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.