I’ve just “linked a paper”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/polsci/2007/07/middleton_and_green_on_whether.html at my political science papers weblog that seems potentially pretty interesting to CT readers and others. Joel Middleton and Donald Green have written a “piece”:http://www.yale.edu/csap/seminars/middleton.pdf that tries to gauge the effects of MoveOn’s canvassers on voting turn-out. They estimate this by looking at situations where (a) the boundary of two voting precincts bisects a street so that people on one side of the street are in one precinct, and those on the other side are in the other precinct, and (b) where one of these districts had MoveOn organizers canvassing prospective voters, and the other didn’t. They then look at the voters on each side of the relevant street – this should eliminate potential bias (there’s pretty good reason to think that voters on different sides of the same street aren’t going to be measurably different from each other). When they do this, they find that people contacted by MoveOn canvasers seems to be 7% more likely to vote than the control population, which is a pretty significant difference. As Gerber and Green say, this is a nice result for the election turnout literature. But it has wider implications, as they note in an aside. There’s a lot of talk from Robert Putnam and others about how people are losing ‘social capital’ as the Internet becomes ever more important. Regardless of the underlying merits of the social capital thesis (personally, I’m pretty skeptical of it, at least in Putnam’s formulation), this provides smoking gun evidence that the Internet can enable greater participation than would otherwise have been possible, through allowing decentralized movements such as MoveOn to get the vote out more effectively.
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JRoth 07.06.07 at 3:19 pm
Not to quibble, but at least in my city, streets are often the dividing lines between districts and neighborhoods, and the neighborhoods eye one another suspiciously across the double yellow stripe. My house is worth between 1/2 and 1/3 of what it would be worth just 2 blocks away (I’m one block from one of these dividing streets).
I doubt that this is common enough to skew the results of the study (7% is a pretty big number for something like this), but it’s certainly a consideration, particularly since US districts are generally gerrymandered precisely in order to homogenize (for instance, to create a majority-black district).
Brian Weatherson 07.06.07 at 3:42 pm
Districts may be gerrymandered, but it will be rare I think for *precincts* to be gerrymandered, which I thought was the relevant unit of measure here. I’m also a little suspicious that houses either side of a road are statistically alike, especially if that road is a precinct boundary. (I’d guess that the precinct boundaries are major roads, which make for larger socioeconomic differences.) But still, 7% is a large number, even if MoveOn did a little selecting in looking for places where their message would be well-received.
jet 07.06.07 at 3:57 pm
Couldn’t this be validated by checking housing prices in adjacent precincts? Homes in the precinct next to mine are 2-3 more expensive.
Stuart 07.06.07 at 6:40 pm
The stuff about how similar (or not) the districts canvassed and their controls were is covered on page 10 and Table 1.
Stuart 07.06.07 at 6:50 pm
But still, 7% is a large number, even if MoveOn did a little selecting in looking for places where their message would be well-received.
They did a lot of this, but the point in the study is they only chose two adjacent precincts to compare that both were targetted by MoveOn.org based on the voter profile of the precinct. The difference between these two is only whether they could manage to find a precinct leader to manage the local canvassing effort or not.
Seth Finkelstein 07.06.07 at 7:33 pm
Regarding “that the Internet can enable greater participation than would otherwise have been possible, through allowing decentralized movements such as MoveOn to get the vote out more effectively.”
I lost you there somewhere. Isn’t this the exact opposite of what people usually mean in discussing the Internet and political participation? That is, we’re talking about a political organization sending people to talk to strangers, face-to-face. The usual complaint about the Internet and politics is that the discussions are a political echo chamber where the choir preaches to itself.
So if you have an organization that’s Internet based, I thinks it’s stretching in the extreme to call neighborhood canvassing a proof of “enable[d] greater particpation”.
Consider this: Say a billionaire is running for President. He uses his fortune to hire neighborhood campaigners. He then says “Some people think money is a corrupting influence on politics. But LOOK – here this provides smoking gun evidence that larges sums of money can enable greater participation than would otherwise have been possible, through allowing decentralized movements such as VoteForMe to get the vote out more effectively.”
Would that be a reasonable statement, or a stretch?
ChrisB 07.06.07 at 8:22 pm
I’ve canvassed before and I’m not at all convinced it increased voting by that large a number. Also I’ve often been one multiple canvassing operations going on in the same neighborhood.
Also I wouldn’t trust that canvassers didn’t do both halfs of the street, I never got instructions to stay on one side
Henry 07.06.07 at 9:33 pm
Seth – participation in this sense is “participation in the political process” – i.e. voting or engaging in other forms of direct political action. There is a longstanding debate in political science about whether or not new forms of media are weakening traditional social groups and mass political parties and therefore discouraging standard forms of political participation. See Putnam’s “Bowling Alone” for the classic statement of this case. This paper is pretty good evidence against this argument – in the terms that the debate has been conducted (as the authors note). The billionaire example isn’t really relevant here I don’t think – ‘participation’ as it is being discussed here isn’t the kind of participation that you are talking about (it is a political science term of art).
Seth Finkelstein 07.06.07 at 10:49 pm
Henry, yes, I grasped that – what I’m asking is does this really contradict the hypothesis that “new forms of media are weakening traditional social groups and mass political parties and therefore discouraging standard forms of political participation” – because it’s not a “form of media” under discussion. It’s (MoveOn) more of a traditional political operation. That there seems to be some sort of very dangerous semantic shift going on over the phrase “the Internet can enable”, where “Internet” gets credit for every non-Internet action of participation done by an organization which makes heavy use of the Internet for issuing orders to members. That is, it seems you’ve set up an argument that’s very much a semantic issue of ambiguity in terms of “enable”. Consider:
1) Money can be spent on activities that increase participation, however defined.
(certainly true, right?)
2) The Internet can be used to raise money.
(very true!)
THEREFORE … putting these together … “The Internet can be used to increase participation!” QED.
That’s exaggerated to get the idea across. But I think it’s basically what’s going on. As in, perhaps more clearly:
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”.
Henry 07.06.07 at 11:28 pm
Seth – I don’t see what you are trying to get at here. As Middleton and Green make clear, the Internet is crucial to how MoveOn works; the canvasssing wouldn’t happen without the Internet allowing for decentralized assignment of canvassers etc. And this _is_ directly and immediately germane to Putnam’s case. The _Bowling Alone_ argument is that TV, the Internet and other media are leading to anomie, social atomization, and the collapse of social capital. This in turn is death to political and social engagement. It is an argument about the incompatibility between these media and certain kinds of social organization. This article provides strong evidence that the Internet has been used by an organization substantially to increase political participation, _contra_ Putnam’s arguments. It’s not dispositive, but it seriously weakens his case, and I suspect that he would recognize this. The key graf in the article:
In other words – the Internetprovides important opportunities for the group-based politics that is the key intermediating variable in Putnam’s argument. And that is all that is needed to make clear that Putnam’s (perhaps somewhat overstated and unnecessarily technologically determinist argument) doesn’t seem to hold. If the Internet doesn’t simply undermine group participation, then Putnam’s stronger claims aren’t borne out by the evidence (weaker versions of his argument may still be possible).
This may be misunderstanding your critique. I’m really not grasping what you are trying to get at with your hypothetical about money – it seems to be an entirely different kettle of fish. We aren’t talking here about generic statements like “money is bad for politics” – we’re talking about more specific causal claims which may, or may not be borne out by the evidence, and which in this example don’t seem to be. I suspect that you’re misreading this post and this argument given your more general dislike of a certain kind of argument (while this is somewhat germane to these broader debates about the Internet being a Good or Bad thing, the emphasis should be on the ‘somewhat germane).
Seth Finkelstein 07.07.07 at 12:31 am
Henry, granted, I come at this from a perspective of an intense dislike of the use of “The Internet” in some arguments about politics. I suppose it’s a matter of what exactly is the claim of the argument.
In terms of “the Internet and other media are leading to anomie, social atomization, and the collapse of social capital. This in turn is death to political and social engagement.”, I doubt the point is that civilization is collapsing, or that we are becoming 100.0% apolitical couch-potatoes (if someone’s making that argument, they’re going to unsupportable extremes just on the face of it). But rather more that certain bonds between neighbors are being weakened, and further, the replacements are decidedly inferior. And that’s not refuted by having a political organization send orders to its members – the *members* are atypical political activists, as opposed to the neighbors who are ranting on net forums rather than speaking to each other. In fact, that supposed rebuttal strikes me as almost a grotesque inversion of the point (“You say neighbors don’t talk to each other because of the Internet, Mr. Putnam? Not at all. Look, here’s this organization that uses the Internet to order its members to go talk to people!”)
I’m trying to convey this by analogy with the “money in politics” topic. Why do people object to “money in politics”? Basically, the complaint is that it causes the politicians to try to please big donors at the expense of everyone else. But if you play with the words “try to please”, and redefine them in essence to mean “try to get elected”, you can create a counter-argument that is essentially “big donors are good for everyone”, though the fallacy would be hidden in the redefinition.
Pointing to the paper’s text doesn’t help much, since the dispute is more over the interpretation of phrases like “group participation” in “If the Internet doesn’t simply undermine group participation, then Putnam’s stronger claims aren’t borne out by the evidence (weaker versions of his argument may still be possible).” That is, is this being interpreted in a way to knock down a straw man, or is Putnam making an extreme claim that shouldn’t be bothered with in the first place?
I should note I’m not big supporter of the Internet-as-social-destroyer argument either. Personally, I’d guess cars and suburban development and television have way greater effect. But I think the Internet-as-political-renaissance argument is downright exploitative (the “social-destroyer” side is just selling a few tedious books, the “political-renaissance” side is out to fleece as many suckers as they can find)
vivian 07.07.07 at 1:32 am
Seth, your argument isn’t with Henry or with Middleton and Green; read Putnam’s “Bowling Alone†paper (shorter than the book) and you’ll see why. His idea is that robust politics, and tolerance of other views, relies on social networking independent of politics. That idea isn’t nutty, it does help us tolerate someone’s views if we like the person for other reasons. But it has some nutty implications (“oh no, the left and right blogosphere don’t link enough, now we’ll never agree on issues and it’s gridlock forever!”).
So if Move On can organize like-minded people, no big deal. But if those people can have civil and interesting conversations on politics with non-like-minded people, well, that’s good. And if those conversations can actually motivate the people who who didn’t seek them out – well, that’s not what the chicken littles would have you believe. The sky isn’t falling. But no one here thinks it’s eternally superglued in place by the internet either.
Henry 07.07.07 at 3:29 am
I should say that I understand that Putnam has modified his arguments in the interim (I haven’t read his more recent writings on this topic), so perhaps he already does have a response to this somewhere …
But the key point here is that _all_ forms of group politics involve hierarchy and order from above. When Putnam talks about how America used to be, I imagine that he’s quite aware that there were some real trade-offs involved in party politics and organizations back then too. You don’t get large scale political mobilization without some degree of top-down direction – and at the _very_ least I don’t think that the degree of top-downism in MoveOn is any worse than party machine politics in its heyday. Without getting too rhapsodic about it, I think that it’s almost inarguably better, although the degree to which it is better is certainly open to argument.
On a much lower level of aggregation, Yochai Benkler talks about the way in which the Internet enables local group politics (I think Laura McKenna has written about this too at 11D) – you can argue with the virtues of this (it surely involves a lot of NIMBYism) – but if you believe (as I understand Putnam does) that it’s a good thing for neighborhoods to organize, then this is surely something that is worth taking note of.
Seth Finkelstein 07.07.07 at 4:55 am
Vivian, again, let me make clear I’m not attempting to lead the charge of “social-destroyer” arguments, but I think the opposite side is worse. 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.
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] ]
tib 07.07.07 at 1:46 pm
Previous Gerber and Green studies used non-partisan messages, which may be less effective. This study is against the obviously partisan MoveOn messaging. It would be interesting to separate the impact of tested, targeted messaging from the contact method (person to person canvassing in this case).
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 07.07.07 at 1:59 pm
Seth – I’m not at all sure that the piece you link to makes the point you seem to think it is making. Your piece is all about whether or not there is a for-profit business model in hyperlocal news. That is a quite different question from the question of whether or not there are local not-for profit community groups using WWW/email to organize themselves around certain issues. And trust me – as someone who lives close to the communities discussed in the article(McLean and Reston), there is lots going on. Indeed, the article implies this in the sidelines in its discussion of how few of these operations are really for profit ventures.
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.
vivian 07.07.07 at 3:19 pm
Vivian, again, let me make clear I’m not attempting to lead the charge of “social-destroyer†arguments, but I think the opposite side is worse.
I would never accuse you of naive enthusiasm (or anti-enthusiasm), dear Seth! Just that you’ve got the wrong target here for your insightful points.
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.
Seth Finkelstein 07.07.07 at 3:36 pm
Henry, we’re back to redefinitions and slippery meanings of (my emphasis) “the way in which the Internet enables local group politics”.
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.
Kevin Wolf 07.07.07 at 6:12 pm
“Get Out the Vote” by Donald Green and Alan Gerber with the Brookings Institute documents years of solid “large scale, randomized field experiments” on the effectiveness of knocking and talking, literature drops, phone calls, robo calls, direct mail and other grassroots GOTV techniques. The evidence is overwhelming that talking with potential voters is the most powerful and cost-effective technique (if using volunteers) in the grassroots tool box. I highly recommend this book and its evaluation of the studies and its recommendations. It certainly backs up the Move-on study and should eliminate issues on whether the methods used to evaluate the result were valid.
Henry 07.07.07 at 9:27 pm
Seth – no, we’re not. This post was about a debate within political science – whether or not new communications technologies such as the Internet weakened the power of groups to organize, and hence had adverse effects on political participation. The evidence provided in the Middleton and Green paper is precisely on-topic, showing that in fact these new technologies have been used by MoveOn to organize a demonstrably successful voter mobilization campaign. This isn’t dodging the question – because the question that was addressed in the post, and in the paper, doesn’t seem to be the question that you are asking. I say ‘doesn’t seem to be’ because I’m not sure what the question that you are asking is, beyond the articulation of your generic dislike for “web hucksters.” Which is a consistent hobbyhorse of yours, but not one that seems to me to amount to a serious and coherent intellectual position.
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.
Seth Finkelstein 07.07.07 at 11:42 pm
Henry, I’m sorry if you feel I maligned you. No personal accusation intended, just an attempt to point out where I thought an error was being made in a chain of reasoning. Let me repeat what I wrote in #9:
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.
me 07.08.07 at 12:12 pm
Seth, what you are missing out of your step #1 is that it proves that amongst MoveOn.org activists and not other groups, as they were not surveyed. It’s quite possible MoveOn.org activists interact in a different way than various other types of activist. Or that they don’t. This is not obvious.
What do you mean by “then “The Internet†added somewhere for slot #2”? What kind of statements do you mean specifically?
Seth Finkelstein 07.08.07 at 5:35 pm
I’m not disputing anything about the basic result of the paper about the effectiveness of canvassing. I saw the objections that others raised. For the sake of discussion, I’m assuming it’s correct. It’s the subsequent inference of “smoking gun evidence that the Internet can enable greater participation” that I’m saying is logically flawed in terms of confusing senses of words. What I mean by “added somewhere for slot #2” is that since the Internet is used for many basic communications and fundraising tasks, it’s no trick at all to find some aspect of any organization where the Internet plays a role in communication and fundraising, and thus talk about “can enable” that way. But as I said before, that’s 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.
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).
Henry 07.09.07 at 5:47 pm
Seth – I’ll accept that you didn’t mean anything personally offensive, but you did refer back to a Crooked Timber post which was specifically about intellectual dishonesty, and hence seemed to be implying that I was committing same. But I’m still not at all convinced by your argument or answers. First, on the link to for-profit local journalism – you still haven’t explained how it is analogous. This sentence
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.
Seth Finkelstein 07.09.07 at 10:07 pm
Henry, see the problem with being critical? I referred back to the old post because it starkly illustrated the error, and am arguing that roughly the same reasoning error there (being done by intellectually dishonest people, agreed) is appearing here. I meant something like, can’t you see you’re going down the same bad error path? Without meaning to imply the same motivation for doing it. The idea was that you could discern the problem more readily when done by people you think poorly of, rather than people you think well of, because then there’s much less incentive to fix it up for fear of offending someone. Is it clear why I don’t want to get into something like this where the stakes are much higher than an obscure comment thread? That is, do you see my problem?
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!]
Seth Finkelstein 07.09.07 at 10:09 pm
P.S.: I poked my head up a little about Benkler here:
http://lessig.org/blog/2006/04/benklers_book_is_out.html
You might also enjoy:
http://sethf.com/essays/major/greplaw-interview.php
Dan 07.10.07 at 2:56 am
“The Bowling Alone argument is that TV, the Internet and other media are leading to anomie, social atomization, and the collapse of social capital. This in turn is death to political and social engagement.”
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.
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