The Power of Placeblogs

I'm working on an article revision that examines power in the city and my short academic attention span has wandered over to the phenomenon of placeblogging as a potential challenge to established centers of power. The traditional debate in the literature on urban power centers around whether power is mostly hegemonic (power over) or transactional (power to).

I'm interested in the role that placeblogging might play in challenging both hegemonic and transactional power, but particularly the latter. A transactional view suggests that power is forged through the process of social production. Social production is the process of pooling resources to achieve a desired goal. In the urban context, important resources like wealth, knowledge and political power are seen as narrowly controlled.

However, placeblogs have the potential to redefine the social production process. While there aren't many of them, they are growing. Lisa Williams describes placeblogs as focusing on:

the lived experience of a place. That experience may be news, or it may simply be about that part of our lives that isn't news but creates the texture of our daily lives: our commute, where we eat, conversations with our neighbors, the irritations and delights of living in a particular place among particular people. However, when news happens in a community, placeblogs often cover those events in unique and nontraditional ways, and provide a community watercooler to discuss those events.

In their intent, these blogs are designed to reduce the costs of social production. One example comes from a website called Clever Commute in which transit riders on the Baltimore Washington corridor alert each other of delays and cancellations. The Baltimore Sun reports that the website has partnered with the Baristanet.com placeblog to expand the service's reach.

In this case, if the end goal of social production is to gain greater information about commute delays, "the crowd" is a much better gatherer of knowledge resources than traditional news sources. The placeblog provides a convenient way to aggreagte information of interest to residents in a neighborhood. Recent development have made it easier to aggregate individual placeblogs. Type in outside.in/(your zip code) and you will get an page that collects placeblog postings about your neighborhood. For example, here's the page for my neighborhood.

My interest is in the potential for these networks of placeblogs to engage in social production that challenges power. Have placeblogs been used to stop development or to get a pothole fixed?

Campaign Convergence Culture

MIT professor Henry Jenkins has a post on his blog that does a good job of deconstructing the anti-populist rhetoric of the McCain campaign's recent "the one" ads against Obama. He argues that the ads mock the trend towards what he calls convergence culture, in this case the blending of politics and popular culture. He points out that the ads ridicule the enthusiasm of new voters by inferring, like Hillary Clinton did, that their support is superficial and not informed by policy. Why has Obama not countered this charge the way he did Clinton's similar charge? He could use it to re-energize his base by saying "McCain is making fun of you."

Jenkins also points out the effectiveness of the Rovian strategy of taking a strength and making it a weakness. The McCain campaign has effectively neutralized Obama's enthusiasm gap against McCain. The Democrats have squandered a summer by not turning any of McCain's strengths into weaknesses. If McCain wins this campaign, it will be yet another object lesson in the importance of social construction over empirical facts. It is impossible for economists and political scientists to model a clever framing like the "Obama as Messiah" effort. But it very well might be that these factors, and not economic indicators are the true determinants of campaign success.

Campaign Convergence Culture

MIT professor Henry Jenkins has a post on his blog that does a good job of deconstructing the anti-populist rhetoric of the McCain campaign's recent "the one" ads against Obama. He argues that the ads mock the trend towards what he calls convergence culture, in this case the blending of politics and popular culture. He points out that the ads ridicule the enthusiasm of new voters by inferring, like Hillary Clinton did, that their support is superficial and not informed by policy. Why has Obama not countered this charge the way he did Clinton's similar charge? He could use it to re-energize his base by saying "McCain is making fun of you."

Jenkins also points out the effectiveness of the Rovian strategy of taking a strength and making it a weakness. The McCain campaign has effectively neutralized Obama's enthusiasm gap against McCain. The Democrats have squandered a summer by not turning any of McCain's strengths into weaknesses. If McCain wins this campaign, it will be yet another object lesson in the importance of social construction over empirical facts. It is impossible for economists and political scientists to model a clever framing like the "Obama as Messiah" effort. But it very well might be that these factors, and not economic indicators are the true determinants of campaign success.

Big Bad Google

David Smith in the Guardian gives pause to Google-philes by inviting us to think of what our favorite corporate behemoth with look like in 10 years. As an avowed Google devotee, even I have to pause at the company's reach:

Google's tentacles are everywhere. It runs services for blogging, email, instant messaging, shopping and social networking. It offers a suite of word processing, spreadsheet and other tools to rival Microsoft's products in the workplace. It is building a software platform for mobile phones that may challenge Apple's iPhone and others. It has just launched Knol, a peer-reviewed encyclopedia to take on Wikipedia. In America, Google Health enables users to maintain their own medical records. The company is also working on language translation, speech recognition and video search.

The bulk of the article covers familiar ground: is Google a friendly giant helping us manage our lives or is it a gathering dark force poised to hurl us into a police state of our own creation? I remain strangely untroubled by Google's data sweep, despite the dangers of Google's uber-data collection and the warnings of Internet critics, like this one by Andrew Keen:

They have amassed more information about people in 10 years than all the governments of the world put together. They make the Stasi and the KGB look like the innocent old granny next door. This is of immense significance. If someone evil took them over, they could easily become Big Brother.

What explains my calm? Our YouTube culture provides numerous examples of people in public live who's impressions of them have been forever shaped by a snippet of their lives posted on-line. Poor David Hasselhoff will think twice about getting drunk in front of his kids.

Perhaps it is the element of consent involved in the surrender of data. As someone who blogs, e-mails, writes, and reads using google's products, I've willingly entered into an agreement to place parts of my life into the cloud in exchange for convenience. This consent either justifies their collection of data or is an example of my inability to properly assess risk. Google's narrative, perpetuated by the media, probably reinforces a sense of security. Undoubtedly, the broad swath of cyberdata that Google collects, in the wrong hands, could be uses as a tool of repression.

But despite these looming fears, hundreds of millions willingly submit information. At the end of the day, we have to conclude that for most people, convenience trumps privacy. I don't agree with this characterization:

It is true that Google doesn't force anyone to reveal anything. But to quote a book currently popular among politicians, its users are 'nudged' towards entering more and more information about themselves in exchange for personalised services. Google can save you time and money, find a restaurant to your taste or a chemist to cure your illness, but only if it knows you well enough. Help it to help you; that is the siren song... The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask questions such as "What shall I do tomorrow?" and "What job should I take?" This is the most important aspect of Google's expansion.'

"Nudging" suggests a form of coercion rather than a consensual exchange. The idea that any surrender of information to an entity is heresy and only done is the person is somehow coerced into giving it, strikes me as overly individualistic. Ultimately, we are social beings and we want the opportunities for sociality the web provides. It does, of course, come laden with a political ideology that promotes connection over individualism, but that's for another post :-)

Diversity 2.0

I'm giving a talk this Friday to the annual Vocation of a Lutheran conference in Decorah, Iowa. The title of the talk is Diversity 2.0. The talk will explore the changing nature of diversity in an increasingly "wired" society. I'll post the presentation slides in the next day or two.

The talk will look at diversity and how it relates to Aristotle's three forms of knowledge. The crux of the talk is that we're moving from a primary rationale for diversity based on episteme (epistemological knowledge) or techne (technical knowledge) to one based on prhonesis or wisdom, for lack of a better term. This is so because as the network society evolves, access to epistemological and technical knowledge can be acquired on-line but wisdom still requires the face-to-face interactions with diverse others. More soon :-)

Diversity and Information Overload

One of the more interesting aspects of Carr's Atlantic article and the responses in edge.org and britannica.com is the effect this has on inter-group, inter-cultural relations. This is Carr's main point

What the Net may be doing, I argue, is rewiring the neural circuitry of our brains in a way that diminishes our capacity for concentration, reflection, and contemplation.

Carr is suggesting this is happening mechanistically as if the irresistable draw of the web leaves us no choice in the matter. There are global driving forces which make us want to be insatiable Netizens. As we proceed through what Mauel Castells calls a "network society" we fear being excluded from its nodes. In a response to Carr, W. Daniel Hills attributes our desire for connectedness to globalization:

Fast communication, powerful media and superficial skimming are all creations of our insatiable demand for information. We don't just want more, we need more. While we complain about the overload, we sign up for faster internet service, in-pocket email, unlimited talk-time and premium cable. In the mist of the flood, we are turning on all the taps.

We are now trying to comprehend the global village with minds that were designed to handle a patch of savanna and a close circle of friends. Our problem is not so much that we are stupider, but rather that the world is demanding that we become smarter.

I think this is a better way of thinking about our relationship to information. Our desire to know the world around us is being outstripped by the increasing ease with which we can know it. The response to this is not an inability to reflect, but a desire to respond in real time to a rapidly evolving network of places, events and relationships.

This need to be "in the network" leads us towards what Douglass Rushkoff in his edge.org entry calls "thin-slicing" information. I admit to being a thin slicer, scanning headlines and RSS feeds to pull out nuggets of wisdom that I believe make me not only smarter, but a better global citizen. But does knowing superficially about what's going on in Rangoon, Geneva and Buenos Aires make me a better person? Am I really engaging with these "others" in a meaningful way? Larry Sanger says no:

To be limited to Twitter-sized discourse ultimately means that we will never really understand each other, because all of our minds are complex and in that way “cathedral-like.” It is extremely difficult to understand other people, unless you take a long time to study what they say. If we do not understand each other in our full and deep individual complexity, we will be invisible to each other, and ultimately incapable of real human society.

Carr suggests that Google's business model is dependent upon my believing that a "thin slicing" approach to the web is leaving me better off.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

My great concern is that this is how we begin to view diversity, as a collection of disconnected experiences that define our consumer selves. In other places, I've called this "menagerie diversity" or a diversity built upon an "appreciation of the other" rather than based upon actual engagement and collaborative work with the other. The great irony is that, as Hills points out, we are closer to each other than ever before, but at the same time we've never been further.

Kitty Immigration

Thanks to The Sanctuary, a great blog new blog I found on immigration issues for this link to The Pinky Show oddly mesmerizing take on the immigration issue. Pinky is a kitten with a mission to speak truth to power! Stick it to the Lou Dobbs-man, Pinky!

No Cost Castrations, Cybertizzies, and Now this!

Obama is certainly experiencing the crucible of presidential electoral politics. On one hand the venerated Jesse Jackson wants to perform a no-cost castration. On the other, the netroots are in a cyber-tizzy over Obama's singing of the FISA bill. Now he has to shake the mainstream media's gleeful exploitation of the "Muslim/ Black-radical meme." This New Yorker cover from Ben Smith's Politico blog highlights how the MSM can use the flimsy justification that the public's belief in "the Muslim thing" is an interesting cultural pheonomenon and thus worthy of treatment.



Of course, if you're going to talk about it, you need a controversial cover because, well, you have to sell magazines. It's a sleazy turn in the coverage of presidential politics. The New Yorker has decided to racialize the Obama's because a small sliver of the U.S. population thinks he's a Muslim. They've given the darker forces of our culture a new laptop screen background.

The End of Theory II

Edge.org has a wonderful symposium on reactions to Chris Anderson's Wired article on The End of Theory.. What strikes me from reading the symposium is the lack of regard for inductive methodologies as "science." The presumption is that, what Richard Fenno called, soaking and poking, is something new in the world of science. Traditionally in my discipline, it has always been thought of as a prelude to the real work of hypothesis testing.

What strikes me as fascinating is the ability of "computing in the cloud" to hyper-soak and poke. Kevin Kelly uses some interesting examples from Google about this potential.

It may turn out that tremendously large volumes of data are sufficient to skip the theory part in order to make a predicted observation. Google was one of the first to notice this. For instance, take Google's spell checker. When you misspell a word when googling, Google suggests the proper spelling. How does it know this? How does it predict the correctly spelled word? It is not because it has a theory of good spelling, or has mastered spelling rules. In fact Google knows nothing about spelling rules at all.

Instead Google operates a very large dataset of observations which show that for any given spelling of a word, x number of people say "yes" when asked if they meant to spell word "y. " Google's spelling engine consists entirely of these datapoints, rather than any notion of what correct English spelling is. That is why the same system can correct spelling in any language.

In fact, Google uses the same philosophy of learning via massive data for their translation programs. They can translate from English to French, or German to Chinese by matching up huge datasets of humanly translated material. For instance, Google trained their French/English translation engine by feeding it Canadian documents which are often released in both English and French versions. The Googlers have no theory of language, especially of French, no AI translator. Instead they have zillions of datapoints which in aggregate link "this to that" from one language to another.

Once you have such a translation system tweaked, it can translate from any language to another. And the translation is pretty good. Not expert level, but enough to give you the gist. You can take a Chinese web page and at least get a sense of what it means in English. Yet, as Peter Norvig, head of research at Google, once boasted to me, "Not one person who worked on the Chinese translator spoke Chinese. " There was no theory of Chinese, no understanding. Just data. (If anyone ever wanted a disproof of Searle's riddle of the Chinese Room, here it is. )

This is no doubt true when it comes to Social Science where we are notoriously dreadful at prediction. It is not so true for explanation, science's other core purpose. Here's Bruce Sterling's amusing rejoinder to Kelly's

Surely there are other low-hanging fruit that petabytes could fruitfully harvest before aspiring to the remote, frail, towering limbs of science. (Another metaphor—I'm rolling here. )

For instance: political ideology. Everyone knows that ideology is closely akin to advertising. So why don't we have zillionics establish our political beliefs, based on some large-scale, statistically verifiable associations with other phenomena, like, say, our skin color or the place of our birth?

The practice of law. Why argue cases logically, attempting to determine the facts, guilt or innocence? Just drop the entire legal load of all known casework into the petabyte hopper, and let algorithms sift out the results of the trial. Then we can "hang all the lawyers, " as Shakespeare said. (Not a metaphor. )

Love and marriage. I can't understand why people still insist on marrying childhood playmates when a swift petabyte search of billions of potential mates worldwide is demonstrably cheaper and more effective.

Investment. Quanting the stock market has got to be job one for petabyte tech. No human being knows how the market moves—it's all "triple witching hour, " it's mere, low, dirty superstition. Yet surely petabyte owners can mechanically out-guess the (only apparent) chaos of the markets, becoming ultra-super-moguls. Then they simply buy all of science and do whatever they like with it. The skeptics won't be laughing then.

The End of Theory

Chris Anderson has an interesting, if not strange, article in WIRED where he makes the claim that we are arriving at the "end of theory." He make makes the case that massive amounts of data (what he calls the Perabyte era) make the scientific method obsolete. The large volumes of data collection and analysis that lightning fast processing speed and massive storage capacity of modern computing allows, makes pattern matching a much more viable approach to knowledge creating than hypothesis testing.

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

While the poor guy is getting shellacked on the comment boards, he's on to something. He probably overstates his case for the natural sciences, but his argument is more telling for the social sciences. If theory, even universal theory, about human behavior is time bound and context dependent, and society is innovating and changing at an exponentially rapid pace, then what good is universal theory?

Bent Flyvbjerg's wonderful book Making Social Science Matter makes a related but different argument about the shortcomings of applying scientific principles to social science. he argues for an emphasis in social science on phronesis, or knowledge on the "art of living," rather than episteme, or knowledge for its own sake. Here's a telling passage from an essay derived in part from his book.

Regradless of how much we let mathematical and staistical modeling dominate the social sciences, they are unlikely to become scientific in the natural sciences sense. This is so because the phenomena modelled are social, and thus "answer back" in ways natural phenomena do not.

This is the guiding principle behind my own thinking about race scholarship. it is much more instructive for use to be guiding our scholarship towards knowledge that enhances the art of living in a multicultural democracy over the quixotic search for some universal law of race relations.

Social Desirability Bias and Juicy Campus

In preparation for my Race and Politics course this fall semester, I've brushed up on the latest work out there on social desirability bias. The general idea is that we harbor implicitly biased views about other groups that we do not share implicitly lest we run afoul of social norms.

The web can provide a safe space for unleashing these implicit biases. One such place where college students can vent their implicit biases is Juicy Campus. A piece in the latest issue of Radar features the controversy over the site's content. The founder of the site seemed to have innocuous intentions:

We thought people might talk about what happened at some fraternity party last weekend, or to rank sororities. That sort of thing," he insists. "And if you look, you'll definitely find those fun stories. And then there's a bunch more stuff that we didn't realize people would use the site for.

But the site has turned into a dustbin of offensive, unsubstantiated accusations and slurs:

promiscuity, drug abuse, plastic surgery, homosexuality, rape, and eating disorders, along with enough racist, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic invective to make David Duke blanch—that seems to generate the majority of the page views.

I first heard of this site from a student in my Community Development class last semester. What struck me (perhaps it shouldn't have) is how graphic the comments were on the site. I can remember hearing some pretty graphic stuff in my own college days, but I couldn't imagine the desire to make such comments public. I suppose that is the point, social networking sites make the private immediately public. Devices like cell phones with SMS technologies and sites like Twitter allow you to post your impulses. I wonder how many of the posts on this juicy campus site are infused with alcohol or other drugs. What social networking and participatory culture allows us to do is to be on-line in the moment. But to me the unanswered question is whether is simply captures a moment of unvarnished racism or sexism, or does it encourage the creation of routines that support further exposition of offensive views?

Folksonomy as a Political Methodology in the Study of Race

There has been some good recent scholarship (here and here) in political science challenging the use of the hypothetico-deductive model to explain how race impacts the political process. Traditionally, political scientists have taken race or ethnic identification to logically precede group-based interest-formation and mobilization.

The reality of race and ethnicity is that they are multifaceted, inter-sectional and contextual constructs that cannot be captured through survey research that asks respondents to check a box next to the ethnicity with which they identify.

Attempts by statistical researchers to 'control for third variables'... ignore the ontological embeddedness of locatedness of entities within actual situation contexts." (Emirbayer 1997, 289).

This is true, but then the question remains, how do you validly and reliably study identity in the political process. One interesting approach might be to employ folksonomies to race questions in political science. Rather than asking people to classify themselves according to the controlled vocabulary of the survey researcher, a folksonomy would allow the respondent to use as many self-identifiers they want to describe themselves. You can use social network analysis to group respondents based on the similarity of their self-tagging structures into clusters and then test whether cluster membership is related to a desired political outcome.

Smear Emails and the Cult of the Amateur Researcher

I'm both excited and cautious about the participatory potential of the web. The easy accessibility of data makes it possible for anyone to become a researcher. While lowering the transaction costs to information is incredibly exciting, it is also unpredictable. The Washington Post has an article today about Princeton Professor Danielle Allen's attempts to trace the source of the various Obama smear e-mails that have circulated during the presidential campaign. Allen tracked down one of the threads to a 69 year-old retired software engineer who created a massive anti-Obama website because he "doesn't play golf."

What strikes me is the extent to which these potential initiators take on the role of researcher. Form the article:

he built a Web site that features hundreds of pages of material intended to undermine Obama. "If 20 percent of what's on my Web site is true, this guy is a clear and present danger," Beckwith said. (He later added, "I try very hard to be accurate.") But while
Beckwith speaks with pride about his research -- much of which he credits to an unnamed "colleague" in Europe -- and to his extensive Obama files, he rejects outright the suggestion that he authored the chain e-mail. "I've never been involved with any
e-mailings. Period," he said.

What drives people to take on the authoritative role of public knowledge creator? Especially when one gets little public recognition for the effort. This identity of "researcher" or "investigator" is powerful if you believe you are uncovering a unexamined and potentially critical truth. In these cases it seems that this impulse is combined with large amounts of "slack resources" in the form of time. This is the main problem Andrew Keen has with participatory culture. It takes a good amount of narcissism (and free time) to take on the role of "citizen protecting America from a "Manchurian Muslim candidate."

But more importantly, what does this all mean for politics going forward? Allen is dead on in her analysis of the smear e-mail phenomenon:

A first group of people published articles that created the basis for the attack. A second group recirculated the claims from those articles without ever having been asked to do so. "No one coordinates the roles," Allen said. Instead the participants swim toward their goal like a school of fish -- moving on their own, but also in unison.

What are the implication of this type of "wildfire" politics? it doesn't take much to influence low information voters. Can an uncoordinated response be addressed by a coordinated campaign like the Obama campaign is currently attempting? I'm skeptical that any intentional effort can stop this type of uncoordinated effort. It might be the perfect storm of elements has combined to make Obama president, but this is a curious side battle he has to wage.

The Whiter the County, the Weaker the Love

Here's an interesting challenge to support for the growing view in social science that racial proximity decreases social capital and lower support for race-based policies. In a good Colorlines article about anti Affirmative-Action initiatives that will appear on a number of state ballots in the fall, the author reports on demographic voting data from Michigan's 2006 Civil Rights Initiative:

Statewide, Michigan is about 78 percent white, 14 percent Black, 4 percent Latino and 2 percent Asian, with most people of color concentrated in a handful of urban areas. For example, while Wayne County, home of Detroit, is less than 50 percent white, a handful of other counties are nearly 98 percent white. Wayne County was one of only three counties where a majority voted against Proposal 2. The other two, Washtenaw and Ingham, include the state’s two largest universities and have among the state’s most diverse communities. In general, across the rest of Michigan, the whiter the county, the higher the support for the ban.

Interestingly, support for the anti-Affirmative Action measure was not correlated with county unemployment rates, a proxy for income levels.

Top Ten Public Intellectuals all Muslim

I'm interested in the impact the Web has on the promotion of in-group ties? Does access to everything make us more cosmopolitan or does it bind us closer to our reference groups? Here's one argument for viewing things contextually. The process by which Foreign Policy created their list of the top 100 intellectuals reveals a strong desire on the part of many educated Muslims to have public intellectuals that share their faith tradition be recognized as influential. Here's a brief description of Foreign Policy's methodology:

No one spread the word as effectively as the man who tops the list. In early May, the Top 100 list was mentioned on the front page of Zaman, a Turkish daily newspaper closely aligned with Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen. Within hours, votes in his favor began to pour in. His supporters—typically educated, upwardly mobile Muslims—were eager to cast ballots not only for their champion but for other Muslims in the Top 100. Thanks to this groundswell, the top 10 public intellectuals in this year’s reader poll are all Muslim. The ideas for which they are known, particularly concerning Islam, differ significantly. It’s clear that, in this case, identity politics carried the day.

It seems clear to me that the Web, in this case Foreign Policy's online poll, taps into the need of a certain subset of a entho-religious group to re-frame the way they are perceived by "the rest" of the world community. Then again, educated, upwardly mobile Muslims might just, on average, be more avid readers of Foreign Policy?

Mature Citizens Index

Monday, June 23, 2008

Mature Citizen Index

The Kiplinger
finance web site just released its "best places to live" list for 2008. These types of lists look at conventional measures like housing affordability, amenities, crime rates, etc. These are logical choices for constructing an index of livability. theirs is no different than the dozens of "best places" indexes that come out every year. But should we be looking at places less as consumer choices and more as places to nurture and develop our character?

Richard Florida has created a cottage industry out of the idea of creative cities. A better word for these cities might be controlled chaos cities. Cities that succeed at attracting knowledge workers are those that are generally able to maintain a sense of playfulness and creativity while eliminating the less savory aspects of difference. I was at the Solstice Parade in Santa Barbara this past weekend and struck by the balance maintained between colorful zaniness and complete order. The parade had all of the trappings of sixties rebellion and dissent, but little of the danger and uncertainty that accompanied those movements.

This is a victory for the city of Santa Barbara. Cities realizes that escapism and play is essential to the human condition. Critical to that sense of play is difference, novelty, uniqueness. Being able
to play that out in public spaces with throngs of others is good for places that want to stay competitive and is good for the soul too. That sense of play, becomes threatened by any encroachment of despair so cities try desperately to keep much of that despair out.

It would be interested to, instead of having a livability, or best places to live, index. There was something of a "mature citizen" index that tried to examine the extent to which a city's residents engage with diversity to its fullest extent. Where are the places that are most likely to encourage the creation of mature human beings?

Flyvbjerg (2007) makes the case that social science should be engaged in the practice of helping citizens develop phronesis, the Aristotelian term for wisdom. Flyvbjerg argues that this widsom
only comes from individual engagement in a varying range of situations. Individuals who have acquired a high level of phronesis are able to act appropriately in a wide range of situations. He likens it to the musical virtuoso knows when to apply the rules and when to be flexible enough to work outside of the rules. This to me is the central case for diversity. Only through heterogeneity of experience is someone able to engage this.

Any ideas on creating a "moral cities" index?

Obama's Iowa JJ Dinner Speech

Web 2.0 tools undoubtedly deserve much of the credit for Barack Obama's historic victory last night. His campaign's ability to leverage social networking tools spared him having to make endless calls to donors. YouTube allowed legions of supporters to develop their own ways to promote their candidate. The Obamabuzz created on the web translated to the voting booth in unprecedented ways.

But in this age of viral videos, content still matters. My own candidate for campaign turning point is the speech he gave at the Iowa Jefferson Jackson dinner on November 10th, 2007. This speech, propelled by numerous YouTube views, moved Iowa voters towards him. Without an Iowa caucus victory, the Clinton juggernaut would have been unstoppable.



On the day he gave this speech, he was trailing by seven percent on the Real Clear Politics average. After this speech, he began a steady surge that carried him to a pivotal eight percentage point win in Iowa. Watch it for yourself.

Test from E-mail

Text.  Address to post from e-mail is CEJAD.CEJGM@blogspot.com

Rachel Ray, Dunkin Donuts, & the Keffiyeh Kerfuffle (NYT)

May 30, 2008
ADVERTISING
For Dunkin’, a Tempest in an Iced-Coffee Cup

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
IT was a peculiarly Internet-age controversy.

On May 7, Dunkin’ Donuts began running an ad on its Web site and others, featuring the celebrity chef Rachael Ray holding a cup of the company’s iced coffee while wearing a black-and-white fringed scarf. In the ad, which was shot in a studio, she is shown standing in front of trees with pink blossoms and a building with a distinctive spire.

On May 23, the conservative blog Little Green Footballs posted an item that likened Ms. Ray’s scarf to the type typically worn by Muslim extremists. The blog said that the ads “casually promote the symbol of Palestinian terrorism and the intifada, the keffiyeh, via Rachael Ray.”

Later that day, the conservative blogger Michelle Malkin chimed in, likening the scarf to a keffiyeh and calling it “jihadi chic.” Then the story, as they say on the Internet, went totally viral.

•

Hundreds of people posted comments, many of them condemning Dunkin’ Donuts. Ms. Malkin continued to blog about what she referred to as the “keffiyeh kerfuffle.” People who claimed knowledge of Islam weighed in, objecting to the ignorance of equating a keffiyeh with terrorism.

On May 24, Dunkin’ Donuts removed the ad from its Web site and others — and was promptly condemned by people who accused the company of caving in to conservative bullies.

Dunkin’ Donuts turned down a request to talk about the episode, but issued a statement. “In a recent online ad, Rachael Ray is wearing a black-and-white silk scarf with a paisley design,” it said. “It was selected by a stylist for the advertising shoot. Absolutely no symbolism was intended.”

The decision to remove the ad, the company said, was made “because the possibility of misperception detracted from its original intention to promote our iced coffee.”

To be sure, the controversy probably got Dunkin’ Donuts a lot more attention than if that hapless stylist had chosen, say, a nice beaded necklace instead. And if there are lessons to be drawn from the incident, they probably relate to the warp speed at which innuendoes pulsate through the Internet, as well as the nimbleness the medium gives companies to remove content that suddenly turns controversial.

“When it comes to issues like this,” said Eric Dezenhall, the head of the crisis public relations firm Dezenhall Resources, corporations “don’t want to be anywhere near them and they will cave very, very quickly — anything to stop the pain, anything to stop the press from calling.”

The fastest way to do that, he said, is “to pull the ad and do another one.”

In this case, however, removing the ad did not make the problem go away — far from it. Days later, on May 28, Ms. Malkin published a syndicated column praising Dunkin’ Donuts for removing the ad and reiterating the contention that Ms. Ray “posed for one of the company’s ads in what appeared to be a black-and-white keffiyeh.” She added, “The keffiyeh, for the clueless, is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad.” It drew hundreds of comments on her blog and elsewhere.

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From there, a backlash to the backlash started to take hold.

An item about the controversy had more than 2,300 votes and 830 comments on Digg, a news aggregation site. A YouTube video, “Rachael Ray Is a Terrorist,” poked fun at the situation, with the narrator saying, “Yes, because when I look at Rachael Ray I think 9/11.” That video drew more than 2,300 comments, and a related story on The Huffington Post had more than 1,200 comments.

“Often the counterstory can become bigger than the original story,” said Adam Selig, the chief executive of Visible Technologies, which helps companies handle their reputations online. “That’s something you have to be very careful about in social media.”

The removal of ads in response to objections is nothing new. Last year, several suicide-themed ads from General Motors, Washington Mutual and Volkswagen were removed after objections from suicide-prevention groups, and animal rights groups have campaigned against certain “Got Milk?” spots and others.

But for all the headache, has anyone’s opinion about the companies in question really been influenced?

“There are scandals that are worth responding to and there are scandals that are worth ignoring, and I think the Internet amplifies these voices,” said Eric Hirshberg, the president and chief creative officer of Deutsch L.A., which created the G.M. spot (which was returned to television after some revision). “But this is no different than the retired grandmother who used to write a handwritten letter because she was offended by a video game ad intended for 17-year-olds.”

Mr. Hirshberg said that the immediacy of the Internet made it seem like an immediate response was necessary, no matter how far-fetched the accusations. “The alternative is to assume that people will simply see through it, draw their own conclusions, and chuckle it off,” he said.

Studiocom, part of the WPP Group, is the agency that created the Rachael Ray ad, and it referred a call for comment to Dunkin’ Donuts. Hill Holliday, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, is the agency that handles much of Dunkin’ Donuts’ traditional advertising, and it too declined to comment.

One Internet executive suggested the mudslinging could be a good thing. “You need to find and do something that is a bit edgy, that is polarizing, that provides some water-cooler conversation,” said Bob Parsons, chief executive of GoDaddy.com, the Web site registrar that likes to run racy Super Bowl ads. “One of the ways to know that your advertising is working is there will be a segment of the population that is upset by it.”

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