Is it? I Don’t have a copy in front of me, but I recall Bowling Alone being very careful about the impact of the internet on social capital. Putnam concluded that it would certainly mean a change in the structure of social capital formation – but not that it was part of its collapse. He said the evidence wasn’t in yet, but did point out it had the potential to underpin an increase in social capital.

And on TV: watching news and current affairs programmes actually correlated to higher social capital; soap operas to lower.

http://lessig.org/blog/2006/04/benklers_book_is_out.html

You might also enjoy:

http://sethf.com/essays/major/greplaw-interview.php

Regarding local journalism vs local politics, the similarity is not merely “have both gotten a lot of hype”, but that the magic pixie-dust, I mean, theorizing about how the Internet acts to foster them, are very similar. And they’re often related as e.g. a poster-child for hyperlocal journalism is hyperlocal politics, the supposed abilities of bloggers to cover the city council or school board and so have those civic aspects of the press which are being destroyed now, taken over and restored by, drumroll, “The Internet”. So I don’t think of it in terms of one’s journalism, one’s politics, end of story, but rather that the fairy-tale told for one is turning out to be nonsense, that is important (not conclusive, not dispositive, but fact trumps fiction) evidence against the fairy-tale told for another.

I grasp the political science argument – I’m saying the chain of reasoning applied to that argument here has a logical flaw, where the statements gets shifted and make it a logical hash. The reasoning error in your restatement is right here: “The result of these two technological changes has been a decrease in political engagement and activity. Putnam, in Bowling Alone, sought to assimilate the Internet to this broader set of arguments. However, MoveOn presents a substantial anomaly for this argument”. I’m saying in order to make the statement “MoveOn presents a substantial anomaly for this argument”, then “this argument” either has to be made absurdly extreme (roughly: “The Internet could never, in any way, in any manner, be used organizationally to promote political engagement and activity in the smallest way”) or it’s talking past a more moderate claim (roughly: “The Internet has an overall negative influence on political engagement and activity” – in which case it’s not a refutation to find a positive effect somewhere, the claim was about the overall results when the positive and negatives are added up).

Going out on a limb, I think Putnam’s that’s-not-what-I-meant would be here:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/DETOC/assoc/bowling.html

“These new mass-membership organizations are plainly of great political importance. From the point of view of social connectedness, however, they are sufficiently different from classic “secondary associations” that we need to invent a new label—perhaps “tertiary associations.” For the vast majority of their members, the only act of membership consists in writing a check for dues or perhaps occasionally reading a newsletter. Few ever attend any meetings of such organizations, and most are unlikely ever (knowingly) to encounter any other member. The bond between any two members of the Sierra Club is less like the bond between any two members of a gardening club and more like the bond between any two Red Sox fans (or perhaps any two devoted Honda owners): they root for the same team and they share some of the same interests, but they are unaware of each other’s existence. Their ties, in short, are to common symbols, common leaders, and perhaps common ideals, but not to one another. The theory of social capital argues that associational membership should, for example, increase social trust, but this prediction is much less straightforward with regard to membership in tertiary associations. From the point of view of social connectedness, the Environmental Defense Fund and a bowling league are just not in the same category.”

[Or MoveOn!]

While not identical, similar arguments have been made for both, and I’d say hyperlocal journalism is a reasonable proxy for local group politics in the very rough context.

doesn’t help. The first part of the claim seems to me to go something like this. (a) Internet-based community groups and for-profit hyperlocal journalism have both gotten a lot of hype. (b) they both use the Internet, and both are local. (c ) ergo the failure of for-profit micro journalism demonstrates the failure of not-for-profit Internet based community groups. Or something. The second part of the claim (the “reasonable proxy” bit) isn’t an argument, but a mere restatement of your position. I still don’t see why on earth the failure of local news-sites to turn a profit has anything to do with the success or failure of community groups, especially when so much of the broader argument that you’re trying to engage with turns on the differences between for-profit and not-for-profit cooperative activities.

You also seem to me to be systematically discounting what is interesting about MoveOn. It’s pretty clear, surely, that MoveOn isn’t just using the email and the other forms of Internet-based communication as some class of an appendage to its more serious activities? What is unique about the organization is that it is pretty well entirely Internet based. The Internet isn’t just an aside to MoveOn – it’s crucial to their organizational model. Thus, the causal chain is that the Internet here is a necessary, but not sufficient cause for the phenomenon observed; it is extremely unlikely that the kinds of canvassing that MoveOn-inspired activists did would have taken place without an Internet-like technology to have allowed MoveOn to get the message out, and coordinate local activities in the first place. This means that the MoveOn case is highly relevant to broader arguments about the fate of mass political movements, parties, and groups in politics. Roughly speaking, the political science argument has gone something like this. New technologies, most importantly the TV have weakened social groups as people move away from various forms of social engagement. This has been exacerbated by the decision of parties to move away from local organization and involvement towards TV advertising in order to mobilize publics. The result of these two technological changes has been a decrease in political engagement and activity. Putnam, in Bowling Alone, sought to assimilate the Internet to this broader set of arguments. However, MoveOn presents a substantial anomaly for this argument – it is a case of a quite successful mass social movement organized in a way that would have been impossible to carry off without the Internet, which is demonstrably increasing political engagement (pushing up voting numbers). This is not what someone reading Putnam would expect to see. It is, as the paper’s authors argue, a demonstration that membership organizations can still play a vital role, in part thanks to the way in which the Internet allows a group to carry out a very wide scale but ideologically targeted mobilization campaign.

More generally, I’d like to see some more meaty background to your arguments. After reading your comments over the last couple of years on this set of issues, I’m pretty sure that you don’t like people who over-hype the Internet, which is fine, but I still don’t have a clue as to what your own positive analysis is. Do you think that the Internet is a bad thing overall or a good thing overall? Or, if that is too vague as it probably is, what are the conditions under which the Internet can or cannot work to underpin cooperation? Any time I’ve tried to push you on this, or on the specifics of your disagreements with Benkler (who offers, for better or worse, the most coherent defence of the possibilities for cooperation on the Internet), you’ve declined, on the grounds that you don’t want to get flamed. Fair enough if this would hurt your career or whatever, but it does mean that arguing with you sometimes feels like chasing shadows.

I actually agree with the “complement” vs. “substitute” point vivian made in #18, but I also think there’s a troubling marketing effort to use the “complement” idea to deflect the problem of “substitute” (note, not that I’m accusing Henry, just giving the perspective that’s driving my comments).

What do you mean by “then “The Internet” added somewhere for slot #2”? What kind of statements do you mean specifically?

1) This paper proves face-to-face campaigning increases participation
(stipulated)
2) A political organization can send its members orders over the Internet to engage in face-to-face campaigning
(what MoveOn did)

Therefore … putting these together … “The Internet can be used to increase participation!” QED.

See the problem? It just cries out for Putnam to say “That’s not what I meant”.

In terms of a serious and coherent intellectual position, do you see the logical problem in the above? ANYTHING workable can be put into slot #1, then “The Internet” added somewhere for slot #2, and a triumphant proclamation made. It’s a trivial usage masquerading as a profound insight. It can’t be meaningful, since it’s a kind of fill-in-the-blank “MadLib” of an argument.

Note I grasped the result of the paper – it’s the reasoning used to draw a supposedly non-trivial implication about Internet effects which I’m disputing. I’m saying that supposed rebuttal has something like a fallacy of ambiguity embedded in it, where different senses of the same word are confusing.

I disagree that the failure of hyperlocal journalism is irrelevant to the aside about local group politics. While not identical, similar arguments have been made for both, and I’d say hyperlocal journalism is a reasonable proxy for local group politics in the very rough context. Quite significantly, the inability of those ventures to sustain themselves provides a crucial perspective against the cherry-picking rhetoric. It’s a measurement versus the anecdote or “ringer”. I wouldn’t claim that article was the last word on the topic, but I do think there’s an aspect of beautiful theory slain by ugly fact.

Regarding reading Benkler, in one of the threads I pointed to a long discussion where I went through several passages in WoN and pointed out exactly where I thought they were completely off-base. It doesn’t do any good, the only thing that’s likely to happen is I’ll get flamed. In brief, I think he ignores some of the negatives behind the “co-operation” which shades into “exploitation”, and puts far too much of a happy face on some examples which are very troubling (anti-straw-man: he doesn’t say there’s no problem, but in my view he brushes off and dismisses much which I think is extremely important and would “harsh the buzz”). And the book is too often being used as some sort of totem, which doesn’t impress me given how flawed I think it is in the first place.

Nor, contrary to your uncalled-for accusation, did I engage in any slippery rhetorical tactics. Instead, I simply reiterated a point that you seem to insist on not understanding. The article that you linked to is – bluntly – irrelevant to my aside about local group politics. The viability or lack of same of for-profit micro-journalism sites has nothing to do with the topic that Putnam, Middleton and Green are arguing about, which (I will repeat) is the ways in which the Internet helps, or hampers, group-based politics, and hence affects political participation more generally. Nor does it have the implications for local community groups that you suggest. Finally, it doesn’t even provide evidence for your more general set of arguments against people like Benkler. I’d suggest that you go back and read The Wealth of Networks – the precise point Benkler is making is that the social effects of the Internet are less about enabling new business models, than about enabling people to engage in non-market forms of social cooperation. Which is a claim that is rather conspicuously supported by the piece that you link to. At this stage, given that you’re accusing me of engaging in various tactics of evasion, while ducking and weaving yourself around the key points made in this post, and in the article that it linked to, I’m not seeing that there is very much point to me engaging further with you on this.

Wasn’t there a thread a while back about the rhetorical tactic of making a grandiose-sounding claim, and when pressed, retreating to a trivial claim? Of course “there are local not-for profit community groups using WWW/email to organize themselves around certain issues” – in the sense that you could always find a bulletin board or web site or mailing-list about some issue, and then cherry-pick a good one. But the key question – which is too often hand-waved away – is how much, how significant? The article on the failure of the highly-hyped hyperlocal journalism, provides significant evidence that the overall effect is not much. Certainly not as much as the look-at-the-little-blogging-bears sort of anecdotal argument favored in certain quarters.

Where I think this is all very dangerous is not in terms of dueling-punditry, but when it starts turning into an argument against the promoting of civic structures which aren’t well-supported by the market, on the basis of the rationale that “The Internet” makes such structures both obsolete and conveniently now market-based. Not to mention the business of web hucksters who will happily sell the latest “civic software” snake-oil to cure the community blues.

I suppose what I’m trying to say in the above is that, independent of whatever Putnam himself may be arguing, the MoveOn canvassing result as counter-example is either being addressed to an absurd extreme argument, or talking past a more moderate argument about how Internet communication intrinsically cannot substitute for face-to-face neighbor communication.

No, it’s making the obvious point that internet communication doesn’t substitute for f2f, but it can complement f2f the same way the telephone did, and it can be used effectively, or not, and estimates the size of the effect in one particular example. This is the point you make over and over, only it’s in a form only political scientist semi-quant types would enjoy. The argument about substitution isn’t especially moderate, it’s just luddite. You use it to help coordinate door-to-door, just like you use the phone to help coordinate who goes where. Look elsewhere for attempts to measure whether Kos and LGF are increasing turnout – this ain’t that argument. Frankly, I expect neither you nor I expect any results from that kind of study, and I doubt Middleton and Green, Henry, etc. have higher expectations there.

Then again, money isn’t necessarily the issue, says Jan Schaffer, J-Lab’s executive director and the author of a report accompanying the survey. “When they talk about success, they’re not talking about revenue,” she says. “They’re talking about the impact they’ve had on their communities.” She adds, “I’m not sure in this iteration, these [operators] see themselves as making big salaries and having big offices. I’m not saying it won’t happen somewhere down the road, but in this iteration it isn’t there yet.”

One could certainly argue that there is too much going on for someone who doesn’t appreciate the miniature panopticon of the local busybodies (but that is a different critique altogether). Nor is the linkage to hobby sites absent – there’s a lot of local dog-owner groups etc who are organizing through the Internet (and sometimes beginning to have a voice in local politics as a result). It may be that this is a phenomenon of the big metropolitan cities (small rural communities don’t need it as much). I very strongly suspect that class plays a big role in this too (i.e. that there will be much more of this in middle-class suburbs than in poor ones). But there is (at least in the DC suburbs, which is the place closest to me), a lot going on, and I have some grounds from Laura and others to believe that the same is true of suburbs around NY too. I would like to see some proper research on this, but there’s enough at the semi-anecdotal level to convince me that there is a there there, even if the size is uncertain and the distribution almost certainly uneven.

The other new factor, compared to previous studies, is nationwide voter databases. These databases were not available to Democrats prior to 2004, so targeting decisions were made on a geographical basis. The individual level data makes it possible to identify potential supporters in areas that traditionally could not be contacted effectively, as mentioned in the paper. So this study should be showing the effectiveness of canvassing in isolation from other voter contact operations, aside from advertising.

Henry – “Yochai Benkler talks about the way in which the Internet enables local group politics”

Bah, humbug.

http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4343

People like to claim the Internet enables local group politics, since it makes a great story, and they can cherry-pick the good cases and ignore all the bad ones.

[N.b. – of course don’t confuse this with hobby interest around a particular topic, not the same thing. Who knew there were so many fans of [insert favorite oddity here] ]