Empty Halls of Participatory Politics?
For all the promises web 2.0 may hold for participatory politics, caution is needed.
In the mission statement for campaigns wikia, Jimmy Wales writes “Broadcast media brought us broadcast politics. … participatory media will bring us participatory politics.”
Very little suggests that this is necessarily so. The dirty little secret is that plenty of participatory media sites are severely lacking in participation. Like, for instance, the very same campaigns wikia site, even seven months on and with all the ressources and brand value that comes from being part of Wales’ sprawling domain.
145 changes in the last 30 days, numerous stubs and very short entries, little activity, and substantial information about only Dennis Kucinich and Mitt Romney of the current potential presidential contestants. Only for Kucinich is the site linked up with an actual campaign network and not just to the candidate’s own site.
Like numerous other empty halls of participatory politics (across the pond, you can consider danmarksdebatten.dk), campaigns wikia lack both horizontal and vertical communication – you get in touch with neither kindred spirits nor actual candidates by spending your time there. No political community is engendered, no-one has anything at stake. Furthermore, the open-ended form that has served Wikipedia so well means that, like in many bulletin board debates, no issues are highlighted. These absent traits seem to me to be precisely the keywords that characterize successful properly political participatory sites – horizontal community, mutual vertical communication, and, for campaigns, issue focus to avoid conversations about everything and nothing. Dean and Bush-Cheney achieved some of this in ‘04. Without a community, a movement or candidate to communicate with, and/or issue(s) to focus on, the question lingers on – what exactly is it one is supposedly participating in by contributing to campaign wikia?
Next week at’Beyond Broadcast 2007‘, Chad Lupkes is giving a presentation of campaigns wikia, and I am really looking forward to hear what kind of prospects he thinks it has – I hope we’ll get more than a sales talk. Campaign wikia could become a useful site for gathering information about politics, but in its present form, it is not anywhere near being the “start of the era of net-driven participatory politics” that the mission statement talks about.
Two new studies show why some people are more attractive for members of the opposite sex than others.
The University of Florida, Florida State University found that physically attractive people almost instantly attract the attention of the interlocutor, sobesednitsy with them, literally, it is difficult to make eye. This conclusion was reached by a series of psychological experiments, which were determined by the people who believe in sending the first seconds after the acquaintance. Here, a curious feature: single, unmarried experimental preferred to look at the guys, beauty opposite sex, and family, people most often by representatives of their sex.
The authors believe that this feature developed a behavior as a result of the evolution: a man trying to find a decent pair to acquire offspring. If this is resolved, he wondered potential rivals. Detailed information about this magazine will be published Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
In turn, a joint study of the Rockefeller University, Rockefeller University and Duke University, Duke University in North Carolina revealed that women are perceived differently by men smell. During experiments studied the perception of women one of the ingredients of male pheromone-androstenona smell, which is contained in urine or sweat.
The results were startling: women are part of this repugnant odor, and the other part is very attractive, resembling the smell of vanilla, and the third group have not felt any smell. The authors argue that the reason is that the differences in the receptor responsible for the olfactory system, from different people are different.
It has long been proven that mammals (including human) odor is one way of attracting the attention of representatives of the opposite sex. A detailed article about the journal Nature will publish.
Enuncacysaw
November 16, 2007 at 9:43 am