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.
The contradiction is easy to resolve. I say that what are being called echo chambers are often normal conversations that fill a particular and important social role.
In the Salon article, I say that the media truly fit the description of an echo chamber. I don’t say or imply that they caused Dean’s political demise. Nor do I believe that the media were the main cause of the campaign’s failure.
The person who ran the Dean blog tells me they only deleted a handful of comments. Too bad yours was one. Glad they restored it.
If you weren’t looking to deflect the blame for Dean’s collapse onto the media (rather than the insular culture created by the technology), why even bring media into the discussion? Winer’s point was about blogs, not about the Big Media, and the characteristics of the one can’t be substituted for those of the other. All along you’ve been denying there’s any substance to the Dean critiques tied to the technology, but post-meltdown the evidence is staring you in the face.
All social groups have “homophily”, as Apophenia points out. The question is whether the use of technology such as blog makes this natural tendency of social groups more or less intense, more or less destructive, or more or less resistant to criticism than it is in face-to-face, organic groups that aren’t formed through technology.
It’s been common knowledge for a many years now that people are more rude on-line than in person. The question before the house is whether on-line groups are more fascist than organic ones, and it seems to me the answer is “yes”, although YMMV.
You’re right, I think, that Dean’s campaign kept on focusing on bringing in just one type of supporter for way too long. I gave money to Dean early and often, but around November I was sort of ready for him to stop pandering to lefties like me and start swerving towards the center, and was sort of surprised that he didn’t. I believe Trippi had a hand in keeping Dean from tacking to the center until it was too late, arguing, I suppose, that people still weren’t paying attention to the campaign so it was okay to keep on making red-meat speeches.
It’s true that Bush’s campaign will probably be better than Dean’s at emphasizing management over message when it comes to the mechanical tasks of assembling and satisfying supporters. An NPR piece on the Bush campaign (aired in December, I believe) noted that when the Bush campaign does conference calls with its troops out in the field there’s someone taking attendance, and absentees are “noted in the building,” as it were. That will probably pay off for them down the line.
But the only way this relates to George W. Bush’s business career is that it’ll be dependent on large infusions of cash from folks with an agenda. Luckily for Bush, having more money than anyone has ever before required for a presidential campaign will probably mean plenty of prototypes are being tried and tested behind the scenes. I think it’s better to look at the Bush campaign not as a Fortune 1000 company but as DARPA. For example, even though getting Bush through the primaries is just a formality, who’s to say that there isn’t some experimenting going on right now in, say, the California state primary to figure out if some turnout approaches work better than others?
Re the Dean campaign: There is nothing new about mobilizing fanatics in a political campaign. The Democrat and Republican party platforms have always been full of ideas that resonate only with the extremists who volunteer (or work for very little money) on political campaigns. How many of these party platform planks actually get turned into law, or even policy, when the candidates are elected to office?
For example, in proposing a Constitutional amendment to define marriage, Bush and advisors know that it would take years for passage in Congress and ratification by the States. It will probably never happen, as many conservatives think that defining marriage is a States’ Rights issue, but the appearance of standing up for traditional marriage is enough for now. I’m sure the Bush campaign will mobilize a huge number of precinct walkers to counter the threat of gay marriage.
I agree that Dean was badly advised and should have veered toward the center much sooner. I think he and his advisors wanted to wring a few hundred thousand more contributions out of their grass roots fanatics before they left them behind.
Also, Trippi was filling his pockets with commissions on all those big media buys. Greed is an ugly thing.