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 :-)