New Tools

I've written before on my ambivalence about Twitter; in my last post on the subject, I worried that it might be harming our ability to think meaningfully about things (and it turns out I'm not the only one that thinks this). However, while I still reserve the right to question the value of a constant feed of celebrities' vapid musings, dietary details, and other such minutia, I also admit that Twitter has great potential for innovative applications.

In my last post, I talked about the Twitter Vote Project. Now, Twitter is also helping to track the spread of the swine flu. From an MSNBC story about the project:

"Our site used to update every hour," said John Brownstein, a physician at Children's Hospital Boston who, along with fellow CHB computer scientist Clark Friefeld, created the HealthMap swine flu tracking service, which was recently modified to include Twitter updates. "But that was too slow for the amount of information we've been accumulating, so we had to switch to a Twitter feed instead."

You can also check out the CDC Emergency feed on Twitter here for constant updates about the swine flu.

As our fellows Morley Winograd and Mike Hais wrote about earlier this week, President Obama signed into law on Tuesday the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. Here's an excerpt from their take on the act; they wrote that it

...represents a major redemption of candidate Obama’s promise to offer his most loyal and largest constituency, Millennials, born between 1982 and 2003, a chance to serve their country at the community level and in return earn assistance with the cost of their college education.

Not everyone is ready to join hands and sing the praises of the concept, however. While [the bill] enjoyed bipartisan sponsorship in both the Senate and the House, that didn’t prevent a majority of Republicans from voting against the bill on final passage. They complained that the bill was “too expensive” and would crowd out pure volunteer work with program participants receiving a modicum of financial support for their efforts from the federal government. In the House, 149 of 175 Republicans voted “no,” joined by 19 of their colleagues in the Senate, including the party's two top leaders. With all Democrats voting in favor of [the bill], the core of the Republican’s “Just say no” caucus demonstrated how out of touch with the Millennial Generation they are.

Of those Republicans expressing their opposition in the Senate, only one, John Ensign of Nevada, was from a state that Obama carried. Even though both Republican Senators from such bright red states as Utah, Georgia and Mississippi could see the potential value of increasing the number of volunteers and college students in the country’s civic life, both GOP Senators from South Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Idaho made it clear that there were no circumstances under which their hostility to government could be softened by the merits of a patriotic cause.

As Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina put it on his Web site, "We need to recognize that this bill does represent a lot of what's wrong with our federal government today.... civil society works, because it is everything that government is not. It's small, it's personal, it's responsible, it's accountable.” And Louisiana Senator David Vitter spuriously argued, “This new federal bureaucracy would, in effect, politicize charitable activity around the country." Echoing Governor Sarah Palin’s horribly off key comment at her party’s convention last August that “the world isn’t a community and it doesn’t need an organizer,” these Republicans demonstrated just how out of touch they are with Millennial thinking.

I wholeheartedly agree with Morley and Mike that members of my generation are lookings for ways to do good for our country (and others) - in fact, many are frustrated with how difficult it is to find something worthwhile to do after graduating, particularly since monetary compensation is often a secondary or tertiary concern. Lucikly, President Obama understands the way that we millennials operate - if we want to go get a drink after work, for example, we might be more inclined to check out dchappyhours.com for specials first. So the Obama administration has launched a new Web site, Serve.gov, to help unite people with service opportunities that match their interests and passions.

Serve.gov is wonderful in its simplicity. It asks you what you're interested in, and where you want to be working, and that's it - the engine searches all posted entries that match your critera. It searches entries posted on Serve.gov itself, as well as on all of these partner sites:

Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist (and a supporter of NDN) was on hand at the signing. Here's what he had to say about the act, and the new site (courtesy of TechPresident):

Many people want to fully dedicate themselves to service, they're troops, teachers, social workers, cops, and all manner of public servants. We should remember the nobility of the public service they perform.

Me, I spend a lot of every day performing customer service and see real human behavior. I see, every day, that Americans are eager to help out, particularly the millennial youth, maybe the new "civic generation."

Serve America provides means for those who want to fully engage, like by seriously increasing support for Americorps, increasing the number of participants from 75,000 positions annually to 250,000...

...Serve America also provides for Serve.gov, a new Web 2.0-style government site that brings together service opportunities from a number of sources. It's genuinely innovative, especially in allowing any organization to create its listing on the site, building on top of the Network for Good platform.

Coming from Mr. Newmark, that is high praise - and it seems like this will have a much higher chance of success than "missed connections."

There is much to celebrate in the President's new Cuba policy this morning.  NDN was among the first organizations in the nation to argue that the right first step towards a new day with our Cuban neighbors would be to relax the Bush era travel and remittance policy, which had done so much to tear Cuban and their American relatives apart in recent years.   So we are pleased with this announcement, and believe deeply that these first steps will initiate a process over the next five to ten years - or perhaps longer - which helps Cuba modernize, and transition to a more open and democratic society. 

But the announcement also contained provisions about telecommunications which deserve a little more consideration this morning.  Note this exchange between Dan Restrepo and a reporter at yesterday's announcement: 

Q If you guys could just explain a little bit more about the part of today's announcement that deals with telecommunications firms being allowed to - I mean, what

MR. RESTREPO: Certainly. We want to increase the flow of information among Cubans, and between Cubans and the outside world. And one of the ways we can do that under U.S. -- existing United States law, back to the Cuban Democracy Act, is to allow U.S. telecommunications companies to seek to provide services on the island. The licensing process has never -- never really went forward. We're allowing that process -- the President is directing that that licensing process go forward, and directing that the regulations system be put into place to allow U.S. persons to pay for cell coverage that already exists on the island -- again, so Cubans can talk to Cubans, and Cubans can talk to the outside world without having to go through the filter that is the Cuban government.

Q So just cell phones is what this is talking about?

MR. RESTREPO: This is cell phones, satellite television, satellite radio. This is forms of -- modern forms of telecommunication to increase the flow of information to the Cuban people so that if anyone is standing in the way of the Cuban people getting information it is the Cuban government, and it is not some outside technical problem that can be pointed to.

Taking away those excuses and putting -- and trying to create the conditions where greater information flows among the Cuban people, and to and from the Cuban people.

Q To follow up on that, if I may. So if this happens as it's intended to happen, is the idea that a U.S. company would be providing sort of U.S. television programming on -- beaming it in -- onto the island, is that the idea?

MR. RESTREPO: The idea is to increase the flow of information, be it what we see here in the United States -- the global marketplace of television and radio, to make that a possibility for the Cuban people and to ensure that the United States government is not standing in the way of that; to make clear that more -- we stand on the side of having more information rather than less information reach the Cuban people, and for them to be able to communicate among themselves.

This is an early articulation of what could become an important part of any future Obama Doctrine - the idea that connectivity and access to modern media and technology tools have become indespensible elements of free and open societies in the 21st century.   This idea has also been a central part of NDN's arguments these past few years, whether it has been in the reporting and papers we've produced in our affiliate, the New Politics Institute, or in our more traditional policy work.  From a paper I co-authored in 2007 with Alec Ross, A Laptop in Every Backpack: 

A single global communications network, composed of Internet, mobile, SMS, cable and satellite technology, is rapidly tying the world's people together as never before. The core premise of this paper is that the emergence of this network is one of the seminal events of the early 21st century. Increasingly, the world's commerce, finance, communications,media and information are flowing through this network. Half of the world's 6 billion people are now connected to this network, many through powerful and inexpensive mobile phones. Each year more of the world's people become connected to the network, its bandwidth increases, and its use becomes more integrated into all that we do.

Connectivity to this network, and the ability to master it once on, has become an essential part of life in the 21st century, and a key to opportunity, success and fulfillment for the people of the world.

We believe it should be a core priority of the United States to ensure that all the world's people have access to this global network and have the tools to use it for their own life success. There is no way any longer to imagine free societies without the freedom of commerce, expression, and community, which this global network can bring. Bringing this network to all, keeping it free and open and helping people master its use must be one of the highest priorities of those in power in the coming years.

And we took an ever deeper look at how mobile devices are becoming core to development work across the world in this recent paper by Tom Kalil, Harnessing the Mobile Revolution.

This new high-tech foreign policy is a logical extension of the deep understanding of the power of these tools the President took away from his own wildly successful Presidential campaign, and is one more example of how the politics of the bottom up is going increasingly global.  Very exciting indeed. 

Congratulations to the President and his whole team for taking these smart and important first steps towards a new day for our relations with our Cuban neighbors. 

As our readers are well aware, we at NDN and the New Politics Institute are big believers in the power of social networks for politics. One of the most exciting rececnt developments in the social media realm is Ning, a service that allows organizations to create their own individual social networks, similar to MyBarackObama. Back in February, Jason Rosenthal of Ning came to NDN to demonstrate the many applications of this new tool - you can check out the video below:

This week, America Votes launched its new Ning site, americavotes.ning.com. We are pleased to see America Votes, which bills itself as "the largest grassroots voter mobilization effort in the country today," embracing this dynamic platform. We feel that Ning is extremely well suited to America Votes' needs, and look forward to seeing this effort progress.

In almost all of Apple's recent ads for the iPhone, the actual hardware seems almost irrelevant - the ads focus almost exclusively on the iTunes App Store.

While some of the phone's physical features like intuitive touch-screen controls and integrated wi-fi are attractive features, they are no longer unique or particularly uncommon (although apparently they may be proprietary); iPhone copies like the new Motorola Evoke and other touch-screen phones with full-featured browsers are popping up everywhere, and the new Palm Pre looks like it might almost out-iPhone the iPhone in terms of stock capability and "oh, cool" specs (like a wireless charging "stone" that the Pre can simply be placed on to juice up).

However, with the App Store business model, Apple really has revolutionized the mobile device. My phone is not just a phone, or an email device, or a web browser, or a GPS device, or an iPod; there really is an app for just about everything, and that's not just Apple propaganda. I've become almost weirdly dependent on my iPhone - I'm so used to being able to do just about anything on the fly that it's hard to remember how I managed without it. With the introduction of the App Store, the iPhone quickly became a remarkably polished mobile computing and gaming platform that also happened to incidentally make and receive phone calls.  

In fact, even that feature has been partly replicated through the app store; last week, I downloaded the free Skype application, which allows me to make free calls to Skype users from anywhere in the world over a wi-fi connection, and extremely inexpensive calls to normal phone lines as well. iPod Touch users can do this as well, and bypass the iPhone's rather prohibitive AT&T contract pricing. 

Other companies have been quick to realize what a game-changer the App Store really is; Apple's innovation has spawned a whole host of competitor application stores, including, most recently, the Blackberry App World (click here for a full comparison of the current App Store competitors and their pros and cons). 

The potential of mobile applications for politics and policy has yet to be tapped; the Obama '08 application, while very cool at the time and ahead of the curve, barely scratched the surface. For some ideas of the power of mobile technology, check out our excellent New Policy Institute paper, "Harnessing the Mobile Revolution" by Tom Kalil. This paper demonstrates the incredible power of simple, cheap cell phones to do good in the developing world. Downloadable applications, which essentially turn mobile devices into ultra-portable computers, promise to amplify the already extraordinary power of mobile devices.   

There is coverage today of a new study indicating that Hispanics made up nearly half of the more than 1 million people who became U.S. citizens in 2008 - almost 1 of 2 new Americans are Latino.  Additionally, the number of Latinos who became American citizens in FY 2008 more than doubled from the previous year.  It stands to reason the sucess of ethnic media that reflects this growing multicultural reality. A piece by Mandalit de Barco today on NPR's morning edition focuses precisely on the growing market share of "ethnic media," happening for various reasons: 

Many of these newspapers and broadcast stations are doing well because they've tapped into an expanding audience - the sons and daughters of immigrants.  In Los Angeles, the No. 1 TV station isn't NBC, CBS, ABC or Fox - it's Spanish-language KMEX, the flagship of Univision. And it isn't just Los Angeles' top station - Nielsen says it's No. 1 in the U.S. with viewers aged 18-49. KMEX built big numbers with immigrant audiences, but is now drawing their sons and daughters - and even their grandchildren.

University of Southern California journalism professor Felix Gutierrez says it's more than just language that's attracting those younger viewers.  "I was watching last night, and they were talking about the border wars - drug smuggling and all that. But they were covering it from the Mexican side. They had the same kind of footage, but it was a different perspective, a different angle that I don't see on CBS, NBC, CNN and the other networks," Gutierrez says.

Largely in response to the ties of many immigrants, one will undoubtedly find that these multicultural outlets have a great deal more international news than local, and thus a wider breadth of stories.  They must cover the local school, storm, or kindapping, in addition to the elections in El Salvador, violence on the border, and new constitution in Bolivia.

Not only is the content more diverse than traditional media, these outlets are forced to be more dynamic and market to a more diverse, multigenerational, audience: 

Previously, these stations used to rely on ethnic audiences that had few other options because they weren't comfortable in English. But that's not necessarily true of immigrants' children.

"We know that the first generation watches us," [Eric Olander] says. "The second generation's much more difficult to capture, in part because they have language skills, which allow them to watch MTV, to go listen to NPR. They have a much wider array of choices. Not to mention, the second generation, which are younger, is watching less TV - they're on the Web, they're not reading the newspapers in the numbers they were. Their media patterns are changing."

That's why in addition to its broadcasts, KSCI now offers podcasts, blogs and video online in various Asian languages and in English.

The biggest Spanish language daily newspaper in the country, La Opinion, is also reaching out online. The Los Angeles paper's circulation has dipped, but it still has half a million readers.

Publisher Monica Lozano says the newspaper, which was started in 1926 by her grandfather, survived the Great Depression, battles over immigration and world wars, and it's now adapting to the recession and new media appetites. Lozano says Latino households tend to be multigenerational, multilingual and multimedia.

I caught some of his townhall from Strasbourg this morning - carried live on CNN and MSNBC but not Fox of course - and our President was simply amazing.  He was good as I've ever seen him, connecting with the audience, offering complex thoughtful answers to tough challenges.   And Barack seemed to be happy to be in front of people rather than as he said stuck in hotel rooms.  The crowd was wildly excited, applauding him in ways few politicians ever hear.  In many ways this event is how our President best demonstrates his power, and the power of the American ideal.  For any European watching and wondering whether it is a new day, they can only have concluded that is a new day indeed. 

It was an inspiring way to start the day, and I was, for the entire time I watched, as deeply proud of being an American as I have been in many many years.

And it feels like on this trip our young, new President has begun the transformation from President of the United States to the paramount leader of the world's peoples.   His ability to find common ground, to talk of our common aspirations, to make it clear that we are all in this together, is a message, delivered by this particular messenger, which the people of the world are very ready to hear.

If as Fareed Zakaria has argued, the defining geopolitical event of this era is the "rise of the rest," and as Brzezinski has argued rising standards of living throughout the world are creating a "global political awakening," what we may have seen today is the first global leader of this new rising era to emerge; one who can speak in universal themes; one who can through modern media speak directly to these aspiring people - more numerous and in more nations than any time in all of human history - of the world, transcending faction, race and nation, speaking of our universal common aspirations as people no matter where they live.  The ability for this particular man, at this particular moment in history, to lay out such a convincing case for the universal dignity and common aspiration of all men and women across the world is allowing to speak directly to this global political awakening, and emerge as the leader not of the nations of the world, but much more importantly, its people. 

The politics of the bottom-up go global. 

Today, Simon and I took a brief break from the usual D.C. grind and headed over to the The Cable Show 2009 to check out the state of cable technology. Beyond the requisite scantily-clad spokeswomen, gigantic TVs, and vapor projector screens that accompany such gatherings, there was a lot of exciting tech on display. Here are my quick impresions:

Perhaps the biggest theme of the whole show was convergence, and the many ways that entertainment, information, and communication are merging. Streaming and downloadable movies and shows, IPTV, advanced DVR and Network PVR technology, 3-D home theater (available this year), networked video sharing, online video syndication, a huge variety of set-top boxes, mobile VoIP, fully integrated household systems, and many other technologies were being combined in myriad ways. 

Without getting bogged down in the details, the key takeaway of the show was that cable is no longer a broadcast technology; it has become flexible, customizable, and interactive to a striking degree in just a few years time, and with ever-increasing bandwidth (one provider boasted "wideband" download speeds reaching 50 mbps), this trend is sure to accelerate. 

Another trend that is likely to continue is the increase in the number of digital cable subscribers. As more and more people gain access to digital cable in some form, it will also become even more important for those of us in the political world to recognize and address these trends. NDN and the New Politics Institute have long been advocates of buying cable, especially now that it is beginning to offer individually targeted advertising (see my recent post on this subject). Read our NPI paper Buy Cable Smart to learn more about why buying cable advertising is an especially smart investment. 

The big news this week on the New Tools front was, of course, President Obama's virtual town hall earlier today, in which he answered some of the most popular questions submitted and voted on at WhiteHouse.gov. The event, which took place in front of a live audience but was centered around questions submitted online, was streamed live to about 65,000 viewers. Here's what Simon and NDN fellow Morley Winograd had to say about the event in an internationally syndicated Associated Press article today by Philip Elliot, a smart and tech-savvy reporter on the White House beat:

"In the new world of online media, formal press conferences are just one element or program to get the message out — to those, usually older, who watch such things on TV. The online version he is doing is an alternative way to get out the same message, in this case on the budget, targeted toward a different audience, usually younger," said Morley Winograd, a former adviser to Vice President Al Gore who now runs the Institute for Communication Technology Management at the University of Southern California.

"In both cases the questioners are just props — or, in some cases, foils — for the star, Obama, to deliver his message. But in the latter case, they get to self-nominate instead of be selected by elites," Winograd said.

In a way, it's part campaign-style politics and part "American Idol," said political strategist Simon Rosenberg.

"Barack Obama is going to reinvent the presidency the way he reinvented electoral politics," said Rosenberg, president of the New Democrat Network and a veteran of presidential campaigns. "He is allowing everyday people to participate in a way that would've been impossible in the old media world."

Obama's campaign allowed supporters to organize themselves to go door-to-door and raise money. Because of that, many felt an ownership of the campaign and devoted countless hours to giving Obama the Democratic Party's nomination and then the presidency.

Obama's aides are taking that step forward, incorporating tools that let visitors to the White House Web site pick the questions Obama will answer, turning the president's Thursday event into a democratic press conference.

"Average people get to shape the outcome, like 'American Idol,'" Rosenberg said. "This is not a couch-potato age. Average people are expecting to be part of the process."

This virtual town hall was a great gesture on the President's part. Obama owed much of his campaign success to his ability to make ordinary Americans feel tangibly involved in the campaign, and he's making strides to make them feel the same way about government. I agree with Simon that participation is absolutely critical in this new political era, and it's great to see that the President understands that.

That being said, there are certain dangers to this approach. Back in January, in reference to Obama's "Citizen's Briefing Book" experiment, I wrote that it would be interesting to see how the

Obama administration handles [unexpected or uncomfortable questions or suggestions that arise through this process] - are they merely attempting to create the appearance and feel of accessibility and openness, or do they really believe deeply in the intrinsic value of this enterprise? How far will they be willing to push this experiment? How far should they? These are questions that undoubtedly will come increasingly to the fore as we enter headlong into a new era of American politics.

We saw similar issues arise today. The New York Times wrote that "at the outset, at least, the forum had a canned feel." In the town hall today, President Obama laughed off one of the most popular submitted questions, which asked if he would consider taxing and regulating marijuana to create a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States. Here are just a few of the comments on the Politico post about the President's response:

"Because a 50 billion dollar/year untaxed industry is something to be laughed about..."

"Same old goverment ...they ask what we are concerned about and then ignore it. Im sure the Mexican Cartels are happy!!! We dont need the billion in tax money from mj, we have own printing press to make money!!"

"It is a shame that he did what he did. There were quite a few respectful, well articulated questions regarding marijuana and legalization. Obama tried to play them off as silly questions from a bunch of stoners. Meanwhile, people are dying in Mexico thanks to the 'War on Drugs.'"

"The way it was handled makes me believe that he is completely ignorant about this issue or else he could have provided a much more thoughtful response then just to laugh at it. I would have accepted some old talking points but to laugh it off as a joke should be insulting to those of us that take this issue seriously."

"The pot question was #1 under jobs, green economy & energy, budget, and financial stability. this is a big issue and i'm disappointed that it was dismissed so casually given the fact the white house is the one who initiated this forum in the first place. what a let down."

Of course, in the midst of a battle to pass his budget, it was unlikely that President Obama would spend political capital on this issue. But the most fundamental issue here is this: When the President asks people for their input, they will naturally want and expect that input to be taken seriously. The American people know the difference between genuine participation and the mere appearance of it; Obama's campaign made it easy for people to actually become directly involved, and people appreciated the authenticity of the experience. If, as Morley says in the article, it becomes too clear that "the questioners are just props — or, in some cases, foils — for the star, Obama, to deliver his message," the President's gesture of openness could potentially backfire on him.