 So my name is Jochai Benter. I teach at the law school. I'm a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center. I'm spending a chunk of time looking at the network environment and different modalities of organization and politics. And Esther and I, despite whatever else was written, are not having an interview, but both of us having a conversation. And I think we both have decided after this morning that, A, the conversation was interesting and getting continuously interesting. And B was way too congenial, and everybody was clapping. So we needed to do something else. Esther is a professor of sociology at Northwestern. This year, a fellow at the Berkman Center working on a book who's done, at least to my mind, the most persuasive work on injustice in access to the net and what is a stable digital divide along dimensions of skills. And has also done a fascinating study that combines all political blogs as well. And is a fascinating person to have a conversation with. So why don't you go ahead and we'll move from there? Thank you very much. OK, is this picking up my voice? Can you guys hear me? Because I'm actually not feeling very OK. Is that better? Yeah, sorry. I'm not feeling very well, so I don't think I can. OK, great. Thank you, Jay-Z. Thanks. My work here is fine. This is the tall people panel. OK, so as Yo-hai said, we've been listening to the conversation, and it's been very interesting. But as people who are not exactly, whose work isn't exactly some of what's been discussed, we come from a somewhat different perspective, and we wanted to infuse that perspective into the conversation. Although I've done some work on political uses of the internet, it's not my focus. But I think coming from a different perspective might be helpful here. I find it very interesting that this conversation, the conversation we've had so far, would I think better characterize a conference that might be called Internet and Campaigns instead of Internet and Politics. And so that's a difference that I want to emphasize. Because so far, we've mainly been talking about campaigns and how campaigns might benefit from and in the future use IT. Whereas politics, to me, means something much broader. And that includes voices from below and voices intermingling and not necessarily just from top down. Even though people have referred to not just top down, I haven't really heard in the substance much below the top down. So I'd like to see more. Even the way people are talking about internet and politics usually is around campaigns. 2004, 2006, 2007, you rarely hear 2008. You rarely hear 2007, 2005. That's just not even in the conversation against suggesting that too much of the conversation is focusing on the campaign, as though nothing in between happened when it comes to internet and politics, which is not the case. As Yochai mentioned, my main focus is looking at how the internet isn't. You're far in training. OK, now it's been silenced. At least he has a cool ring. OK, so as Yochai mentioned, my focus is on inequalities and internet use. And what I'm going to say, I'm going to say because I think it's important to say. And I wouldn't be surprised if, after I say it, you forget it and we move on. But I'm going to say it anyway. Another assumption or a main assumption in the conversation so far has been, what is the internet doing to people? How are people using the internet? And the way that's phrased assumes that all people are using the internet the same way and all people are being influenced by IT the same way. And that's just wrong. And you're probably thinking, OK, well, maybe she's talking about the 25% of Americans who don't use the internet at all. And I'm sort of talking about those people. Or maybe she's talking about the 33% of those who are connected who don't have broadband. And those of us in this room can't even relate to what that means. But let's put that aside because I'm not even just talking about those people. I'm actually talking about the 50% of Americans who do have broadband. And saying that even among those people, they're very different groups. And IT will have very different implications for how they use the various tools in their political lives. And so when we talk about Facebook or whatnot and mobilizing, we can't forget that these are going to have different implications by different groups. So that's just something I'd like people to keep in mind because it's not irrelevant. It's certainly not irrelevant. It wasn't irrelevant in this campaign. If you just look at the demographics of who is using what. So then just some specific questions I wanted to throw out there related to all this. One is, is there room to influence the agenda from bottom up? And it's really, that hasn't been part of this conversation. And it's not really clear how there is room for that if most of the thinking is about how we can mobilize the 3 million who've already joined the Facebook group or those specific people who've joined our list. And while million is a big number, it's a big unit. It sounds helpful. It's a very small fraction of the American population in reality. And then, so for example, Andrew brought up that idea of how people are starting to create things from the bottom up in terms of services. And it's great. So the government doesn't have to pay for them. I guess other people will take care of those. But those are likely to be services that represent very specific perspectives in the population. So they're going to meet the needs of particular populations and certain needs that are not represented in those really savvy people who know how to upload the photos and put them on maps and whatnot are not going to be as represented. So that's something to keep in mind. And then something looking forward, and this is not necessarily about skills, although I think it relates, is we're at that moment where some of this is still very exciting and people give out their emails and you get them and maybe they even respond and they read the messages. And partly I think it's because people were so excited about the candidate this year. But how does this work moving forward? Partly when more candidates start adopting these tools and when they don't necessarily use it in the most savvy ways. And then people might get fatigued, whether it's by email or emails or the text messages or whatnot they're receiving. Are you going to be able to mobilize the same way? And then one more thing I wanted to bring up as a possible topic for conversation, which a little bit of it has come up this negative side. And so far it's been more about trolls, for example. But one issue that does relate to the skill question and that people have different skills in understanding IT is misinformation, for example. So just like the people who have the good material to send out can use these tools, so can those who send out misinformation. And if people don't know how to use IT well and they don't understand that they need to be critical of the sources and they don't know how to evaluate content online, which is a lot of people. I mean, this is what I do research on. And that includes young people, by the way. Assuming that all young people are savvy is just completely wrong. That's another thing that campaigns or whoever might need to figure out how you counter. Whether that's campaigns or government or whether local government or whatnot, or just organizations, email can be used for both good and bad. And given that people don't really understand the technology that well, and whether it's email or text messages or informational websites, that has the potential for negative outcomes. And so I just wanted to make sure that these other sides of the equation were part of our conversation today, because I feel like still the conversation is pretty positive. I have nothing, I don't have a problem with being positive and optimistic, but I think we need to be realistic. And for that, we need to consider the other side. Thank you. I wanna start by focusing on the fact that we succeeded in spending an entire morning on internet and politics without saying, for example, daily costs or act blue, or liberal blogosphere or anything like that, which to me is the core of what I found difficult about this morning's conversation. Carpenters and tools assumes you have a plan, you know what you're building. The carpenters are there, they have a trade, they're the organizers and the political organizers, and here's a fancy new tool. That's one story about what happened in 2008 is that there was a tradition and an art of organizing that met a moment of need and also used some nifty tools. There's a different story. It's a story of a network public sphere. It's a story of a technological moment that changed people's perception of their agency, not because they were given a strategic goal, Marshall, and then given freedom within an organization to act out that strategic goal, but because they have become to adopt a series of behaviors. As you say, Scott, in new models of organization, and it doesn't matter whether it's software, whether it's fan fiction, whether it's Wikipedia, to be effective in the world on their own. And one of the ways in which people found ways to be effective on their own is to bypass the understanding that somewhere between CNN and Fox is the entire political spectrum, and that there's balance and propaganda, and that's the entire universe, and to find a way to talk. It's to ignore the fact that the 2006 campaign began to see some of these practices that later on were used in the campaign, like, for example, online fundraising and targeting towards marginal users, like, for example, expanding the field and getting people on board, like, for example, attacking Lieberman in the primary, not that that worked out so well ultimately precisely because it wasn't institutionalized in these ways, but it's an orientation of a story that's very different, and it's an orientation of a story that sees the meetings that Jeremy was describing, and that Elise were describing as very, very different kinds of meetings. One was a set of meetings, at least as I read it from hearing there, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, which was about understanding how we can get even better mobilization for the next battle. And the other was, how do we begin to create participatory fora for people to set their own agenda? And Marshall, you've already been angry at me face to face for this, so you can be angry again. To say when we lack strategy, we get diffused and break up is to reject what I take to be the core of democracy, which is people's ability to participate in setting the agenda, not only how they implement an agenda that is set for them somewhere else. And so the story that I tell of the network public sphere is a story whose core is in diffuse behaviors that transcend politics, but politics is one of them, of diffuse models of problem solving that transcend politics, but politics is one of them, that then are built into the practices of the left wing of the blogosphere. And in fact, we've just finished a study, and I think Aaron will talk about it a bit in the breakout session on collaboration if we do, but it turns out there's a lot of work on the blogosphere. All of it describes the political blogosphere as roughly symmetric and uniform on the left and the right. Turns out the practices are different. Turns out the practices are different. We see a lot more use of collaboration and discourse on the left than on the right. We see some of the things we've been talking about in terms of people participating in the campaign already happening on the left blogosphere. So that's a statement. It's an invitation to a conversation and to a continuation of the conversation that we had in the morning, but these are themes that were on the table all day. When Archon asked, how do you move the problem solving? That was that kind of question. It was a question about how do you move from mobilizing to action on a set agenda to allowing people to set their agendas and work on their problem solving? When Micha was talking about the structure of the conversation, when Andrew was talking about distributed solutions, these were solutions that were being proposed from the perspective of the networked public sphere, not from the perspective of a new set of tools for the carpenters who are acting out their art. And that to me is internet and democracy, not internet and political campaigns. And to the extent that I'm being extremely crisp and less polite than I usually am, it's because I spent a morning hearing at least several people around the room. There were moments at which Peter was making that point as well that didn't get stated as crisply. And so we have plenty of time now and I'd love hopefully to have a continued conversation on this question of what is the relative role in our understanding of what happened? Of a new set of tools to an old set of carpentry, that is to say, political organizing around campaigns, organized around an understood strategic goal which is electing a person or maybe passing an agenda item, versus a set of practices imminent in the networked environment, repeating and occurring across multiple domains, not only politics, not only culture, but along all of these domains, and then being incorporated in a brilliant way into political campaigns. That's my question to you. Daniel Grestner of the Fletcher School and I'm not here this morning, don't blame me. My question is for Esther, which I take your point about the dark side of the internet. The problem I always have with that is the notion that if something is a tendency and it's kind of research to believe that if something happened on the internet, wow, we've never seen this before all along. And so the counterfactual for me is always, to what extent is the phenomenon you're seeing on the internet happening already which is what we didn't know about. So you're trying to perpetuation of myths on the internet. Obama's citizenry, the status of citizenry or so on and so forth. But these things happened before we had an internet. In some ways, one could argue, they were actually even less transparent then because it was tougher to diffuse message or even know that the myth was out there. So do you think this problem has gotten worse with stuff going online, better? Is there any way to tell? I think, okay, so I'm an empirical sociologist, so I'll start with the caveat that I don't know any studies on this, but so I don't know specifically whether it's gotten worse or better, but I think it does have the potential actually to get worse. I see your point about transparency, but the reason I think it can get worse is because things can disseminate so much quicker, right? I mean, just your email distribution list, right? And that it can show up in so many places. I mean, it's not just the one email distribution list, you get it from three friends and then you can even find it on our website. And that I think adds to the potential seemingly legitimate aspect of that information that you're getting. And so I think it does have the potential to spread much more quickly and to larger numbers. And again, because people then lack the, I think there's too much, I mean, we know that people still trust mainly their social networks for a lot of information. And so if it's from your social networks that you end up getting this misinformation, then you have trust in that and you might have gotten that before too, but you can only make so many phone calls and you're only gonna see so many people face to face to get that misinformation in the past. And traditional media are still pretty careful with some of this information. So I don't think you don't necessarily see it there, but people will still believe it even if they don't see it on the traditional media. You don't seem convinced. I agree, the rapidity with which the stuff gets out, but I think you're absolutely right. The counter to be, of course, is that it also can be counteracted much more rapidly. Which is, if you had a myth go offline, but it's not even found out about it, trying to counteract it would be next to a possible res. If a myth spreads online, you're right, it can spread very quickly, but also you could then see the fact, oh my God, there's this myth out there. It needs to be, it's obviously is a truth. So the counter, the debunking can also spread potentially more quickly. Potentially can, but I don't see it wouldn't necessarily. I mean it's one of these, you know, you get an email that has some like myth in it and then the best I can do is, and I see I was 100 of, I was one of 100 people who were CC'd and I can write back to the person who wrote to me and say, look, this isn't true. I doubt they're gonna then send it onto the other 99 and I mean, I don't know if you can really backtrack necessarily. There's the potential of what I'm talking about. You can necessarily backtrack, but counter debunking would also take place along multiple networks as well. There would be multiple sources that way also. Scott. Quick question here, or I thought. So the genius of Facebook to kind of bridge the Marshall, Yohkai divide here is that, so the genius of Facebook, think about it this way, the genius of Facebook is that it maps the existing social network. It maps the existing social graph. It takes the, everyone you know and it pulls out the more strength and power in it, none of it, and that's great. And that's sort of related to, I think what you're talking about about the network public sphere. The network of all those connections being more sort of transparent and there and usable and exploitable and mobilizable is great. But there is no existing, there is no existing organizational network and sphere. In other words, the potholes are still there. There's no activity or, there's nothing I can do about that 14 year old Somali girl. There's nothing I can do about most anything and people don't have a sense of their own power, their own collective power. They don't have a sense of the potential of collective action. And what Marshall talks about is the, he's talking about that potential and how people can work together, how people organize can do things and get things done. And so that's, just to sort of summarize, make sure it's clear is that there's the difference between the social network and social graph and then there's the organizational capacity and those are two very different things. And so you guys disagree but you're talking about different things in my view. Well, I'm not 100% sure that I agree. So I think this problem of increasing the degree of efficacy of new social action is a problem that is shared across domains of intersection between existing organizational models and emerging social action on the net. So for example, when even an organization as grass rootsy as Wikipedia has to start organizing because it's gotten to a certain scale, it meets new tensions between people's sense of the ability to just come and write whatever they want and people's need to connect. When certainly when you're talking about free and open source software projects, these are not just social networks that map existing social networks. These are directed forms of action that are creating new forms of organization that weren't there before and that are meeting boundaries of efficacy and then begin to translate into real world organizations. And that locus of meeting is a place of enormous potential but at the same time, enormous potential threat. So when a company like IBM begins to intersect with the free software community, it's got to change what it does and sometimes also accept that there are people on the inside of the organization who actually have to have split loyalties and have to sometimes say to their manager who's paying their salary, yes, I understand what you need but I have to take it to see whether it's good for the kernel, whether it's good for whatever the software project I'm working on and that requires a recognition that it's not just a new tool and I'm doing my thing with it but rather that it's an imminent social practice that is not just a social network but a directed set of social acts that I'm an organization and can make it more effective but that I need to understand that it's that it is a different phenomenon than what I described. This particularly gets important when you're talking about democracy because clearly one of the things you want to do in democracy is successfully organize a political campaign, capture power and have the state act but at the same time if you're concerned about democracy you want to get people to actually be able to be part of the agenda setting not only execute a plan that has been decided by political elites as opposed to by organizational leadership and so I'm not sure that we're talking about separate domains. I think I at least am seeing a potential tension between the successful transition to government and a wide scale democratic practice as long as that successful transition focuses on what it's done on continuing to effectively mobilize for discrete set political action as opposed to setting up completely different kinds of platforms for actually allowing people to have their voice heard between elections. But one is the critique that my colleague, our colleagues at the teach out made of how campaigns are using internet which is they're sharing tasks but they're not sharing power and the idea that there's more power out there that people are empowered in new ways whether or not they need permission. Something very interesting today the transition, the change.gov site has launched a deep like platform you're using Google moderator and they're inviting anybody to ask a question that they want to transition to answer and load up the best questions. I don't know exactly what time it was announced it was they've already got 8,000, just now, they've already got 8,000, right? What happened? What happened? What's your comment? I just, maybe the first thing that occurred to me The first thing that interested me, when I saw that was the most popular questions are always the best question. Sometimes the least popular question is the best question. And this seems like a perfect way for them to avoid our questions. I mean, depending on who signed up for it. Which is something that they've been brilliant at so far. So power to them. Not your power, but theirs. I'm just going to say that that relates to my point about how certain voices are represented and certain voices aren't. And it's not always the most vocal voices that are necessarily the most representative. Well, that's a whole other. Go ahead. Can you comment on where the flash of a bottle applies? For example, the million voices against Mark that turn into the 12 million people marching in the streets in a very short period of time. How that, just in your theory, is that a one-time instant or is that a representative of what you're talking about? Well, it's a representative in some sense, although I think that that ends up being more of a diagnosis of a system that is incapable of opening itself to sustain conversation. Because then you get people on the street when otherwise they lack power. So again, if you understand protest as a problem, an organizational problem, just like any other, then what you're seeing is online practices translating into problem solving and coordination in the real world. But to my mind, the question of whether you build a system that people will look at and say, yes, I have real input. Whether a dig-like system will do it or not, or whether it'll divert questions to things that aren't that sustainable. I think this was part of what Arkham was trying to focus on in the morning, which is to say, to actually get a sustained platform that allows people to work things out, talk about them, and then have pathways that they say, I've been heard, genuinely heard, not just allowed to do something that is insignificant. I've been genuinely heard. We've had a conversation. It's been converted into action or not. Strikes me as more potentially sustainable as a model than things that are, when things really burst open and you have massive demonstrations. That's a particular form of political efficacy under conditions when you're actually not succeeding in being part of the democratic governance process. But I think the fascinating challenge is actually to build a governance process that allows people to participate in ways that don't require this flash protest, but actually are part, particularly from an administration that sees itself as built on this kind of community organizing, including people within the framework. Okay, I agree with the point that you and Marshall are not really so much disagreeing as talking about different things. If you take Luke's radical view of power and the three phases of power, the first phase is the ability to change others' behavior by various incentives and so forth. That's what organizing and campaigning is about. If you take the second phase of power, which Bach, Bach, and Barrett's and others have written about, it's ability to control the agenda so that you never have to coerce people or resent people because something never gets on the agenda in the first place. The third phase of power, which is more Gromchen or if you want McLuhan-like, is the ability to establish or reestablish fundamental preferences. Politics is about all three. Campaigning is primarily about the one. The interesting question is how do the second and third phases of power affect the first? And we heard an example this morning on agenda-setting where it did, the Palin question. The campaign, the organizers, thinking it was strategically important not to be seen attacking Palin, tried to keep that essentially off the agenda. But others who were essentially setting the agenda because they're going to put it there and much of that was attributed to Obama or the reaction to it was attributed to Obama even though he didn't organize it. So that's a case of the second phase of power affecting the first. The third phase of power, if you want the Gromchen McLuhan setting these preferences, goes to an understanding of people's ability to, yes we can, to point a phrase, which goes out of the nature of the candidate in the way he projects himself. And that the Obamary has changed by the pavement, he changed politics in that sense. All the people who were told, you know, you grew up with the president and 10% of them knew it was absolutely not true. All of a sudden now, for them at a deep level of understanding of Gromchen's sense is something that's not true. That's a third phase of power in politics. So the three, you really are talking about very different things. You're right to expand the scope but what we need to be spending more time on is the interaction between marshal's sense and what you're using. And that comes up with this question of what do you do with this machine you've created for the period of governance, not election? And the great danger I see is it's becoming salesmanship. You know, it's not organizing, it's selling. So all of a sudden my box is loaded with emails about my view on this or what I think is inauguration is over. I don't take any of that seriously. Nobody's really going to have much impact on the agenda with that. On the other hand, when Tom Daschle, the secretary of destiny for dealing with a health plan, calls the list of tens of thousands for those who have put in a strong interest in healthcare, not because they're seeking a job but before the campaign, this is what recruited them and calls from that a subset of a thousand or so. And it goes out and meets with those people, the virtually or a person to solicit ideas. You have the opposite of Hillary Clinton's healthcare plan of 93. We need to explain a lot more time about the way this second and third basis of power can affect the first base when you transition from salesmanship as in campaigning to government. I will embrace every single word you said. I mean, literally. I just think that's exactly the point without that structure coming from a different perspective that I was trying to make, which is when you spend your time talking about internet and politics focusing on campaign, you miss the domains of who sets the agenda, who gets to speak to what effect, and the cultural domain, soft power to coin another frame. That's a good phrase. That's a good phrase. That's a good phrase. That's a good phrase. What are your remarks? Well, I'm sorry, I should introduce myself. I'm Matt Hyman. I was going to say, both your remarks, I think, were very useful, sort of broadening our perspective beyond what we were talking about this morning. Both in terms of talking about not just campaign sites, but a whole host of other sites online, and you all know, in the whole sphere, Esther talking about not just a tiny segment of the population, but thinking about the population as a whole, including those parts of 50% of Americans who have broadband and are unnecessarily seducing it. But I'm gonna push you to expand even a little bit more. And I think that we're in some ways missing the vote here because what we've been talking about thus far is really only a tiny portion of overall web traffic. So let's take the numbers from, I looked this up this morning, October of 2008, kind of an important political moment. So for the entire month of October of 2008, according to headlines, which has ISP level traffic, news and media sites, which includes weather.com and New York Times.com, Yahoo News, got 4% of all internet traffic, which is roughly a third of what porn gets or web mail gets. And looking just at political sites, which is a narrower, somewhat fuzzy category. Does that include YouTube traffic? But even, you know, but if we break down YouTube, and we look at the videos on YouTube, I mean, there were some pretty important political videos. And certainly YouTube is probably not helpful for the McCain campaign, but you also see an awful lot of skateboarding dogs. But even looking at political traffic, which is another sort of smaller, fuzzier category, that gets even less than 10% of what news and media traffic gets. And that includes Daily Post, that includes all of the Huffington Posts, that includes Free Republic, and all these other sites that we've been talking about. So isn't one of the things that we should be worried about is not just that we have more opportunities for citizens to engage in the online public sphere, but in some sense, evade politics at all? It's not obvious to me that there are alternative behavioral or policy or structural options on the table. You're not describing a different pattern from the one that we see on TV or with newspapers. The question, to my mind, is the extent to which all the part, so there are actually two components to this. One is all the part of the people who are concerned with policy, politics, local, national, the extent to which people can participate in a conversation and organize themselves effectively to do things and get things done. And partly it's the question of how many people actually get the experience of having been meaningful in any way, and then changing. One of the things that I thought was fascinating about the campaign was the fact that they actually got so many people. Now again, as you say, 3 million is not 300 million, but 3 million is very different from a few thousand or a few tens of thousand in terms of the implications for what portion of the of a polity actually does something and participates and see it as central to what they're capable of doing. And I think the challenge is to set up structures that actually are meaningful to people and do invite them to actually try to do something or say something that's useful. And in that regard, it's true that a thousand people who have their views on health policy heard is not million, but it's a thousand who wouldn't have been there before. And it's a thousand who care. And that strikes me as important on a very substantial level, not only how many of the overall are happy to sit back and let others deal with it. Yeah, I'd like to respond as well. So as you said, I mean, if people aren't interested in visiting those sites, that's they weren't really interested in watching the evening news per se either. But that said, I think partly what might be going on is that we need to shift our ways of measuring some of these things, right? So do you have to go to the New York Times.com to be involved, to be engaged? What counts as being engaged? What counts as civically engaged? How do we measure it? And I mean, these are actually questions that we don't know the answers to, I don't think. And it's more of a call for more work on this. But for example, what kind of engagement on Facebook matters, right? Like, does it really matter if you joined a group? I don't know, but does it matter if your friend posts a link to a political story and you decide to follow that up or post a comment and you decide to engage in a conversation? And that's much harder to get aggregate logs on and certainly harder to know how to survey about that. So I think, but also this expansion of what counts as political and civic material is just something we need to be thinking about more carefully. The examples that we're talking about, you're talking about the Obama leadership not wanting to tax that or pay a limit to grassroots attack in any way and that kind of disrupted the agenda that they had. What are some examples of the masses? Truly at a high level setting, have you seen it? And regardless if you've seen it in the past or what do you see moving forward in the ability to set the agenda? Okay, so first of all, I'm not sure that agenda disruption is different from agenda setting. But you can decide that it's not consistent with you. In fact, at the core I think of what it means to set the agenda is to disrupt someone else's idea of what should be on the agenda. And in the context of participation, it's to disrupt whoever the power who is and put in your own. I think I'm not sure that this is a good example because Josh Marshall is sort of slowly moving toward being more like media, but I think his role, for example, in the US Attorney scandal is an example of an agenda item that became a very substantial agenda item that came from the blogosphere. I'm not sure that's a good enough example because of, as I say, it's not exactly a ground swelling. I suspect that there's real room in the Lamont Lieberman election. That's not an agenda item so much as a particular person. When I see looking forward, I see these two processes. It's not at all clear to me that move on's counsels will necessarily come up with the same set of preferences about what to move on and when and what to accommodate versus what not to accommodate that will be exactly congruent with what the next administration wants to do. And the question for me will be the degree to which we will have systems that will allow that set of actors to play a large role in deciding what ends up actually being both discussed and acted on. I don't think that it's about direct democracy because direct democracy is about the actual formal power to act. I do think we are potentially, and I think it's only potentially, it's far from a foregone conclusion, moving toward a more participatory democracy. One where people can have more of a say in what the agenda is as opposed to just how it's executed. If anything, I would worry to some extent if my BO really were a successful way where you can send emails out and say, today this is my agenda. Go email your senator, go email your representative, put the pressure that we'd be moving toward more of a model of a plebiscitory presidency than direct democracy. But my primary hope is neither a plebiscitory presidency nor a direct democracy, but simply a more participatory or a representative democracy. With my caveat of more participatory for some and not others. Chris Radd, Afro-Medicine. I think one example would be the immigration reform protests in Southern California and all across the country that was hundreds of thousands of people who corporate media had written off that political institutions, mainstream political institutions had written off that white progressives essentially have chose not to discuss on the most popular, left-leaning logs. Gina Six is a good example as well. These were matters that were important to in communities of color that in a larger political progressive community would be considered shared values but not shared interests. They were very low priorities for a lot of our white brethren and sisters until it became so well organized and compelling that people slowly but surely or actually not that slowly joined on and there are great folks from all kinds of communities who jumped on to make these things an issue but it's interesting that when it came around to the presidential campaign and talk about immigration and I think we have in our analysis of these different constituencies we have to talk about kind of the what I call digital capital martial referred to as civic capital in the context of politicized activity where essentially even though a lot of these tools are free the social capital around the blogs and organizations that have access to wealth and access to corporate media and other assets significantly increase status and priority for their agendas whereas a number of concerns in communities of color will not see that level of interest or dedication and I think particularly in Obama administration may be even more difficult because if he's portrayed as a post-racial or trans-racial president any kind of concerns around racial justice it will almost by definition be squashed down because we're supposed to be passed that. So I'm curious about your reaction to how essentially race and ethnicity class impacts the adoption and transference of power. Well this is exactly what I was getting at I just didn't go so far as to get specific but yes exactly research shows that ethnic minorities, racial minorities those who come from lower socioeconomic status those are precisely the people that even went online they do fewer things they have less skill to do them so that was exactly the point I was getting at that even when we look at people who use the internet they're not participating equally right now. And part of what I've been able to figure is partly because they're lacking a lot of these digital skills to do so and there are other potential reasons and that's a conversation that I think needs to happen and when we talk about wiring more of the country we need to make that part of the conversation because it's not just a technological issue where you give people the access we already know it's not gonna take care of the divide. And I think just to conclude this session I think what we were both actually hoping to do is raise this particular we have another day and a half. You're holding that because we do have more time I thought we were... Okay so I think why don't we instead of me continue to arc on then Marshall and then we'll close to the extent that we can. I think the question of examples is exactly the right questions and at a deeper level people have to have a some sort of view about what kind of democracy they want to live in and so to put the drawing from the healthcare example an example from the 1990s before the proliferation of a bunch of ICT is Oregon and in Oregon in the 90s they were faced with the question of expanding public healthcare to cover more poor people but they can't cover all poor people for all conditions so they had to decide which conditions but instead of the governor or the legislature deciding they had a pretty wide ranging statewide process that specified what healthcare values the public insurance system ought to cover and then that became healthcare legislation and for a decade or more became very very popular in Oregon because it was the process of popular problem solving and consideration whereas almost every other state in the nation this one accepted has failed to achieve any kind of meaningful healthcare reform despite large large majorities in favor of it in popular opinion and so the challenge would be can someone in this room or someone that you know create some technological platform that would allow serious direct consideration of what values should inform healthcare reform that would include one or two million people in a serious conversation where they felt like it wasn't just a plebiscite but where arguments were being listened to and then responded to and translated into policy do you like that kind of democracy or is it enough for the administration and some people in health and human services to decide what the healthcare what value should inform the healthcare plan and is that the kind of democracy that you want to live in and if it's that kind then you want to work on quite a different kind of internet and communication technology Yeah at the risk of upsetting Joe's very carefully crafted You wouldn't want to do that consensus here No I wanted to try to clarify I guess a little bit both language and metaphor I was trying to articulate six conditions that I thought made for effective collective action and that was to share values interest structure strategy action piece that I went through and what I was suggesting is that how those conditions can be well that the work of leadership that those are leadership practices that it takes to transform random wishes into effective purposeful collective action so my question was really what ways what kinds of tools can help us do that and my reference to Carpenters was practitioners of leadership not campaigners I think it's very important to and well just my understanding of a lot of this comes out of social movements it comes out of my own experience in organizing and studying social movements much more than out of political campaigns I think it's important to appreciate just how different the Obama campaign was in that respect the typical campaign would do exactly what I think you were describing as mobilizing for Arkham has described which means you get a bunch of people you send them door to door I mean and actually there were places where that's what the campaign did this is what Dana has written about in her book which is just it's a mobilizing thing there's no there's no delegate there's no location of responsibility for decision making for strategizing for imagination for creativity for the ownership of goals now what the Obama campaign did was create those venues and one reason was because on the one hand there was high motivation people were highly motivated but on the other hand the campaign had to be pushed a bit into relinquishing control enough to allow local groups local teams given within certain spheres to actually take responsibility and with the taking of responsibility comes the creativity and comes the imagination and comes the ownership of the commitment now that's the first time that I've seen a national campaign be willing to do that and I think it was crucial in the kind of civic capital that was created I think it has everything to do with why those people out there now are clamoring for more stuff to do because it was brought into organizational reality these were actual organized groups of people not just isolated individuals being sent door to door who actually had the experience of making decisions about how they were going to contribute within their domain to a successful campaign I think it's important not to dismiss that but rather think about how to build on it because the connection between strategic deliberation and action is crucial to make and so the question is how do we expand the deliberative domain without divorcing it I think this is a real danger from the action domain they really need to think about how they're brought together more effectively so the carpeters I was talking about was people skilled in leadership practice and I was trying to locate agency in the practitioners rather than in the tools because I continue to think the new media are a wonderful set of tools and like anything we shape our environment, our environment shapes us, it's a dialectical relationship, obviously and a new set of tools causes us to think about new possibilities but nevertheless we remain responsible for making choices about how to use those tools and what way we can and what way they open up possibilities in and so forth so I wouldn't dismiss the campaign, I would rather take the energy that it's created and what it's learned about mobilizing collective engagement and figure out how to build on it I couldn't be farther from dismissing the campaign, I think we're all stand in awe of what was clearly a breathtaking campaign but with the awe comes a certain fear and I think the way that you've described it now is to my ear more nuanced than what I heard this morning over the course of the morning because at some level as I was listening to you talk about what the values of leadership they strike me as correctly describing again a whole class of behaviors and it doesn't matter whether the leadership is of a cluster of articles on Wikipedia or a software platform it's just a different set of values, a different set of goals converted into action but my concern and my fear and my pushback and in some senses you may have failed to resist Joe's harmonization is precisely that we not mistake the enormous success of a system that has a well-defined goal elect this candidate and implements a set of radically different processes than those that were implemented in the past that are much more respecting of autonomy and local efficacy and local leadership and diversity and experimentation and failure I could say all of those things about practically speaking Toyota production system and it wouldn't be that off by comparison to Ford and GM if I wave my arms enough um... but um... but but understanding that that's not enough once you move from a well-understood agenda and it can be a candidate or it can be a particular agenda item that isn't being considered well enough because white progressive aren't embracing it enough uh... and to move from that to converting it into assist a component of a system of governance that doesn't take for granted what the agenda is as opposed to just how to achieve it in the best way uh... or how we talk about creating a cultural understanding of who we are what we could become why it's worthwhile doing that we should break for coffee we should break one more that's all because I suspect that that's the particular place where we wouldn't have any disagreement at all about the degree to which that something that's that targeted with that particular set of adversaries is precisely the kind of thing that you could use these platforms to mobilize large numbers of people the pressure politically um... and to uh... uh... shine sunlight on what they're doing and how they're doing it and to try to disseminate alternative messages it might fail it might fail but the difference in terms of the capabilities both organizationally the particular in the immediate time frame as long as as the energy hasn't dissipated and in terms of the platforms so that harry and louise no longer have so much of the overall airspace uh... that actually strikes me as a place where where we could uh... uh... equally be optimistic coffee