After reading Weinberger's Law:
whatever people most emphasize about themselves is the biggest lie they tell. If your boss tells you that he's all about teamwork, then he's all about himself. If Nixon says that he is not a crook, then he is.
I'm somewhere between an academic geek and a normal person.
Also, for what it's worth, I've never believed that George Bush is "compassionate." There was no compassion in the glint in his eye during the debates when he supported the death penalty and asserted that marriage is between a man and a woman. And I agree with David that John Kerry's claim to be just a regular guy probably is another instance of Weinberger's cynical law.
Are you living in an echo chamber? I'll test you in a minute. First, a quote from Jane Galt.
If you ask me, the difference between conservatives and liberals right now is that the conservative base has a pretty good idea of where the rest of the American public does and does not agree with them, while the liberal base, to judge from their websites, believes that the American public is somewhere slightly to the left of Al Gore. This may explain why they spend so much time trying to convince each other that Republicans are a uniquely crafty brand of liars; with their worldview, it's the only way to explain their fellow voters increasing tendency to vote for the other side.
OK, so here's your quiz.
1. How many people do you know who are opposed to gay marriage?
2. How many people do you know who own a gun?
3. How many people do you know for whom internal combustion engines figure prominently in their recreational activities (think auto racing, jet skis, etc.)?
4. How many people do you know who regularly attend church?
If your answer to two or more of these questions is "zero," then you might want to face up to the fact that you live in an echo chamber. That's not a criticism--I live in the same one.
But I don't run around saying that I have a political platform that represents "the people."
David Weinberger spits into the "Internet is an echo chamber" wind (or echo chamber).
The Internet as a whole presents the broadest range of opinion, belief, feeling and creativity in the history of civilization. If you are not on the Net, you are limited to a diminishing selection of outlets expressing a diminishing range of views...No, if you want to see a real echo chamber, open up your daily newspaper or turn on your TV. There you'll find a narrow, self-reinforcing set of views.
As I've said before, I agree with him. My diagnosis here is that people are confusing correlation with causation. That is, they are confusing the fact that the Dean campaign was an echo chamber (Dr. Weinberger may disagree with me on that one) and it also used the Internet with a causal relationship between the two.
I think that the Dean campaign was an echo chamber because of propensity of people with those political beliefs to tune out the fact that much of the country disagrees with them. They think, "everyone I know agrees with me. So, if we can get together and overcome the corporate/media/right-wing conspiracy, we will win."
I also think that the Dean campaign made a start at using the Internet in politics, although I think everyone is at the early stage of the learning curve on that. But the Internet does not create an echo chamber. Walter Russell Mead raised the issue of the "neo-elite" being out of touch with the American masses without any reference to the Internet.
I think that the challenge for Internet politics in the long run is that there may be a mismatch between the Internet's decentralized spontaneous order and the mass-market industrial-era party politics that exists today. My reading of Doc Searls' essay, which I linked to here, is that it starts to tease out some of that mismatch. A conversation about that mismatch is what I think is called for at this point.
The Dean Deflation has led to some discussion of the Internet as an echo chamber. I think that an echo chamber was involved, but it was not necessarily the Internet. In this essay, I discuss the academic echo chamber.
If your temperament favors freedom without responsibility, then there are certain occupations that are a good fit. Academic life is one of them, as I pointed out in Real World 101. A professor has very little of what most of us would consider responsibility. Teaching, which is the most responsible activity that a professor must perform, is considered a minor part of the academic's life. Almost all professors seek to lower these modest responsibilities even further by seeking reduced teaching loads.
What I object to is translating it into a political ideology. It scales badly. Very badly.
I look at Bush vs. Russert and conclude,
Decision-making under uncertainty means living with probabilities, not absolutes. Tim Russert needs to take a class in AP Statistics.
I really hope that whoever wins the election in November, he does not get as demonized by the losing side as Bush has been by the Democrats. That is, I hope that if the Democrat wins, the Republicans don't engage in rage-aholic behavior, and conversely.
Brother Weinberger takes exception to Big Media's characterization of the Internet as an echo chamber.
The echo chamber meme distracts us from the true echo chamber: The constellation of media
The core of Dean's support is/was Gowns. If anything, the Internet has the potential to open them up to other viewpoints. My guess is that without the Internet, the Dean campaign would have been even more of an echo chamber.
Brother Ernie talks about the boob on the tube.
if the Super Bowl had been broadcast on cable, there most likely would have been some controversy over the baring of a partially concealed breast for a couple of seconds, but there certainly wouldn't have been any call for an investigation into the act by the FCC. Why?
People should be free to strip in a movie, but then they should not be allowed to stick a "G" rating on that movie. I think that unless the network advertises otherwise, the public has a right to expect a G-rated halftime show. I don't think that the First Amendment should entitle you to subject people to in-your-face porn when they were not expecting it.
What is particularly infuriating is that no one is taking responsibility for what happened. If somebody would just stand up and admit that the act was planned, you would not need an investigation to find out who planned it. If responsibility were clarified, then I might be able to retreat to another libertarian fallback position, which is to let the private sector punish the villains. But that fallback is not available in this case.
All in all, I would not waste any libertarian sympathy on Justin, Janet, and the other halftime show culprits. If anything, they are in less legal jeopardy than they deserve.
In my earlier essay, I argued that Dean could have made a defensible statement that we are no safer with Saddam in custody, but in the context of a thoughtful op-ed piece rather than as a sound bite. He didn't get the message, delivering a sound-bite on Michael Powell's investigation of Boobgate rather than explaining himself. Here is what Dean might have written (James Pinkerton wrote it instead).
people should remember that there is such a thing as consumer sovereignty, including boycotts. Gotta problem with what you see? Fine. Tell it to the broadcasters and advertisers. Everyone involved will get the message. Bill Cosby, who never said or did a bad thing to anyone on the air, has carted home a lot more endorsement money than, say, Marilyn Manson. To be sure, not every boycott succeeds, but again, that's freedom in action.
I was so offended by the MoveOn.org person's claim that "changing minds is overrated" that I wrote an entire essay on the case for trying to change minds.
Changing people's minds requires empathy with other people. Just as an entrepreneur must have empathy with customers in order to produce a marketable product, someone who tries to change someone's mind must have empathy with how the other person is thinking in order to take that person on the journey from one point of view to another....Most important, attempting to change someone's mind demonstrates respect for that person. It is dehumanizing to people to suggest that there is no need to appeal to their reason. It is insulting to suggest instead that one's hold on truth is so powerful that any disagreement is wicked.
The State of the Union address last night included what pundits call "raw meat for the President's base." But I did not see one line that could be considered raw meat for a libertarian. The closest might have been the sentence about privatizing Social Security. Against that, we had drug testing of kids, government as marriage counselor, etc.
I know that libertarians are a much bigger presence on the Net than in the electorate. But Bush basically did to libertarians last night what Iowa caucus-goers did to the Howard Dean campaign. I don't think this was a good week for Net-heads in either party.
UPDATE: The point about Bush blowing off the libertarian wing was also made by John Hood.
I have invested enough of my ego and my career on the Internet that I do not want to see "Internet campaign" become a term of political derision, like "Al Gore's endorsement." So, even though I thought that Howard Dean was the second coming of the Internet Bubble and was bound to burst sooner or later, I was sad to see him do so poorly in Iowa.
My guess is that Iowans tend to cast their votes based on personality. It's sort of like the article I read recently about job interviews, which said that studies show that a good rating at a job interview tends to correlate with being liked by the interviewer rather than with job performance. I think Iowans decided that Kerry and Edwards were nice and folksy, while Dean failed to connect. I don't think that the caucuses really sort out issues or message.
But the Internet smart mob proved to be far less potent than even I would have expected.
