E-learning Curve Blog at Edublogs

In yesterday’s post I alluded to the idea that Barack Obama’s recent US Presidential Election win could, in no small part, be attributed to his effective utilization of social media, including the use of tools and technologies like YouTube, Facebook, blogs, and even PayPal (and other online payment solutions). Citing James Surowiecki’s 2004 text The Wisdom of Crowds, I indicated the characteristics of crowd wisdom, and outlined the four criteria that separate wise crowds from irrational ones.

Social networking guru Clay Shirky describes the phenomenon of group dynamics mediated through Web 2.0 technologies as a “Run-time effect:”

You cannot specify in advance what the group will do, and so you can’t substantiate in software everything you expect to have happen… [but social patterns emerge] that …are core to any software that supports larger, long-lived groups.

…there’s this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it’s subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we’ve seen come up over and over and over again in online communities.

I would assert that this is the group run-time effect that was leveraged by the US Democratic Party, and that ultimately galvanized such a substantial number of voters to become involved in the democratic process. Shirky describes a number of ways in which these social patterns manifest themselves including:

Table 1 Run-time effects of groups

These group patterns emerge on the Internet, not because of the software, but because it’s being used by people.

An Idea whose Time has Come

I would suggest that one of the primary reasons that social networking software played such a significant role in the 2008 US Presidential Election was precisely because of the nebulousness and loose structure of the read / write Web. But before we can look at this, it’s worthwhile to understand the role of traditional media in distributing information. As I’m not a broadcast media expert, I will investigate this through the filter of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model.*

First presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the “Propaganda model” views the private media as businesses selling a non-media product — readers and demographic groups — to other businesses (advertisers). The theory postulates five general classes of “filters” that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five filters are:

1. Ownership of the medium
2. Medium’s funding sources
3. Sourcing
4. Flak
5. Anti-communist ideology

I would strongly argue for the position espoused by Herman & Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent that as mass media news outlets are run by large corporations, they are under the same competitive pressures as other businesses. According to the authors, the pressure to create a stable, profitable business invariably distorts the kinds of news items reported, as well as the manner and emphasis in which they are reported. This does not occur as a consequence of market selection: those businesses who happen to favor profits over news quality tend to survive, while those that present a more accurate picture of the world tend to become marginalized. In a nutshell, the Republicans had the politically conservative Fox News to deliver their campaign messages (reflecting the vested interests of powerful lobby groups, trans-national corporations, and the military-industrial complex in maintaining the status quo).

However, ranged against this (probably for the first time in history) was the availability of an alternative set of media channels to disseminate information combined with a new generation of voters familiar and comfortable with the media supported by the Internet.

And that’s what I’ll look at next time.

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References:

Herman, E.S., Chomsky, N (2002). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books.

Shirky, C. (2003). A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. A speech at ETech, April, 2003. [Internet]. Available from: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html Retrieved 14 October 2008.

Surowiecki J. (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Doubleday.

* …and yes, I’m aware of, and entitled to my own biases – IMFB

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