Bill Bishop responded to my last post about diversity and mobility, both in the comments and by email. Part of my argument in that last post stemmed from a disagreement with his statement that, "Stong social networks repel people who now vote Democratic." From his response in the comments:

1. Democrats aren't (sic) attracted to places with weak social ties. A few years ago, we ran the numbers using Robert Putnam's data on social connections. High tech places (i.e., Democratic) scored lower than Republican places. See: http://www.statesman.com/specialreports/ content/specialreports/citiesofideas/042 8socialcapital.html

2. Tight ties are WORSE for economic well being than loose tie places. This has been known for some time. Loose ties allow ideas to bubble up, for new kinds of economic activity to be tried. Tight ties squelch innovation, restrict the movement of new ideas. See: Granovetter, Mark S. "The Strength of Weak Ties." American Journal of Sociology, V. 78, Issue 6 (May, 1973): 1360-1380.

3. This isn't a matter of one way of life being better than another. It is a matter of society segregating into different ways of life that have political consequences. In 1980, high tech cities voted much like other places. Ditto with rural areas. By 2004, Bush lost high tech America (loose tie places) by three or four million votes; he won the election in low-tech, tight tie places.

Those are fair points. (And I want to say thanks for that link to the Statesman article, because I read about the correlation between gay populations and economic productivity back when that study came out, but have had a hard time finding even a vague reference.) I feel like they still don't get at what I was talking about.

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Last week Change.org, a social network for social justice and political action, released their own FaceBook application.  It's a smart move for them.  Like most social networks that have aimed at creating political change (Essembly comes immediately to mind), Change.org tried to create new online communities centered around particular issues and nonprofits.  These communities were to be dedicated to achieving some sort of communications, policy or electoral goal - raising awareness about Darfur, donating money to the Sierra Club, or even just electing your preferred candidate to office.  

The problem with such endeavors is that the model is necessarily limiting.  It takes a lot of work to build a new online community from scratch.  Most of the time, only hardcore activists with a certain amount of tech savvy will ever make their way onto a new social network.  And even then, since the only thing to do on these networks is talk about or donate to a single issue, it's tough for these types of strategies to ever achieve a critical mass of membership and become self-sustained and effective communities. There's just not enough incentive to come back on a daily basis.  

Now Change.org is looking to change that.  They've left the walled-garden of their online community and, rather than create a new social network and community from scratch, they've gone to where the users are: FaceBook.  Last week Change.org launched a new Application that essentially ported their whole network and functionality over to FaceBook via the F8 platform.

It's too early to make any real judgments, but the strategy seems to be at least a jump in the right direction.  People stop by FaceBook everyday - for long periods - because they can find information useful and relevant to their daily lives (mostly about their friends).  If you want to create awareness or build a constituency for a cause or for a politician, doesn't it make sense to integrate that advocacy and awareness as much as possible into the daily lives of your potential constituents?  Isn't that part of the philosophy behind a group like Drinking Liberally?  FaceBook is where millions of Americans hang out online.  If you want to engage them in online activism, it makes sense to do it through these highly trafficked, existing communities rather than attempt to create new communities whole-cloth.

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When Facebook opened up its F8 platform last week to developers, I wasn't the only one to get excited about it might be used in political ways. Within hours after Facebook opened, I had already gotten a number of requests to support non-profit groups via a new app called Causes. Seemed to me that Causes would be a good place to start investigating how social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and the like can be used to redistribute power and resources. So this weekend I tracked down Joe Green of Project Agape, the group behind the Causes app. Together with his partner Sean Parker (of Napster and Plaxo), Green has plans to leverage existing offline relationships online, starting by directing funds and volunteers to non-profits. Green is also the founder of the political social-network site essembly.com and the old college roommate of Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook. Green has been a field organizer for years, and has been thinking about how to use social networks in politics since he was a Kerry intern in New Hampshire. (This interview is part of a constantly-evolving IM based interview series called Hearing Progressive Voices.) I think we get some insight from Green on where politics meets social networks now, and where we can go from here. Dig in.

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Like Mike Connery, I am skeptical of the role social networks will play in the coming primaries and election.  I think the political utility of "Web 2.0" has been over-hyped and it's going to take awhile before we start to see most candidate use of these sites rise above the level of glorified advertisements.  That said, on a more academic level I'm interested in tracking candidate usage of social networking and related sites as best as possible now, so that the impact of these sites, such as it is, can be better evaluated in the future.

However useful these sites are for inspiring grassroots political participation, they are clearly only going to become more and more relevant as time goes on.  Even if being able to friend a candidate on Facebook doesn't increase a person's ability to interact with and influence that candidate, as people begin to check such sites at greater frequency they will at least have some kind of daily reminder of the potential to become politically involved.  So I think some optimism might be warranted when it comes to the question of whether or not these sites could help to boost young voter registration.

For this reason, I've lately been developing a script and accompanying website that gathers together data from several social networking sites (number of Myspace friends, Youtube subscribers, etc.), with more information to come.  I'm honestly unsure at this point as to whether or not this is a trivial exercise.  On a geeky level, I like being able to see this information all at once and get an idea of the extent to which it correlates with recent polling data.  So there's that.  But I also think this keeping an archive of this information could be helpful in ultimately deciding the role social networks played in the 2008 election.

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Cross posted at Future Majority. Bumped--Chris

So MySpace has launched a new area dedicated to the 2008 election.  Called MySpace Impact, the site will link to candidates "official" web profiles, allow MySpace users to donate to the candidates (not yet a live feature), and resurrect MySpace's ill-fated voter registration partnership with Norman Lear's Declare Yourself.

Fred Stutzman at Tech President mostly nails it on why this is a pretty lame development.  But here's a couple thoughts of my own.  

I'm really interested in the idea of Social Networking sites operating as a de facto Board of Elections and registering new voters.  I've heard that FaceBook is also going to set up something similar and attempt to register their current crop of users, as well as anyone who creates a new account on the site (potentially integrated into the registration process, like a mobile voter for the internet).

As a low-cost way of reaching millions of unregistered voters, the potential is huge.   Text messaging gets a lot of credit as an organizing tool for last spring's immigration protests, but MySpace had a role as well.  In this respect, the digital divide is less and less of an issue.  Social networking may not reach everyone, but as a value added it sure as hell expands the reach of and lowers the barrier to entry to our political system.  Certainly more so than our current model of voter registration.  

That's why it's strange to me that this didn't work (at least not well) when Declare Yourself tried last cycle.  Rock the Vote registered millions of new voters online in 2004, so why couldn't Declare Yourself and MySpace do the same in 2006?  Was it the off-year?  Is Rock the Vote's brand so big that it gobbles up the market of new voters?  Or was the program just executed badly?  All three are probably a little bit right, but it strikes me that the last reason might be most significant.  

It seems clear to me that this program's success will depend on how well they roll it out, and right now, I'm underwhelmed.  As Fred notes, MySpace Impact is just a straight up ad for candidates.  There's no real interactivity.  They're not giving you badges to register your friends on your person profile page.  There's no way to track how many friends you registered or anything else that would make the process of online political participation interesting.  If this is going to work, it will be because the political aspects are fully integrated into the MySpace platform.  Ghettoizing it to a separate (and lame) area is going to hamstring the effort - no matter how many banner ads they use to promote it.

Exemplifying this whole discussion is the actual registration page currently employed.  It contains an advertisement for Fast Food Nation (in theaters soon!).  FYI, that movie came out last year.  Usually it's customary to update your site when rolling out a new revamping an old product.  If I really needed to register today, I would have about zero confidence that this was legitimate and was going to work.  It looks like an orphaned web page.

I have similar doubts about the fundraising model MySpace Impact plans to introduce.  My question is this - will it allow users to raise money for candidates on their profile pages and make  fundraising a viral and empowering activity?  Or will this just be a way to siphon voters to a candidate's paypal account?  The former is exciting and interesting. The latter is totally uninspired and another instance of where this year's campaigns would be regressing from 2004.  

The poster child of Web 2.0 embracing a Web 1.0 political model . . . will people's heads explode?   More likely  it will either go unnoticed as more politics as usual, or the media will continue to report on it as if it was a groundbreaking use of technology in political campaigns.  Meanwhile, MySpace Impact won't do nearly as well as it could.