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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]](../../images/bushcompare.gif)