Blog assignment 6:. How can social software help to build new kinds of public space and discourse? Analyze one of the networked political organizations (such as MeetUp or MoveOn - or others) to understand how new forms of political coordination and power are being created.

I interrupt this assignment to offer the following suggestion about future weblog assignments. I love the lectures, the readings, the class weblogs and the wiki and I find this to be one of the most exhilarating and useful experiences I've had as a student -- in one sense. But the detailed, strictly-defined nature of the weblog assignments counteracts those benefits, and the frantic frequency of the assignments at the end of the semester amplifies this effect. These constraints are too tight. My creativity's in a straitjacket.

(I may belong in a straitjacket but my creativity doesn't.)

Consider this assignment. It starts strong: "How can social software help to build new kinds of public space and discourse?" Now that's a great question! I could produce a compelling essay that explores that question because I'm fascinated by the prospects for new sorts of place, space and discussion that will arise when computer-mediated communication is combined with face-to-face interaction via locative services, augmented reality and tech that allows people to examine their face-to-face encounters in new ways.

But I don't have time to delve into this fresher and more interesting stuff, because the second half of the assignment forces me instead to analyze MeetUp or MoveOn, each of which has been analyzed to death by dozens of other people and now will be analyzed further by dozens of my classmates. So I'll just offer a few juicy links that suggest what I'm getting at, before I MoveOn:

Encounter Bubbles

Location-Aware Thumb Ratings

Hocman

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Thanks for breaking from traditional instructional style to experiment with weblogs; this was a useful and enjoyable exercise. And the next class will get even more out of this if you pose more open-ended questions, or if you ask them to explore their own questions within each week's theme of study. Weblogs embrace fluid forms of discourse by their nature; strictly formalized assignments are a better fit for occasional class papers than for often-updated weblogs.

I think the flash mobs phenomenon can tell us something about the MoveOn and MeetUp phenomena. Dozens of mainstream media reports and more than a few weblog entries mischaracterized the flash mobs of 2003 as being created via the use of networked mobile communications devices such as cellular phones and handheld computers. Some SMS activity was reported surrounding a few of the flash mobs, particularly those in Europe and Asia, but even there mobile devices didn't play a central role in these events. The 2003 flash mobs were built upon e-mail, Web sites, mainstream media reports, face-to-face speech, and paper slips (which informed participants gathered at initial meeting points where to go and what to do from there). But many webloggers and journalists made the mistake, over and over again, of tying flash mobs to mobile phones and PDAs. Some mainstream media and weblog reports also implied that flash mobs were completely decentralized. It's almost as if they wanted the sort of computer-mediated, decentralized social swarming behavior predicted in Howard Rheingold's book Smart Mobs to become a reality; it's almost as if they read these things into the situation.

Then again, perhaps the flash mob participants experienced similar feelings; maybe they vaguely sensed or hoped for the emergence of such promised new capabilities and phenomena, before the location-sensing technology necessary to support "smart mobs" was ready for mass consumption. Perhaps that's what motivated the surge of flash mobs popularity.

Perhaps I've ventured too far into Speculationville, but let's keep going anyway. I can suggest a similar hypothesis to explain MoveOn and MeetUp and the Dean campaign. Perhaps people (webloggers, journalists and voters too) really wanted particular new forms of computer-mediated civic action and discourse that have been predicted for years in Wired and in weblogs and in Smart Mobs and in magazines and newspapers. Perhaps we all wanted these things so badly that as soon as we saw something like MeetUp (which makes organizing local gatherings among people who already want to gather easier, but probably doesn't provide the desire to gather in the first place) or MoveOn (an echo chamber that doesn't really encourage people to form new arguments or movements, but only provides another way for people of a particular political stripe to reinforce one another's very similar beliefs). Maybe one day our technology will catch up with our wishes, maybe that's not possible. Perhaps I've crossed over into Rambletown; I'd better get back on the highway and head home to Assignmentsburgh.

Here's a brief application of the Networks and Netwars reading to the Howard Dean campaign: the campaign was strong at the Narrative and Doctrinal levels. It told a romantic and compelling story about an underdog building up grassroots support, and potentially unseating a bigger, better-funded opponent. Core to the story was the way this was happening - through the use of the Internet as a campaign tool. The media ate up this story and it intrigued people across the globe. I assume that this powerful story and its success in moving outsiders encouraged the network of Dean supporters to enthusiastically embrace their doctrine.

(By the way, the National Defense Research Institute's Networks and Netwars reading is a useful and enjoyable piece, and not just because it uses the phrase "malcontents, ne'er-do-wells, and clever opportunists" without sarcasm or irony. I recommend it to anyone interested in emerging social networks.)