There’s an old Usenet saying that when you throw a rock into a pack of dogs you can tell which one you hit because he yelps the loudest. Dave Weinberger is yelping pretty loud about the echo chamber discussion Dave Winer wants to hold at this year’s BloggerCon. Weinberger makes two contradictory arguments, first that … Continue reading “The Meme Factory”
There’s an old Usenet saying that when you throw a rock into a pack of dogs you can tell which one you hit because he yelps the loudest. Dave Weinberger is yelping pretty loud about the echo chamber discussion Dave Winer wants to hold at this year’s BloggerCon.
Weinberger makes two contradictory arguments, first that there is no such thing as an Internet echo chamber, and second that echo chambers are a necessary feature of all social groups. If this line of reasoning seems evasive, you understand the yelping analogy. (He expands on these arguments in today’s Salon.com, where he ends up blaming the Dean collapse on Big Media.)
Many Deaniacs are uncomfortable talking about echo chamber blogs, not just Weinberger, for very obvious reasons. The Dean Campaign positioned itself as a different kind of campaign, one in which the voters and supporters had some actual input into campaign decision-making. This implies an interactive vehicle for taking and responding to feedback, and a general openness to it.
Some feedback is critical, and this is (one of many places) where the Dean Campaign failed to live up to its promises to The People. Critical comments left on Blog for America were deleted by campaign censors, and not heeded by the campaign. One example: when Dean was guest-blogging on Lessig, I posted some comments on both sites, only to have the Deaniac censors delete them. There was a fuss, and some of my comments were restored.
But the censorship policy continued, and the Dean Campaign found itself out-of-touch with real people who hadn’t drunk the Deaniac Kool-Aid. And we know what happened next.
So rather than pretend that the Deaniac Echo Chamber wasn’t both real and destructive, thoughtful people want to talk about it.
That being said, a couple of caveats: I don’t think anybody is suggesting that the Internet is nothing but one big echo chamber, and I don’t think anybody is suggesting that social groups don’t require allegiance or reinforce affiliation. Rather, I think the idea is that the blog strategy contributed in a major way to Dean’s spectacular Iowa collapse, from which trauma his campaign never recovered. And lest we forget, this was a momentous event, the likes of which we haven’t seen in American politics in my lifetime: a candidate went from leading all the polls and outfundraising the entire field to winning nowhere and bankrupt in about two weeks. So we’re talking about both the rise and the fall of the Dean campaign, and you can’t very well blame both vectors on Big Media or any other bogeyman.
I’ve said before what I think Dean’s problem was, and at the expense of annoying Mike Nelson, I’d like to say it again: the technology Dean employed allowed him to collect a small army of fanatic followers at a time when nobody else had any supporters at all. Their fanatical nature turned off normal people all over the country, attracted more of the same kind of people, and pushed Dean to the nutty fringe. The Dean campaign focused on the numbers, especially the fundraising numbers, and ignored the emotional defects that Deaniacs brought to the campaign and the corrosive effect they had on reaching out to voters.
It’s understandable that they were mislead by the numbers. Had they amassed as much support as they did by conventional means, they truly would have been comfortably ahead in Iowa.
But the advent of e-campaigning means that you have to look at fundraising success and rally attendance in a different light. No Democrat had ever tried to raise money in small amounts from individual donors before; they rely on unions and fat cats much more than Republicans do. And there are so many people in America willing to sink $100 into a campaign they were surprised by the results.
Sophisticated recruiting tools require sophisticated management and analysis, and e-campaigning has got the one but not the other. Filling in the management part of e-campaigning is going to be the great historical challenge of the 2004 campaign, and we shouldn’t be surprised if the candidate with the Harvard MBA does this better than those dyed in the fiber of traditional politics.
The former Dean supporter who leads the AFSCME union now says that Dean is “nuts”, but his campaign dynamics are familiar to those who’ve followed politics for any length of time. Dan Lungren’s campaign for governor of California against Gray Davis in 1999 had exactly the same set of problems: he started his campaign by speaking to party faithful all across America, and when he started campaigning in Los Angeles he acted like he was speaking to pro-lifers in the Midwest. The rest is history.
(note: parts of this post originally appeared in Weinberger’s comments.)
UPDATE: Empty Bottle explains how the Meme Factory/Echo Chamber works.
Apophenia says the echo chamber effect in social groups is called homophily.
