Connie Flanagan, who is one of the very best developmental psychologists who studies civic and political development, has opened a discussion about virtual worlds over at the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning blog. She writes, “our material world is sorely lacking in [free] spaces, especially for young people. … The political potential of free spaces is that they allow us to imagine what our worlds COULD be, what our institutions could look like, and what values we want to bind us together.” Any comments belong with Connie’s post.

Kos (Markos Moulitsas Zúniga) gave a very strong speech about what the netroots have accomplished. I wasn’t anywhere near the Yearly Kos convention, but the transcript is online here or you can click below to watch.

Kos is modest about his own contribution but argues that creating an online forum allowed thousands of people to become leaders:

It’s a world in which the gatekeepers in the traditional media, political and activist establishments can be easily bypassed. It doesn’t matter whether the elite think we are respectable or not. They have no right to judge us.

It is those leaders – YOU — who are changing your country. Me? I’m just a guy who built a website. You – the thousands of YOU — have taken hold of Daily Kos

and so many great sites like it to become your own leaders. YOU are running for office. YOU are walking precincts. YOU are making campaign phone calls, talking to neighbors, families, co-workers – YOU are bringing passion back to true progressivism. YOU are building the institutions of our new progressive movement – MoveOn, Democracy for America, ActBlue, TPM Media, SoapBlox … The culture of entrepreneurship you’ve created will provide the foundation for our future progressive majority.

All of this is true, and good news. I happen to find the discussion on DailyKos a little too tactical and insufficiently focused on visions for America. But there’s some good material over there. Besides, it’s better for many people to debate and influence political tactics than for tactical decisions to be left to a few professionals.

Still, I think the hand-wringing about the dominance of white men in the blogosphere is not merely PC. Old white men dominate the US Senate because there are major barriers to access and political power is unequally distributed in society. The demographic composition of the Senate reflects those underlying facts. The great question is whether online politics can shift the distribution of political power. To achieve that, we would need more than a few thousand individuals to enter the political debate. We would need a change in the underlying balance of power, which would be reflected in more diverse participants. In other words, diversity is not only a goal; it is evidence of social equity.

But the Internet is a medium of choice. So is TV, in the age of cable. Both reflect a powerful shift toward consumer choice as the central organizing principle of society. Choice is great for the politically active: those with knowledge, confidence, and interest. They have access to countless channels of information and can add their own opinions and ideas. But if you lack a political identity, choice allows you to avoid politics altogether.

In the past, you might sign up for a union because you needed a job. The union had an incentive to give you political confidence, knowledge, and interest, whether you wanted to be political or not. Unions were thus mechanisms for changing the underlying political balance of power, and they had an impact. It’s not at all clear to me that the Internet (or the various net-based forms of political organizing) have had comparable effects.

(Indianapolis) We have an opportunity to ask questions on a national survey that will gauge the extent of civic engagement online. We hope to repeat the same questions in subsequent years to follow trends.

It’s hard to get this right. If you ask people whether they do specific activities, such as blogging or posting on message boards, two problems arise. First, these forms of engagement change very rapidly. Yesterday, it was blogging; today it is podcasting and MySpace; tomorrow it will be something else. Second, these activities are only partly “civic” or “political” (by any definition of those terms). If you ask people whether they have created a blog, you can’t tell whether they have done something relevant to politics or community issues. The blig might concern knitting or porn.

Therefore, we might be tempted to ask more abstract questions, such as: “Have you used digital media for civic purposes?” But obviously, most respondents will have no idea what this question means. So we need somewhat abstract questions that can outlast changes in technology, yet ones that people can understand.

I have pasted some draft questions below in case anyone has any advice. These draft items include abstract leads and then concrete follow-ups:

Continue reading →

These are interesting results from a representative national survey.

Blog readers skew young, which isn’t a surprise. (And despite the higher rate of reading among youth, probably most readers are over 30.) The male majority among visitors to political blogs is striking and not self-evident. Women are politically engaged, representing 51% of voters in 2006, according to exit polls. But men aren’t only drawn to blogs; they also read newspapers more (44% of men versus 38% of women were regular readers in 2006).

The left and right seem to be about equally drawn to the blogosphere. But that doesn’t mean that liberals and conservatives are equally prevalent as blog-readers. Self-described liberals are significantly outnumbered in the national population, never surpassing 20% of American adults. That means that even if the same proportions of liberals and conservatives read blogs, there are more conservative eyeballs trained on the blogosphere. Moderates seem relatively uninterested in blogs–maybe because blogs tend to be strongly ideological, or maybe because some self-described “moderates” simply lack interest in politics.

Finally, well educated and privileged people are the most likely to participate.

(In Cambridge, MA) Students don’t give a lot of money to political candidates; they don’t have enough to give. In 2004, according to the American National Election Study, just 1.3% of young people (ages 18-25) said they had given money to any political candidate. In contrast, 10.1% of people over the age of 25 had made financial contributions.

However, the independent group Students for Obama (which started on FaceBook and now has 50,000 members) has figured out a way to have an impact. They write, “We understand that money is not exactly something we all have a lot of to spare; that’s why we put together a list of some of the things you can skip or pass on once–and donate the amount you saved. Next time you are going to spend money on one of these items, think of instead helping break the stereotype that students do not donate and do not care about the political process.” They suggest, for example, that you give up your next Starbucks Caramel Macchiato and give the $3.21 to Obama. It will be interesting to see whether this practice spreads as the ’08 campaign unfolds.

[Update: see Jose Antonio Vargas’ good article in the Washington Post, which cites our work. He says that the Obama Facebook site now has 279,000 members and rising.]