Call for Study Participants

Please forward and distribute widely (apologies for cross-posting).
Twitter-friendly link: http://bit.ly/Kv0zLq


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Are you a political junkie? Addicted to the news? Is your browser's homepage the New York Times or Wall Street Journal? Or maybe it's the National Review Online or the Huffington Post? Ever wanted a deeper look at what's being said between the lines?


Or does the news bother you? Does politics turn you off? Do you find yourself ignoring any kind of discussion of political issues or news coverage? Do you feel like there's a level of depth that is lacking in most political discussions?


If you fit either of these descriptions, this study is for you. We've developed an online tool that helps you understand political news and discussions by visualizing patterns of language in them. We're currently looking for people who want to try out the tool and wouldn't mind talking with us about it. Plus, you'll be entered in a drawing for a $200 Amazon gift card.


If you're interested, please contact Eric Baumer: ericpsb@cornell.edu

barking up the wrong (digital) tree

just saw this and I couldn't resist commenting.

apparently, DARPA is soliciting proposals for research that will help security and intelligence officials use social media (read: Facebook and Twitter) identify rebellious intent, predict mass public action, etc. OK, not a particularly new story, even if they are sinking $42 million into it.

what's interesting here is the implication, present in so much research on social media, that social media = reality. if it's on the internet, it must be true. for example, consider the 2004 Howard Dean primary campaign. Dean had a huge following on the internet, and, going into the Iowa caucus, many predicted him as the frontrunner. however, he ended up finishing a distant third and soon thereafter dropping out of the primaries (no doubt in part due to the media reaction to the Dean scream). what happened? the exuberance Dean's supporters showed online was not representative of the general voters in the Democratic party, or at least not those at the Iowa caucus. since these other voters were not part of the online political scene, it would have been hard for analysis of online content to determine that the Deaniacs were likely a minority.

granted, this is a bit of a simplification, and I'm choosing here to focus on a particular, limited portion of the account. the point, though, is that online furor and enthusiasm does not necessarily translate to impact and action. yes, there are certainly numerous interesting examples of being able to predict everything from election results to movie ratings based on social media content and activity, and the Pentagon seems to hope to expand this predictive power to issues of national security. however, it seems equally if not more important to attend to when, why, and how such predictions prove inaccurate, especially when we're talking about suspicions of political unrest or even terrorism.

unparticipation

while reading this article on the impacts of public deliberation forums, I saw included just below the abstract a most fantastic keyword: zen participation. "whoa!" I thought, "this article is going to be more awesome than I thought."

alas, this apparently novel keyword was really just the result of a typographic idiosyncrasy. the keyword citizen participation had been hyphenated, such that citi- was on one line and zen participation on the next. still a cool article, just not about zen. nonetheless, it's fun to think about what zen participation might look like...

activism for activism: the necessary locality of tactical knowledge

yesterday, Richard MacManus from ReadWriteWeb interviewed Mary Joyce about the founding of her new meta-activism project. the idea is, in short, that most activist strategies were based on social and technological (technosocial?) conditions before the advent of mass digital communication. however, these strategies must be radically altered to enable what's being called digital activism. the focus of the meta-activism project, then, is to provide potential digital activists with the knowledge, tools, and tactics necessary to make full use of these novel technologies.

this seems like a rather sensible goal, depending on how it's accomplished. yes, it makes sense that tools for digital activism require new strategies and tactics; to some extent, this is the "more is different" argument about digital/social media. however, it seems that such tactics would also need to be grounded in local contexts. the same digital activism tactics that work with incredible efficacy in, say, Iran may fail entirely in Egypt, or the US, or anywhere else. I feel that a major portion of this project should be focused on situating digital activism in local cultural, political, social, and historical contexts, and on understanding how those contexts interrelated with the success or failure of given efforts.

speaking of success and failure, in the interview, Mary is pretty candid about how effective this digital activism has been, noting that "few cases of digital activism are actual successes." she goes further, noting the difficulty of even assessing success. is a campaign successful if it mobilizes a sufficient number of people (in which cases, what constitutes a sufficient number)? is it successful if it achieves its stated goal? by either criterion, few such campaigns succeed, and it's only a minute portion that achieve success in the latter terms of actually affecting change. this brings up a point I've wondered about often: why do some online social movements succeed, and why do some fail? there have been tons of studies of success stories, but I feel like these need to be complemented with studies of the failures, perhaps focusing on campaigns that succeeded in mobilizing large numbers of people but still failed to achieve their goals (if anyone knows of such work, feel free to point me in the right direction).

another point Mary made caught my attention. she described how, for a digital technology to be highly useful, it needs both scale and "use neutrality" (even she uses scare quotes around that phrase). by scale, she means simply that there must be a critical mass of users (again, what constitutes a "critical mass" is likely a topic for some debate). by "use neutral," she means that the technology "can be easily co opted, that its architecture can facilitate a wide variety of interactions and does not dictate the content of hosted files." she cites YouTube, Blogger, Facebook, and Twitter as use neutral, while she says LastFM and Bloglines are not.

I think I have to disagree with use neutrality, both on a terminological level and on a conceptual level. first, none of the tools she has described are use neutral; each is designed for a specific set of use cases. Twitter is not conducive to long, thoughtful, complex argumentation in a way that blogger would be. Facebook cannot host videos the way that YouTube can. however, I will admit that LastFM has a much more focused, constrained set of use cases than, say, Facebook. furthermore, these tools are anything but neutral. the ontological categories invoked by tools such as Facebook (friends, networks, feeds, etc.) privilege a certain type of configuration between the individual and society, and arguing that these tools have use neutrality distracts from the social, political, and cultural (not to mention philosophical and epistemological) commitments made in their design.

I think the point is not that these tools have "use neutrality," but rather "use plasticity." that is, while a tool such as Facebook or Twitter has a certain intended use, the tool is flexible enough, plastic enough, that it can be adapted to serve a variety of purposes in a variety of contexts. and again, we're back to what I think is the crux of the interesting issue here: how are these various tools repurposed and adapted to local contexts, and how do those processes of repurposing and adaptation change the tool (and, reflexively, the context) in ways that enable a digital activism campaign to succeed (or prevent it from succeeding)? synthesizing across different instances of the interplay between the plasticity of digital/social media seems like it could be a highly advantageous approach for enabling efforts such as the meta-activism project to make a real, significant contribution to understanding digital activism.

is more participation better participation?

a few weeks ago, I attended a panel at the IEEE Social Computing conference on "Promoting National Initiatives for Social Networking," which ended up being largely about social software and political participation. panelists included Sandy Pentland of MIT, Jenny Preece of U Maryland, Ben Schneiderman of U Maryland, and Kevin Grandia of Hoggan and Associates. each variously extolled the virtues of political participation and civic engagement, as well as how (information and computational) technologies could be used to support and encourage such participation. Kevin provided a nice bit of counterpoint with several examples demonstrating some of the potential problems associated with these approaches.

there was one question I’d wanted to ask but have the chance: do we really want more participation? that is, is having more people participating in the political processes necessarily better? I don’t intend to be Machiavellian, though I’ll admit to being something of a devil’s advocate here. however, whenever there are fundamental assumptions at work, such as this one that more participation is better, I find examining, questioning, and occasionally problematizing such assumptions beneficial in terms of determining exactly the goals we’re trying to accomplish, as well as considering alternate means of approaching those goals and/or methods of inquiry related to such approaches.

first, let me consider what exactly we mean by participation. in the broadest general sense, democratic participation usually translates to voting. at other times (e.g., in Farrell, Lawrence, and Sides’ definition), it implies activities such as contributing money or time to a political candidate/party/campaign, or attempting to convince others to vote a certain way. in the context of the above mentioned panel, it seemed that participation was framed in terms of civic engagement; involvement with political issues; and participating in deliberative debates about governmental polities, their implications, their results, and alternatives. for example, Sandy Pentland talked about citizen-science-style sensing and census data to determine the impacts of policies intended, e.g., to increase education levels in low-SES neighbors, or to reduce pollution from factories and power plants. this arguments for the benefits seemed two-fold. first, collecting and presenting these data could enable politicians to be held accountable for their policy design and implementation decisions, preventing politicians from making vacuous claims of efficacy in the absence of any concrete evidence. second, making such data readily accessible and comprehensible would involve and engage more people in the political process by lowering the barriers to entry, thereby creating a better democracy.

it’s this second point on which I want to push here. that is, is involving more people more directly in governmental and political processes actually beneficial in terms of creating a better democracy? brief consideration would suggest that, yes, it does; since democracy is about government of, by, and for the people, involving more people in that government will make it more equitable, thereby preventing the abuse of the many by the few. however, one of the central premises of American democracy, as well as that of many other (Western) democratic nations, is representation. that is, rather than being a direct democracy where every member of the state has a direct vote on every policy or governance question, we elect representatives who represent us in such decision processes. in direct democracy, not only does every citizen need significant knowledge of every issue, but so much of citizens’ time is consumed with the political process that they have little time left to live their lives. furthermore, based on the apathy evidenced by low voter turnouts in many elections (at least in this country), getting people engaged with and interested in such issues is a non-trivial problem.

however, I’ve recently become aware of a third option that represents something of a compromise between direct and representative democracy: deliberative democracy (slight caveat: I’ve only recently become aware of the notion of deliberative democracy and, at the time of this post, am still in the process of wrapping my head around it). elected representatives ultimately make the political decisions, but citizens are involved in the decision making, deliberative process. this approach seems to share a certain sensibility with participatory design, but that’s a topic for another time. what I want to consider here is something that seems like a central tenet in deliberative democracy: by involving a large, diverse group of citizens in the political process, there can never be full and complete agreement. that is, there are differences of opinion that, no matter how much deliberation and participation you have, will always be irreconcilable differences. thus, by increasing the amount of participation in political debates, one increases the likelihood of such irreconcilable differences, thereby making it more difficult to reach a compromise or mutually agreeable solution.

I want to ask if, instead of increasing the quantity of participation, we can instead improve the quality of participation? trying to involve every single citizen not only runs up against theoretical problems in terms of irreconcilable deliberation, but it also runs up against practical problems in terms requesting participation from those who are disinterested and/or unmotivated. again, I’m not arguing that a government controlled by the few is better. rather, I’m arguing that those who participate in government (a) should be those who are most interested and motivated to do so and (b) should participate in a deep, meaningful, effective way. while a fully detailed exploration of what might be meant by deep, meaningful, effective participation is probably beyond the current scope, I’ll suggest here three potential ways in which such participation might manifest: consideration of long term impacts, consideration of all parties involved, and consideration underlying assumptions. while I’d like to pursue each of these at length in future posts, it’s much more realistic that to suggest instead that those interested should start a discussion in the comments.

it does a body good (?)

here's a quote from someone commenting on somewhat spurious results in metaViz, specifically, the metaphor that "America is like milk":

I disagree; I do not think that America is very much like milk at all. Milk is thick, smooth, and sweet, while America is rather...gritty. America is like Metamucil.

some of the replies are just as good.

Yet America very rarely gives you your daily recommended fiber, so, perhaps America is just muddy water?

America is like milk in the sense that new immigrants tend to get homogenized.

absolutely fabulous, I couldn't have asked for a better alternative metaphor.

a new metaphor on election day

how long did you stand in line to vote? I spent about an hour and forty-five minutes at my local polling place this morning. and based on what I hear from other parts of the country, that wasn't even that bad.

while you're hanging around waiting for the results to be counted (which is probably starting about now on the east coast), here's an interesting metaphor that metaViz turned up recently: a candidate is like a theory. I think it provides a great alternative to the common adversarial rhetoric surrounding political campaigns (even the word "campaign" is reminiscent of war). click through for a full description and a link to the visualization.

metaphors in political speeches

as I mentioned previously, I've been spending a lot of time recently working on metaViz, a computational system designed to identify conceptual metaphors in political blogs. metaViz also includes analysis of the campaign speeches from McCain and Obama (presidential candidates from the two major political parties). there's a UCI press release that gives an example interpretation of some of the results. I think the major value of the press release is that it shows how the system is meant to be used and how one might go about interpreting the metaphors that it identifies. check it out, and let me know what you think.

metaViz (i.e, what I've been up to lately)

I'll admit, I haven't been blogging as much as I'd like to this summer. most of my time has been spent developing metaViz, an application designed to allow blog readers to see potential conceptual metaphors in political blogs. here's a blurb about the project:

metaViz is a system that finds conceptual metaphors in political blogs, displays the metaphors in an interactive visual fashion, and lets you look at the different ways in which many concepts are framed in those blogs. For example, a 'campaign' is often talked about like a 'war' -- both are 'fought,' 'won,' 'lost,' 'survived,' etc. The goal is to foster critical thinking, getting people to think about what's being said not just by the words themselves, but between and behind the words.

if you have a chance, check it out, and feel free to pass it along to anyone you think might be interested. if you have any thoughts about the project, drop us a line, we'd love to hear from you.

link to a demo

I've been a little taciturn of late with respect to blogging, not so much for lack of ideas, but for lack of time. to hear a bit about on what I've been working that's taken so much of my time, check out this post about a demo we did today.

I may very well be blogging over at Calit2.Life pretty soon, in which case I'll cross-link from here.

patriotism and matriotism

about a week ago, John Holbo from Crooked Timber posted in reaction to a discussion of what constitutes patriotism. there are some really interesting questions raised, including (but not limited to): can patriotism condone or include a critical stance towards one's country? do liberals and conservatives have different versions of patriotism? does patriotism mean thinking your country is objectively the best, or is it more akin to familial love or loyalty to a sports team? is patriotism an import quality for all citizens to have, or is it essentially a military virtue? if an individual is patriotic, must s/he love everything about her/his country, or is s/he allowed to love only some aspects thereof and wish to remake others? near the end of the post, the blogger quotes Carl Schurz: "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." I think that does an excellent job of summing up what patriotism is (or perhaps should be) about, and I highly recommend reading the posted linked above, as it's got some great thoughts on the topic.

however, what I want to discuss here is not patriotism per se, but the language we use to think about (and by implication the concepts we use to think about) patriotism. at one point in the post, Jonah Goldberg is said to have quoted Ramesh Ponnuru as saying, "can't love of my country be like love of my mother?" Holbo says this conception, rather than patriotism as thinking your country is objectively the best, is pretty much spot-on the way to approach the issue.

If you love America because it is objectively the best at doing certain things that’s fine but not patriotism. That’s like loving your football team only so long as its winning, which is sort of the opposite of team loyalty. As I was saying: who thinks that loving your mother means loving everything about her to the point of being opposed to your mom improving herself or getting her act together or overcoming her problems? If your mom has problems – maybe really serious problems – and your brothers or sisters are trying to help, do you stand athwart the train of helping mom crying ‘stop!’ On the grounds that you love her too much to bear to see her become better, hence un-mom-like?

what's interesting here, to me, is the use of "mother" as the image for country. not least is this striking because of Lakoff's discussion of the "strict father" vs "nurturant parent" metaphors for conservative and progressive politics, respectively. what's interesting is why patriotism is not described as loving your country like you love your father. the etymology of patriotism and patriot come from the Latin and Greek meaning, roughly, "of the same father." given this etymology, and given Lakoff's assertions about conservative philosophy framing government as a strict father, why does Ponnuru describing loving one's country like loving one's mother rather than like loving one's father? I have a few guesses.

first, I think it's partly because it's because Ponnuru (and Goldberg, for that matter) are male. for a man, loving your mother is expected. loving your father is perfectly reasonable, as well, but it's a different sort of love. it's the love that is at most times gruff and distances, and it only comes through in bear-hug embraces at special occasions like graduations, weddings, and perhaps some holidays. it's not the kind of interaction that's usually associated with love. with your mother, though, it's much more of a caring, comforting sort of love. I think, implicitly, Ponnuru, and through citation Goldberg, are here trying to set up a certain sort of framing of how they think about country and government, that it is not a somewhat distances, gruff interaction, but that citizen and country truly care for each other.

second, there are different perceptions about correcting mother vs correcting father. in the scenario one describes above, it's easy to envision gather with siblings to try to correct some of Mom's more self-destructive behaviors. but can we really envision correcting Dad? I don't think so, at least not as readily (I'm sure that those more familiar than I with feminist literature on authority in the family would have more informed things to say about this than I do). given the etymology of patriotism, I'm a little surprised at the idea of loving your country like you love your mother, but given the argument being made, it's not a surprising framing at all. if we're making the point that patriotism and desiring to change/correct your country are not mutually exclusive, it seems much more advantageous to frame country as mother than as father.

so who cares? does it really matter if we love our country like we love our mother or like we love our father? yes, it matters a great deal, partially by virtue of the fact that many people often tend to think that it doesn't matter all that much. using the metaphor that your country is like your mother has different entailments that your country is like your father. by using the language associated with maternal, rather than paternal, relationships, the speaker invokes (albeit somewhat subconsciously) a whole series of entailments and implications about interacting with one's country, based on interacting with one's mother. I think what's important here is not the specific metaphor being used, whether it's mother or father. what is important is recognizing that a metaphor is being invoked at all and questioning what that metaphor implies, what is doesn't imply, and what alternative metaphors might be used. how would patriotism be different if we thought about it instead being like loving your father? or your grandparent? or your uncle? what about being like your relationship with your coach? your boss? your therapist? how about a different metaphor entirely that doesn't anthropomorphize one's country and treat it as a sentient human being, but rather frames the country a complex entity whose actions arise from the combination of many individual actions? in this regard, the country as a sports team metaphor might be better, but there is another whole slew of entailments and implications concomitant with the sports team metaphor that are really beyond the scope of this (already somewhat longish) post.

suffice it to say, I think there needs to be some critical questioning of the ways in which we talk about and think about these central, key political concepts, such as patriotism.

to drill or not to drill or ...

I was listening this morning to a story on NPR about Bush's expected lifting of the executive ban on off-shore drilling. in immediate impact, this doesn't mean a whole bunch, since the legislative ban has not (yet) been lifted by congress. rather than discuss all the politics of this particular issue (e.g., the argument that off shore drilling won't actually affect gas prices), there were two aspects of the story on which I'd like to comment.

first, there was a woman from Alabama saying that her state was doing its part in helping with the oil crisis, so why shouldn't Florida do the same. she went further, talking about how oil rigs are not all that disruptive. "...it's just interesting little blips on the horizon. It's just part of this area." people think that turbines for generating wind power are eyesores on their hillsides, but they will tolerate oil rigs dotting their horizon?

second, what really baffles me about this issue is that most of the coverage I've seen and heard treats the issue in a rather binary fashion, looking at arguments for and against off shore drilling. what I don't understand is why people aren't challenging the need for oil in the first place. rather than spending time, money, effort, labor, etc. on extracting oil from the Gulf of Mexico (which, by the way, is estimated to hold enough oil reserves to meet the US's needs for about six months), why not spend those resources on developing alternatives so that we don't need the oil to begin with? not only does this save us even having a debate about off shore drilling, but it actually does something to help reduce the causes of global climate change.

I'm certain there are other people making this argument. it just irritates me that, to my knowledge, it doesn't seem to get addressed in any of the major media.

...and effect

about a month ago, I posted about the political views slot on facebook profiles and the somewhat puzzling set of options it presents. later, Sam notified me that apparently facebook had expanded its political vocabulary. instead of listing not a spectrum from conservative to liberal (with libertarian tossed in for good measure), they now provide a free response slot, similar to that for religious views, except that facebook now has a compendium of political parties in almost every country around the world from which users can choose. while the party system has its own problems, this is probably an improvement over the single conservative-liberal dimensions, especially for countries where there are more than two large, dominant parties.

this also made me wonder, did facebook really read by blog, as Sam had suggested? the more likely story is that on the official facebook dispatch about the feature, that "users have often asked for the ability to select from more options to describe their political viewpoint, so [they] expanded the list." furthermore, I highly doubt they could have compiled that extensive a list of political parties from around the world in the 10 days between my post and the announcement of the feature's release. still... it sort of makes you wonder (or at least it makes me wonder).

political affiliation

while adjusting some privacy settings on facebook, I noticed the profile spots for Political Views and Regilious Views. political is a drop box with pre-specified options, while religious is an open-response text box. this alone is cause for interest. are political views more pidgeonhole-able or easily classifiable? are the facebook creators more worried about offending someone by excluding their religion than their politics? then I saw the specific options listed for Political Views:

Very Liberal
Liberal
Moderate
Conservative
Very Conservative
Apathetic
Libertarian
Other

wow. I really had to read it twice. the only one that's actually a part is Libertarian (I don't think there's an Apathetic party, as I suspect it might be a little oxymoronic).

however, this is troubling at a deeper level. what if I'm morally conservative (e.g. against gay-marriage and abortion), but I believe in expansive governmental social programs like welfare and public health care? is that moderate? to me, it sounds both very conservative and very liberal, just in different ways. this sort of polarization is really neither helpful nor healthy, but, I think, is quite damaging. it seems like just the sort of thing against which John Stewart railed on Crossfire several years ago. trying to put political views on a single axis like this not only makes it difficult for me to express my identity (something that facebook should help me do), but it really reinforces this obfuscation of the complexities of our current political situation.

...or you could just be libertarian.

issues, anyone?

I was just listening to a report on NPR about surveys of people likely to vote in the California primaries. for republicans, the number one issue was illegal immigration. for democrats, the top issues were health care, the war in iraq, and jobs and the economy. OK, sure, none of that is particularly surprising.

what is surprising, and even I think galling, is that the environment doesn't seem to be a big issue for anyone. what's going on here? despite increased awareness in the news, popular media (e.g. Inconvenient Truth or 11th Hour), and public opinion, the candidates in the primaries don't seem to be talking about it very much. why not? I think there's a lot of environment good will out there, and candidates could do well to capitalize on it. if a person could show how s/he could help the economy, decrease the national debt, provide health care, and do it all in an environmentally conscious and sustainable way, virtually nothing could stand against that kind of platform. so why not do it?

someone with a clue

I just read a great piece about the horrible VA Tech shootings (via Liz Losh). the author, Siva Vaidhyanathan makes some great points.

As a culture, we are very bad at thinking about technology. We look to it either as something to fear or as a panacea for the flaws of the human condition. Technology is neither. It is merely an extension of our own wills and capabilities.

this is great, especially since I'll be presenting a paper in a couple weeks entitled "Questioning the Technological Panacea" that critiques a rhetorical trend to portray technology for the solution to any sort of problem, be it social, economical, educational, whatever. I'm not arguing against technological solutions, but rather that we might be better served by a pause for consideration before blugdeoning every problem we see with the technology hammer. not only as a culture are we bad at thinking about technology, but perhaps even the technology designers are rather bad at it in their own way.

it goes on

After 9/11 we wasted billions on biometric and data-mining technologies to protect ourselves from rare and limited dangers like hijackings, anthrax epidemics and chemical weapon attacks. Yet we defunded efforts to attack real killers like cancer and real lifesavers like public transportation.

beautiful. I don't know if the point could be made better.

go read the rest of the piece, it's all good stuff.