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Like
any American who feels decidedly estranged from the political
processes that go on in Washington, it was bittersweet, the
concession of my vision of the "smoke-filled room". But as any
American with a frontal lobe and the slightest amount of media savvy
must, I've come to realise that the processes of power are far more
intricate and subtle than my easy visual shorthand of fat men with
cigars. That might explain why this passage from
rtmark.com's GWBush Website was so
pleasing. The scene describes a pack of Bush aides thinking of all
the negative URLs they could in an effort to buy them up before some
prankster did: |
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"It
was great. We got a bottle of Jack and sat around thinking up dirty
words -- not something you get to do all the time in this business.
'Bushblows' was the climax..." |
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The
fictive scenario re-seats the fat cats round a table, but this time
they're strategising about containment. It's been the lesson of the
Internet (helped along by the world's most famous intern) that
damming up an information flow is hardly as easy as it once seemed.
No one has enough fingers to plug up all the holes. And those of us
who know our way around the flow snigger as the others swim upstream
and issue threatening
letters. |
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The
GWBush site offers a number of policy initiatives, by turns surreal,
hilarious, and morbid, the absurdity of each no greater than George
Dubyah's own erratic
outpourings. The significance, however, lies not in the creative
criticality of the site's producers, but rather in the demonstration
that anyone can be the "one" in one to many. |
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And
that's where the parody/sabotage/slander site falls short. Another
demonstration of the unreliability of sources is not going to
re-engage citizens, at least not this one. Another rumination on the
lunacy/inadequacy of the candidate crop is not going to reinvigorate
the "system". The real promise of the Internet, and we presume
Net-informed politics, is the model of many-to-many. |
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Even
the viral alerts from action groups that travel online urging a
letter or fax to Congress before a vote are still operating on that
one-to-many model. Real action and reform can't follow a
stimulus-response model. You see, the trouble is not with the
reliability of sources. It's the fact of sources themselves.
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Keeping our citizenry segregated for half a century in
single-family dwellings with a one-way cathode ray information flow
did a pretty good job of crippling our democracy. And commendably,
parody sites and email alerts are a fine way to address the
inadequacies of a system which depends on a tsunami of one way info
flow. |
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But a
Net age politics, mirroring its medium, should focus on de-centering
information as power and networking the governed, on forging a
connection among citizens who are engaged in the task of their
governing, on building a space for citizens to reclaim their
concerns and assert their collective power. Call it the smoke filled
chat room. |
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Although perhaps we'd better not. While the occasional
synchronous chat allows a small segment of society to "talk back" to
a figurehead or public official, these events are generally a
perfunctory exercise, better suited to lessons on the nature of the
medium that the nature of governance, as Clinton's
last foray demonstrated. Instead, the promising experiments with
many-to-many politics are tinkering with various models of
asynchronous communications, variations on the bulletin board. They
institute structural variations aimed at remedying those trends that
have so long crippled online discussion: anonymity, intermediation,
and apathy. |
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ActionForum is the latest
offering from MoveOn.org, a
political Website dedicated to improving civic participation. Far
more focussed than the average free-for-all on guns or abortion,
ActionForum centers on a discussion of Berkeley, California's
General Plan, a blueprint that will guide the city's
development over the next twenty years. Conversation is threaded
with replies tied to originating posts, but they are displayed
according to "importance". Participants in the dialogue rate each
post based on its perceived importance and whether or not they agree
with it. The agreement rating is posted alongside the message, but
does not affect its position in the queue. Messages with low
importance ratings, however, are relegated to the bottom of the
discussion while more important messages are prioritised. A timely
and innovative approach, ActionForum's granularity avoids the
pitfalls of broad stroke mass mediated politicking, and its
importance rating directly addresses the nature of conversation on
the Web. |
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Elsewhere, ScoreCard.org proves that the
Environmental Defense Fund has learned the importance of
"disintermediation", that is, the practice of stepping out of the
middle to promote a many-to-many connection. The site itself is well
constructed to direct visitors to resources and information on
pollutants and polluters in their area, and every section includes
contact information for other concerned parties in the region. The
discussion forums, while less travelled than those on other sites,
are intelligently structured on a principle of Q&A -- with other
visitors doing the answering. Separate forums are organised by zip
code and by corporate offender. This structure underlines the site's
mission of community organisation and sidesteps the WWW pitfall of
overgeneralisation. |
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Sites
like these are far better poised than their one-to-many kin to
reinvigorate American political practice, which itself has been
ruined by anonymity, intermediation, and apathy. The real promise of
computer mediated political discourse is not the efficient
facilitation of more of the offline same -- verbal and textual
flame-wars, top-down propaganda and the temptation to simply tune
out. A more practiced thinking about the Internet and its potential
embraces technological solutions that instead foster responsibility,
direct communication, and engagement. |
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Less
smoke. More room. Better government. |
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Citation reference for this article
MLA
style:
Laura Kertz. "Because We Already Know BushBlows"
M/C Reviews 12 Apr. 2000. [your date of access]
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/features/politics/bushblows.html>.
Chicago style:
Laura Kertz, "Because We Already
Know BushBlows," M/C Reviews 12 Apr. 2000,
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/features/politics/bushblows.html>
([your date of access]).
APA
style:
Laura Kertz. (2000) Because we already know BushBlows.
M/C Reviews 12 Apr. 2000.
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/features/politics/bushblows.html>
([your date of access]). | |
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![[image]](bushmedia-culture.org20000412_files/bushcompare.gif)