of the readers and I did a poll so people maybe self responding to the poll but there are some people in the audience who I know read the site and were active commenters or people emailed me but most of my readers were like I don't know how many percent of them are Barack Obama supporters and that was disheartening to me because I wasn't writing a blog for Barack Obama supporters I was trying to write a reported blog on politics that played it as fairly close to what I saw the truth as as possible and giving no quarter to either campaign or website there is a significant partisan clustering effect that goes on even sites that aren't partisan the Atlantic has a series of bloggers I would say we have two and a half bloggers that are identifiably conservative and I'm including Andrew Sullivan as a half because he's a bit of a hybrid but Ross Douthat who is undeniably a brilliant smart conservative, Megan McCartle who is also very conservative but the majority of people who read the site or who read all of our blogs including Andrews including Isoche Ross's were to the left of center because people tagged the Atlantic as being part of the old media the establishment media the liberal media online and there were very very few sites that managed and there have been some studies done about this but very few websites that managed to straddle both the left right and then the small but I think fairly active group in the center who was just hungry for information and I don't know how to solve that but I think that's a problem because I would have loved to have more Republican and conservative readers we're going to open up the questions in just a minute so people want to start lining up at the mics but I'm going to ask another question to our panelists while people are beginning to formulate questions and get in line so the question is about governance we've just come through this campaign and now our president-elect the question is what are our visions of how new media can be used for governance people use the language now permanent campaign so one notion is that the stuff that's gone in the campaign simply continues and that it takes on a different role I've just pulled up change.gov which is the site that the Obama people put up the very morning after the election results it's already have office of the president-elect up there so what are you seeing and what are your thoughts about what's going to happen now for both parties as we go into the next four years if you wouldn't mind I want to show you a project we created from GOP.com the platform process where the party sets basically its objectives for the next four years has traditionally been a very offline process you drive to a hearing you hope that you get to the microphone to present your thoughts to the platform committee meetings are held regionally so you hope you get to the microphone you hope that they listen to what you say you hope that it enters the public record and maybe less than one tenth of one percent of the nation gets to participate so for the first time in the nation's history we wanted to change the way in which the platform process evolved and if you scroll down so we opened up the process for the Republican party's 2008 platform and invited any American regardless of party affiliation to come in and tell us what they thought the Republican party should represent the next four years over half a million people access the site over 20,000 submissions in text or video we've incorporated user submissions into the party platform and I hope that very similar to change.gov this is the way we evolve that's okay yeah and then just pick any topic you'll see on the right hand column where Americans have incorporated their thoughts on what the party platform should be this guy, by the way, the one in the middle I don't know why he did this but he was submitting entries all the time but he always did it from his car at night from his webcam it didn't make any sense to me but he submitted thoughts on every plank of the party platform but change.gov I think is a very similar effort in that we're going to begin to if I can use for his open source government whatever that means the dialogue where Americans can truly contribute to government via the web and both the platform project and change.gov I think are the first efforts towards that there's a tradeoff between transparency at times and efficiency that the Obama transition is working out right now I would hope just for the sake of accountability that they are on the side of transparency but it is very easy for a White House staff to say well we promised that all the meetings would be open we'd say the participants but we didn't mean this or we can't give you a look at what the Treasury Department how it's actually allocating its funding even though we said we would put all the budget online well we're not going to put all the defense budget online obviously there are some things you don't put online but we're not going to put the entire Department of Defense there are lots of choices that the Obama administration will be forced to make when it comes to transparency which I think is going to be one of the key ways in which people using new media hold the administration accountable and I would just hope that they again err on the side of transparency over efficiency because when they have the power it is going to be they're going to be very very very tempted to close things off to keep deliberations private and to back away from some of Obama's fairly ambitious campaign promises I would just say I totally agree with that I think in fact probably the greatest risk that the millions of people that supported Obama and honestly even I think John McCain there's just a different expectation of the populace's involvement in governance it's just we've crossed the line and we can't unscramble the egg you know and I actually thought you were going to show Republican for a reason because I saw that yesterday and I thought that was a powerful site because not only you know obviously Obama's got change.gov and if you go to the site he's actually asking Americans to submit their ideas and in fact even the night of November 4th in the interim period before he was announced as the winner as President-elect and before he spoke at Grant Park there was a massive email sent out saying thank you this is all about you I'm going you know there'll be some new information that I'll share shortly but he instantaneously reinforced the message that look you're still part of this process but Republican I'm sorry it's being slow but so clearly on the governance side I think Obama is going to want to continue he's got to live up to these expectations now but I think Republican for a reason is a good site also and hopefully it's showing from a Republican perspective that there's some rebuilding that needs to be done or you know some leaders within the Republican Party think so and so I think this is a great message as well so it's inviting Republicans to say look we just lost a huge election but you know there's still core principles you know and it's not just from top down but you as an individual why don't you re-articulate why is it that you're a Republican what are those principles that we stand for and again start to invite collective intelligence to help shape the party from the bottom up so I actually think this is a great sign from the Republican Party that you know that there's an openness to listening to people as opposed to just you know waiting for five governors who are in Florida you know today to suddenly you know come out with the new the new word of what the Republican Party will be I appreciate my nickname for the site is eathumblepie.com but you can get to it at republicanforareason.com and anybody can come in and tell us what they think the Republican Party should be doing to you know cure itself okay we've got some people lining up over here so introduce yourself and ask your question I'm Charlie Dottarum in the speech and mobility group here at the media lab I was wondering if you could comment on the role in new media technologies in potentially elevating the discourse in presidential elections I've noticed that most of the emails, the online videos on this election still were just tribalistic sound bite heavy lacking in nuance on any discussion on issues or policies or the actual direction government might have in a more long term way and can you comment on the way new media technologies is there any change any difference thanks what was John McCain's quote each time he was asked about negative politics what do you say right that was always the excuse as to why he would then launch into these attacks I don't think new media is immune to what is just politics and when you've got folks competing when the stakes are incredibly high and by the way negative campaigning works there was a period of time again in mid-August before the convention before the democratic convention republican convention there was a time when McCain I think was very effective in really going after Obama's strengths right after Obama had come back from his European trip where he had 200,000 folks in Germany loved across the world and he was the greatest celebrity and McCain very effectively used Britney Spears and Paris Hilton to start to bring down this guy from this mantle of messaging but it was effective and then the association with Bill Ayers like that stuff started to work and so it's hard you know I don't know if new media can solve that problem in fact I'm sure it can't it just allows more outlets to get it out but you know politics is you know presidential politics is tough business you know I don't think we can assume that it will necessarily raise the level of the discourse one example comes to mind though about how the Obama campaign was able to use new media to inject nuance in the debate remember the gas tax holiday that Hillary Clinton wanted and the which was a gimmick but in order to in order to think about the gas tax holiday as a gimmick you actually have to think through the arguments for it because it's not inherently clear why getting more money back from the government would simply be a gimmick when it comes to the gas tax but it was therefore just as someone who likes intellectual honesty and debates very heartwarming to read the primary exit polls in Indiana where half of the voters believed that the gas tax idea was a gimmick and in fact the polls are replicated across other states and even at some point some majority of Americans thought it was a gimmick and the Obama campaign spent a lot of time through their new media technologies and emails explaining to people why the gas tax holiday was a gimmick and at least what that shows me is that you don't necessarily have to you don't, new media technologies and distribution channels aren't just limited to very simple messages that can touch heartstrings or whatever you can actually make intellectual arguments and it was good to see that I mean there weren't too many examples of that because it's much easier and presumably more effective to I mean I think one of the Republican National Committee I think made a very very funny video about Obama's celebrity I forgot what it was called but it was very humorous at least in my opinion it's easier to go to this simple to the non-nuanced but at times at one time it was used effectively to go toward the nuance so I think if everyone tries maybe I actually think new media exacerbates the problem of negative campaigning and whether it's the campaign controlling it or not the fact that the community at large can now play a part in it in such a decentralized way where the campaign has no influence over it it just makes it all the more worse two things I guess in that vein Reverend Wright's name was Off Limits Senator McCain said just no way it's not coming up and it never did from the campaign but you found it everywhere in the blogosphere and the campaign distance itself from that and when those comments were posted on the bulletin boards they were removed it was just a taboo subject but one interesting thing I saw during the campaign was my friend's Facebook profiles all majority of them started to have middle names and I started to see Joe Hussein Smith on Facebook and I click on it I've got a vast group of Facebook friends I don't know a lot of them but so I click on it and I'd say alright this is a Republican trying to be cute when in fact it was Democrats who were just mocking the fact that Obama's middle name was being mocked and I'd love to know from Facebook how many people actually had Hussein in their name I mean it must have been in the millions but it was just an interesting use of it. It's like a cool thing for Democrats to do on Facebook but it's spread it was pretty wild to watch. We had at the Center for Future Civic Media yesterday a speaker who's been scanning the blogosphere for 30 words and found that they were overwhelmingly more references to Hussein on liberal blogs than on conservative blogs so that in fact liberal spent more time responding to that criticism or that tactic than the tactic itself was played out over here Hi I'm Goss I'm from Student Northeastern actually and a couple of my friends that have a Hussein middle name on their Facebook in the past couple of weeks and what I'm wondering is I saw I'm not sure what this was but I think I read that the Obama campaign or the Obama administration might be using a website of its own to as a channel of information going directly to the public which would bypass any kind of media outlet and how so that's if you have any thoughts on that and how do you think the new administration might use new media in just governing in general? Well they've said several things one of which is they're going to Obama wants to incorporate a daily, a weekly YouTube address as opposed to a weekly radio address being the traditional format for it the White House will probably establish some sort of a blog whether that will include comments is TBD because there's a lot of stuff you have to think through the Obama one of the things that he said he would do is and again this will come at the expense of the efficiency of these but he wants to open all regulatory hearings a centralized website and allow people to comment on regulatory hearings in real time and force the people who are administering the regulations to read all the comments again there's a difference with the efficiency and transparency you can see how that trade off there and one of the other things that they're considering is something that the government of the UK has already instituted which is sort of a petitions.uk.gov where citizens can launch their own petition drives that in theory someone at 10 Downing Street will read every single petition they can be either jocular or they can be serious you haven't heard too much about it in the UK in part because they haven't quite figured out or they're not quite prepared to accept the ramifications of allowing a citizen petition process but I know that is something the Obama folks are considering as well whether they do any of this I'm not sure but he talked about some of this during the campaign and I do know that they're thinking about these things right now one of the things we're hearing and I think it would be just tremendous is that they're considering creating a chief technology officer cabinet level position and so that I think is transformative and I think they were talking to Eric Schmidt of Google and I guess he's publicly denied but maybe he won't who knows but it's hard to say no so that I think would be extraordinary because it would essentially you know make every area of government put under the microscope of how can technology be utilized to make it more efficient right so whether it's education health care all these different ideas make technology at the center and I think I'm really hoping that that's actually a big sort of single huge message that you know because the cabinet you know historically you know that's where the heavy hitters are that's who has access to the president and a CTO who has accountability across all of these different divisions I think really would be huge we'll repeat the question the question is that you're talking about a lot of new technologies that are exciting both in terms of campaigning and governance but I also hear that the data seems to be linking the use of these technologies with just younger people so we say like there's this big turnout from young people we associate it with these new technologies if they are transferring into the governance what are we going to do in order to bring other people who are not included in that young demographic and what way can using new media technologies and governance encourage adoption among older people among people who are often kind of kept out maybe because the web is inaccessible to people with certain disabilities or for other reasons they are just not really included in the conversation are we further alienating big portions of the citizenship and just shifting from one group to another by doing this so to repeat the question for the podcast audience and others the question I had to do with the discussion around new media and young voters if we move toward new media what are the implications for older voters who often have lagged behind in their embrace of new technologies is that it's also a geographic split as well I mean it's a geographic split urban areas tend to be more wireless than rural areas both candidates, well it doesn't matter what John McCain promised now because he's not Obama but McCain is big he's telebucations they both promised significant expansions significant expenditures on broadband services for rural areas there has to be a revolution in technology I confess I'm not an expert here and there are probably people in the audience who know much more about it than I do but there has to be an enormous regulatory revolution in technology policy in order for there to be truly universal broadband in this country part of it is part of that's the obstacle but it does seem to be something that this administration is aware of I don't know if that's probably not a good enough answer for you and it is a problem certainly but I think I'm not confident that well maybe I am this is still an area where technology companies and telecoms spend enormous amounts to lobby there's every couple years in congress there are these extremely complicated telecom bills that push things in one direction or another and I guess it will just take something to dislodge that in order for us to get to the point where again we could truly have some sort of a universal broadband network across the country which I do think is kind of the only way to facilitate access for everyone it's not necessarily a technical question that I'm interested in but actually about the people so like in digital TV transition the advertisements often indicated that older people there is a fear that they wouldn't even know how to change through digital TV so how can we expect them to participate in like a YouTube address yeah I know there's a Perry Shearer has a wonderful radio show where he has a segment where he regularly pokes holes in the idea that this digital transition is going to be smooth the one in February when analog television no longer works the government will say well we spent a lot of money trying to educate people but if you look at the response rates of people who we know have analog TV sets are actually sending in for coupons to buy digital conversion boxes it's fairly low so I don't have any answers I just I agree that it's going to be a problem yeah you know circle which is the group that measures youth voting just released the fact that in this 2008 election the number of 18 to 29 year olds that voted for the first time in at least two decades was greater than the number of people 65 and over and it may actually be the greatest number ever but they're looking at they're looking at years prior to two decades but you know you're you're right I mean in some ways it's similar to the challenge of when we had all sorts of conversations about the digital divide you had whole groups of low income communities that were not part of the process and so how could we expect them to engage and this is why I think for me it comes back to a CTO type position or getting you know 100% broadband penetration we actually need a presidential team that recognizes the importance of enabling technologies for everyone not just for you know those that can afford broadband but I think it does come down to that but you're right I mean you know young people again partly because of the new technologies the campaign part of this strategy they are utilizing and taking advantage of all the stuff in much bigger numbers than older folk and we can only hope that this administration recognizes that it's not good to leave now that segment behind where you know we've left other segments behind to you know to ill effect as well From a legislative standpoint I keep my eye on Democrat Senator elect Mark Warner and really believe strongly about these issues it must be interesting to watch over the coming years from a from a sociological standpoint there's actually a really large audience of older web users but where they're falling behind technologically is in the advancement of you know 2.0 and I mean look at eons which is nowhere on the map from network standpoint relative to Facebook but this was a point I made at the outside of the campaign which was we're so enamored now with the chic sites twitter etc that we've forgotten about the millions of users that are on the portals AOL MSN Yahoo even and from my experience there you know the older users are there in droves but they're not where you'd think they are they're on the gaming sites which on face value seems contradictory but they're playing backgammon and cribbage on MSN games and trying to find Bill Gates and Warren Buffett I guess but I think it's just the adoption of the evolution of technology but I'd argue that there's actually a pretty sizable older audience online I'm a graduate student here at CMS my question forgive me if it's a little cynical that often seems to be my role here but we've been talking a lot about active users engaged users and I'm just wondering if we really are to take what has happened as a universally rosy picture or if on the surface it seems like users are driving the conversation but there really is a lot of thought taken to manipulating the conversation from the campaigns and from media outlets and sort of as insiders if you could give us your view on that negotiation that's happening what would be an example do you think of manipulation that you've seen I don't know if I can think of anything at the exact moment but give me a minute I don't know if my question is vague the McCain campaign I mean gentlemen mentioned Joe the Plummer McCain campaign attempted to make Joe the Plummer sort of a universal stand in for every man there was a web campaign show us how you're Joe the Plummer member of the commercial I'm Joe the Plummer I'm Joe the Plummer there was certainly a lot of attention paid to Joe the Plummer but and the McCain campaign did its best to drive that and the media paid a lot of attention to it and the American people didn't seem to so it might be an example of how the media I acknowledge I mean this again was because both candidates instantly mentioned the guy's name what 40 times totaled in the debate in some sense the story led the media to say who is this Joe the Plummer guy but the effect that Joe the Plummer had in the election unfortunately for the McCain campaign was fairly minimal so maybe there's an example of how in this fragmented age the media can try to set an agenda or collectively not try because there's no well if there is a conference call I'm not on it and I want to be on it because I work in these areas but just the collective mentality of the media certainly focused on Joe the Plummer and then on the fact that he wasn't a licensed on all this stuff didn't seem to matter that much but maybe one example of how the media did the old media did matter was in helping people come to a different perception of Sarah Palin than they had initially you know the succession of interviews that she did I mean again I'm a consultant for CBS News but the way that CBS News extended Katie Kirk had about 45 minutes with Sarah Palin over the course of two days and CBS broke the interview into three or four minute chunks and ran it over a week and it did seem like every single day there was an additional question now all the questions I should say I think are entirely defensible from the standpoint of asking them but every day it seemed to be a more outrageous question that she didn't that she didn't get and I've heard the argument that that was CBS trying to manipulate people's impression of Sarah Palin I disagree with that but that might be something you know something to the degree of what your discussion there are people within campaigns who go on and pretend that they're users in order to drive the conversation or we actually reference once people taking down comments enabling people to cancel out comments I guess sort of I think that stuff happens on the extreme margins not that people are extreme but just it happens on the real margins of the people I guess the sock puppets is the technical phrase for them and I there's some you know usually just individual dumb person on a campaign thinks they can be cute by pretending to do X, Y, and Z and because it's people are fairly easily exposed these things are fairly easy exposed so I don't think that that was much of a let me give you a concrete example one of the most heavily hit visited Wikipedia entries of all time with Sarah Palin's entry the day of her announcement and if you follow the history page back it looked like between 60 to 70 percent of the content there was written between midnight and noon the day of the announcement let's say we don't know who wrote that but circumstantial evidence suggests it was probably someone in the campaign now whether we see that as manipulation or simply I would see that as good campaigning but some could see it and I could see what you're saying I mean you obviously you you want to try and define Sarah Palin positively if you're the McCain campaign and if you don't do that you know but it's a hard question it's a hard question because I see a political campaign is essentially a manipulation of media you know it's it's so I'm a little hard-pressed to answer it because you know the campaigns are trying to tell a story and they're going to create you know very effective ways to manipulate all the different ways you're going to hear that story you know on all the different platforms so yeah I think so to your question I think yes I think it is very much a complete manipulation of media to tell your story I you know it's I mean that's the deal I mean that's you got to win an election this is all the story very briefly Martin Eisen this there actually is an example now this guy named or fake guys not doesn't exist but this person a few people created an identity for a guy named Martin Eisenstadt who they claimed was a McCain advisor who had fed Carl Cameron of Fox the quote that you know Sarah Palin couldn't distinguish between a couldn't didn't know whether Africa was a or thought Africa was a country as opposed to a continent and a lot of media sources uncritically picked this up and said oh you know this is the McCain they didn't even bother to check that this person the McCain campaign really had no idea who this person was was an advisor but again these things get exposed so quickly well I think probably what's interesting about that example is because the original quote came from a reporter on Fox that was critical of Sarah Palin you instantaneously believed it was true right because Fox has such a reputation of only reporting positive news that it's like well who needs to check there's no way Fox would if Keith Olderman said something bad about Barack Obama like you know it must be true right it has to be true so anyway so I mean there are so to that if that's what falls in the category of manipulation media no doubt what Keith Olderman does every night at 8 o'clock and what Sean Hannity does at 9 p.m. every night that is complete bias on both sides of the aisle technologically we're facilitating this through tools like mashup technology I mean you can now mashup mashups and mash those up so what begins as a pure campaign originated video takes on a life of its own by the very fact you put it on YouTube so the manipulation we're facilitating it I guess next question over here hi my name's Whitney Tritine I'm also a CMS graduate student I'm going to add another facet to Madeline's kind of cynicism I come from a background in very traditional activism and have a lot of old school hippie friends from the 60's who are very disturbed by what they're seeing with Barack Obama and I keep hearing the phrase cult of personality things like this I don't believe it but this is what I'm hearing from my older friends and at the same time they're criticizing the kind of things that you're pointing out here where it's like you just put a widget like you've done something that's active and involved in changing policy and I'm wondering what you have to say about that first of all and second of all I'm wondering what you have to say about this also from the point of view that the very same people who have been saying about Bush for the last eight years that he's someone that I want to go have a beer with and he's just like us are now saying the same things about Barack Obama where it's like he's a scholar he's one of us we feel very comfortable with him and I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing to be believing about your candidates in fact I think it's a great thing that people are feeling connected with their candidates but at the same time I'm wondering if the kind of tools that we've been talking about have changed how we approach our politics rather instead of from a policy perspective we're coming at it now from a kind of like who's our man kind of or woman perspective I think it is although I would love to ask two friends if if they had if they felt a certain reverence for John F. Kennedy during the sixties if he was became this larger than life mythical figure who represented so much and then we had Watergate and all these you know so I would be curious how they would compare their personal feelings for him to what's happening with Obama now I do think there's we live in a celebrity culture a lot of it fueled by MTV where there is this idea that I can have 300 friends instantaneously I can create these intimate relationships so you're right there is a different I don't know if it's necessarily bad I do think for our audience I do think that there is a certain kind of kinship there's no doubt that issues played a big role I mean 74% of 18 to 29 year olds told us that they personally know someone that fought in Iraq or Afghanistan you know a huge issue in terms of seeing your friends independent of how you felt about the war but knowing that who is president has a real impact on your lives and so when our audience is telling us they're seeing their friends come home and not getting the treatment they deserve getting their school benefits or they can't hold a job or they can't stay in a relationship that became a very real issue for them and seeing gas prices and knowing that we're at war because of our you know dependence on oil so while there certainly is I think there is a cult of personality I don't think that completely trumped issues like a massive deficit you know stock markets plunging fears are on global warming so you know we have to give some credit to issues based election can I also ask them to follow up with that how deeply do you think the people that you are working with were engaged with issues because you know Barack Obama has promised to increase military spending you know in various issues the people who I'm working with are saying there's a disconnect between this ideal of him as a strong anti-war candidate and I share those people's concerns but what he's promising on the policy side and that's the kind of disconnect he's always said he's always denied that he's an anti-work candidate what he will say is I'm against the Iraq war I'm not against the war and then Stanley actually and at this point now he's talking about cutting defense spending but that's because everyone's talking about cutting defense spending but that's a tangential point but I just wanted to clear that up because maybe I think part of the genius of the Obama campaign was that he allowed a lot of different things to be projected onto him and maybe that also you know could turn out to be if he doesn't do very well his undoing because expectations for him may be very very different maybe not in the reality in terms of increasing increasing increasing activism has improved through technology because we're making it easier and I think most important geographically because if you're from a small town convene with a close group of people but we've broadened that ability as an example at least on our social network and Obama had the same functionalities you can really get into the minutia of how you want to become an activist by you know I care about these issues this is how I'm willing to help support these issues whether it's door knocking or phone banking etc and I just think that's increasing the body of people that want to participate which is a good thing you've opened a huge door for me that I'm not sure I want to go into on criticizing Obama but I think the one point the one point that we were trying to make this campaign that I'm not really sure ever resonated was that we don't know a lot about Senator Obama and I hope he's a great president I hope America becomes stronger and we solve our economic issues but we really know so little about him time will tell about his true self I feel like we know a lot it's just not what we see the image of because I feel like all that information is out there it's just that people aren't connecting with it they're connecting with other elements but I don't want to take up too much more we're about to go into what I call the lightning round session we've got 15 minutes late we have a hard stop at the top of the hour so everyone can try for conciseness on both sides of the microphones here we can hopefully get at least these people weighing the line I'll try to pack this all into a quick sound bite but my name is Ev Boyle and I helped start and I've been working on research for a site called glassbooth.org for the past year some of you guys might have seen it but it's a non-partisan, not-for-profit voter education site where we really try to get all of the candidates and their positions on not just mainstream issues like Iraq and abortion but also different issues like net neutrality or media consolidation or sort of the principle of war as an instrument of policy different types of questions and really making that information transparent so my question is about the debates and with the debates this year you saw them start to open up in the sense they had the CNN-U2 debate there was the thing on MTV where there was citizens submitting questions but they didn't really go all the way there was still a control maintained over the questions and because of that you never really got questions asked in the public sphere about questions like media consolidation or drug policy or these sort of marginalized issues so I'm just wondering I guess how you think the control over the debates is changing and how much longer you think sort of corporations and also the two major parties can keep that control and how soon they're going to have to sort of let citizens really choose the questions that are asked well I get paychecks from corporations so you can disbelieve this response of course but I spent a lot of time on the campaign trail and inversely every college town that both candidates were asked they were always asked at least one question about drug policy and it happened in 2004 when all the candidates I mean so questions certainly asked the candidates had stock responses to it because the questions were usually similar and they took positions on things like net neutrality and you know you would hear the mask about media consolidation but you're right I mean I don't think you're ever going to convince the old media to the extent that they have control over these settings to completely relinquish it Ralph Nader has certainly been trying for years and years and years by trying to get into these debates I mean I do think the commission on presidential debates probably for different reasons but I think it's a complete and utter joke and that you know that the candidates I mean it's a private corporation that essentially has I mean and that does actually create concerns for me a private corporation having control over these very very very important moments of our democracy so I think you and I may disagree about corporate media for a variety of different levels but I think perhaps we can both agree that the commission on presidential debates is one thing that a lot of complex reasons why I think it's an awful idea but it is a bit disconcerting to have a private corporation control what are the just even the format and the rules so the candidates say that they negotiate them I'm not going to talk more about this because it's a very sore issue for me but they are kind of ridiculous they go away I just want to echo Mark's sentiments and say that that for me was the most disappointing part of this entire campaign cycle was that the presidential commission on debates did such a poor job of incorporating technology and bringing in the voices of the citizens to participate in something that was archaic on its face I mean it's this is a call out look at the camera this is a call out to whoever leads the organization to please in the next set of debates improve when we did our first big event with Senator Obama and MTV MySpace we partnered and by the way Glassbooth is a great website and I wish we had done more work with you when we did our first MTV MySpace presidential dialogue with Senator Obama we partnered with a group called 10questions.com and the basic idea with 10 questions was that people submitted the question that they wanted to ask the president and or they wanted to ask the candidate and we said look at 1030 on the morning that we were doing the dialogue which was happening at 12 o'clock the number one question at 1030 would be the question that was asked and it turned out to be on net neutrality that's where we got Obama's position actually it was from you guys there was some good stuff there okay next sorry so I've never worked with a mic before hey okay so what do you think about Barack's not having any kind of military experience I mean certainly he's not qualified to be the president if he doesn't have any military experience not exactly a media question I don't know if anyone wants to try to respond to it well you know the election went on and I thought we were talking about the election and media results well I think there are a lot of people can we talk about the role of the media in representing this question of experience which was certainly a central theme running through the campaign well especially when compared to someone who had the incredible background of John McCain I mean it was a big differentiating characteristic that I don't think you know I think John McCain didn't do a good enough job of drawing that distinction but I think what Obama was able to do you think that McCain didn't have military experience not for it wounded him in his campaign but because Obama kind of could do battle or something that made him equal to McCain I mean I don't know how far we want to go down this road or better than McCain perhaps my sense is on this particular issue if the Iraq war had remained as big an issue as it was a year ago the sort of preponderance on military background and military acumen probably would have made much more of a difference ultimately the campaign became much more about the ability to be a steward over the economy and I think on that front McCain didn't you know in the military experience the heroism of all that stuff just became much less important and I think it just became a non-issue even though McCain certainly had much more cred in that area okay I've got eight minutes to get two questions in so why don't we if you let us go to the next question okay you're not on the line for a question all right over here I'm curious in your opinion why did media so completely dropped the issue of Obama producing his birth certificate since the two most important qualifiers for presidency is age and the place of birth do you think the only reason they were completely never dropped it completely because he was black and they were afraid of being accused wait wait you're saying yeah the story that he wasn't born in Hawaii well he still has not produced a birth certificate to this day we still don't know if he's in America or not we should go to fightthesmears.com and see if it's there seriously I mean that's definitely been a rumor that he wasn't born in the United States and in fact wouldn't it be easily resolved by producing a birth certificate well the truth of the matter is I think he has but the truth has nothing to do with this right because in fact when he suspended his campaign in a much more elegant style than McCain suspended his campaign but when he went back to Hawaii for visit his sick grandmother the rumor was that was all a cover for him to go back and burn documents that actually really there it is there it is and if it's on the internet it's gotta be true it looks fake to me that's again that's the power of what this campaign has done but here's what you believe that do you think that's a valid having seen that what would it take to convince you no I'm serious because obviously the Obama campaign is putting this out you could say well this is their fabrication but one question in this age of all this stuff is what type of authority does it take to convince people even though there does seem to you know you can never approach 100% of the of the but maybe it's an unanswerable question yeah I mean David is just noting that probably in no other point in human history that we have answered this question as quickly as we've done here whether we believe or trust the information on the web or not it's a legitimate question but the information on both sides is readily available at a fingertip just scroll up look what the directive says at the top next time someone talks about Barak's perspective make sure they see this page it's amazing it is okay do you guys have final comments anything we haven't talked on that you think central to our understanding of this topic so yeah the question is fundraising in the new media we talked in a little bit but clearly it's one of the big implications of this campaign one of the big transformation is how much money how it's possible to process smaller scale donors and what some of the implications of that may be the truth is I'm really excited by it this whole idea actually take it out of the political context for a second this idea of micro philanthropy it's really there are it presents enormous opportunity if you look at websites like kiva.org some of you might be familiar with kiva it's a global giving these are sites that essentially allow an individual to make a personal connection to another individual in the case of kiva.org it is an entrepreneur in a developing country that might need a micro loan of $250 but in their home country that is an enormous amount of money that then allows them to launch a thriving business that can transform their family and so much as from what has been learned from Senator Obama's campaign is how to facilitate these kinds of connections where you essentially eliminate intermediaries and another thing that's been really amazing about kiva is that the payback rate is something extraordinary like 98% of the loans that are made or paid back which is amazing but not only that when the founders of kiva launched they thought they would just be helping the entrepreneurs who now got access to capital but they've discovered that they've created a community amongst the people who are loaning the money who are now saying wow I put money into this business in Peru but do you know that there's an entrepreneur in Uruguay who's got a similar kind of business so I think outside of the political context there are enormous opportunities in education we're working with the Gates Foundation on an idea now to facilitate the idea of creating a scholarship marketplace where any individual can make a donation in the form of a scholarship to a young person who's at risk of dropping out of high school it's tremendous what it could mean for solving really intractable problems by tapping into the goodwill of individuals all across the world I'd just like to reiterate what I said earlier about the importance of being as forthright as possible about your donors and the ease in which the Obama campaign enabled small dollar donations I think it's great that as many Americans donated presumably Americans donated as they did but I think it's incumbent I think it's incumbent that moving forward there was no transparency on Obama's website as to their donors the RNC provided a database where you could search for any donor Ron Paul provided the names of all of his donors as did Mike Huckabee on their websites and the response from the Obama campaign that it was going to be too difficult to sift through the donors to determine who was valid and who wasn't when in fact Visa processes millions of more donations per hour than the Obama campaign did in their entire campaign and the response at its surface wasn't acceptable to me maybe I'll end by acknowledging that the McCain campaign was more transparent about that the finances were silly and that Barack Obama and this may be getting to what you want to talk about and that Barack Obama did decide to opt out of the public financing system because he simply believed that he could raise a lot more money and did in his mind justify the fact that saying well if I can get 2 million people to give that's kind of public financing but not a smaller group of folks but Obama has also promised to support a bill that would mandate public financing for presidential elections kind of easy to do that once you've been elected but he's promised to do that and he obviously was successful not doing that so it'll be very interesting to see whether he keeps that promise or whether he tries to wiggle out of it now I'm going to get a little hyper partisan because you brought that up Obama did promise that he was going to take financing and then when he saw the potential to internet and how much money was coming in he backed off of his word and now that he's elected he's promising to change it to so it's hypocritical oh well it's something but he did he saw even Obama partisans should acknowledge that the decision to opt out was a wonderful instrumental tactical moment for his campaign but not I wouldn't say ethically but it wasn't the best moment when it comes to you know sort of the keeping his promises so it's clear the debates about this campaign will continue for a long time to come but this has been an illuminating discussion and I appreciate all of the panelists and the audience participation so thanks everyone for a great event