I will be in Turkey for the next couple of weeks. I hope to meet a couple of local journalists, intellectuals, and activists, so all contacts are much appreciated. I’ll be in Istanbul and on the Western coast mainly.

on the conference front, I’ve just returned from the International Communication Association’s annual conference, this year held in Montreal, Canada. I presented two papers, one about the public that is still only the raw material for an argument, and one on blogs I want to submit for publication some time soon. Email me at rkn2103 [at] columbia . edu if you have any questions or would like to read one of the papers.

in addition to presenting, I saw very interesting presentations by a number of people, including a great discussion of media ethnography amongst Georgina Born, S. Elizabeth Bird, and others, a very interesting analytical paper on media output concentration in France and the U.S. by Rodney Benson, and many others.

April 29, Professor Charles ‘Chuck’ Tilly died. I was fortunate enough to be in the last class he taught, and to learn not only from his classroom presence and wonderfully orchestrated class, but also from his geniunely collaborative contentious politics workshop, his prolific writings, and the comments he generously offered on my own work. Let this post join the flurry of emails amongst former students and collaborators, all bearing testimony to all that he has done as a person and an academic to show what it can all be about. Though he is gone, I still think of this as the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Thanks, Chuck.

I’ll be in London Thurday and Friday for a conference at Royal Holloway, University of London, called Politics: Web 2.0. I am presenting work-in-progress on ‘The Labors of Internet-Assisted Activism: overcommunication, miscommunication, and communicative overload’. Based on some field research I have done on the role of new media in primary campaigns here in the US, I want to give some push-back on the notion that new media simply lowers the costs of communication. While that is certainly true, and has been argued forcefully, most recently by Clay Shirky in his very, very interesting book, Here Comes Everybody, I want to add to that the complications that follows from precisely that–when costs of communicating are low for every individual, and the number of platforms of communication is increased, there will simply be more communication, and the aggregate transaction costs are not easy to keep down, and this creates all sorts of complications of overcommunication, miscommunication, and communicative overload.

my paper is available here. Comments are most welcome!

abstract below

Abstract: This paper analyze the problems of overcommunication, miscommunication, and communicative overload that internet-assisted activism in contemporary incarnations suffer from. Pushing beyond web research and into ethnographic fieldwork amongst activists involved in the 2008 U.S. presidential primary, I demonstrate how the supposed wonders of new technologies, including the low-cost communication they provide, comes with new and peculiar problems that are only really visible on the ground, prices that are only paid in practice. Even in a case like mine, where resources like money, skills, and volunteers were amble, and everyone involved in a race in a state with much at stake had the incentives to make the whole thing sparkle, internet-assisted activism turns out to be more laborious in practice than in theory and hyperbole. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour and organizational sociologists like David Stark, I trace the complications that arise as the number of communicators, communications, and modes of communication multiply as new organizational forms, based on internet elements and greater volunteer participation, are introduced into political campaigning. I chronicle the orientation and composition, and reorientation and recomposition, of the people who accept the invitation to participate extended by websites exclaiming ‘we need you!’ and connect the socio-technological study of internet-assisted activism to current debates over the connections between political practices and civic engagement in America.

MPSA was pretty good. My panel was great, good fellow presenters in Jane Anna Gordon, Laura Montanaro, and Antony Lyan. Lisa Disch was a great chair and discussant.

Other pearls include fascinating work on ‘Strategic Obfuscation by Members of Congress’, analyzing what information political websites choose to divulge and what to withhold, despite the low costs of putting it up. David Lazer, Kevin Esterling, Michael Neblo, and Curt Ziniel has gathered a mountain of qualitative and quantitative data for this, and it will be interesting to see where it goes.

Had a chance to meet a couple of Danes, Henrik Bang and Anders Esmark, and their co-conspirators Michael Crozier, Mike Jensen, Brian Nelle, and John Altick for an early Sunday-morning panel that turned into more of a roundtable. It was interesting.

Oh, and Chicago was great.

I’m going to the Midwest Political Science Association’s 2008 Annual Meeting over the weekend. Four days of political science, rather overwhelming. Hope to get a chance to meet Shanto Iyengar and John Zaller, who will be presenting. Grad students Timothy Kersey (Indiana) and Bryce Dietrich (Kansas) also look like they will be presenting interesting work. I couple of friends (Amy Styart and Tom Ogorzalek) are also on the program. Oh, and so am I–work in progress on the public, rather exoteric stuff on John Dewey, Walter Lippman, and Jürgen Habermas, I’m afraid–one of these days, I plan to rewrite that paper to put my own argument up front, illustrate it, and downplay the exegesis that helped my make it. But time, time is scarce these days.

I was at Media Re:Public in LA over the weekend, a conference co-hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the USC Annenberg School for Communication.

It was very interesting, and a number of people have blogged about it in an intelligent fashion, including Martin Moore, Richard Sambrook, Victoria Stodden on the Internet & Democracy Berkman Blog, David Weinberger, and Ethan Zuckerman.

The conference aimed to bring together scholars and practioneers and survey the state of the field of participatory media (or citizen media, or public media, even the terms are unclear) within the overall news and information environment. The conference demonstrated its own necessity, so to speak, in that most of those present seemed to leave mostly confused at a higher level–that’s great, of course, nothing against sophisticated confusion, but also a great illustration of how murky the waters still are, and a great illustration of why the project is valuable.

They have a blog here.

I have a book review of Jules Boykoff’s The Suppression of Dissent out in a recent issue of the sociology journal Mobilization. The book discuss a number of important examples of suppression, but is plagued by numerous analytical problems.

Given it is at least as necessary a link in the chain that brings people from geographically disenfranschised areas like New York City to where electoral activism actually matters as social software tools, I demand more respect for the bus as a medium for political participation.

Like the telephone and the postal system, the bus is such a mundane medium for political participation that it is easy to forget how it and other technologies of everyday life are integral to much political activism. Like voting machines, they become visible only when they are not working or missing—when activists are waiting for the bus that just does not come, when the organizer can’t get reception, when someone has forgotten to buy the envelopes for those direct mail letters.

We tend to discuss the relationship between technology and politics in terms of the most recent additions to our arsenals, but the clipboards, signs, and–well–busses, are necessary too. New forms of organizing are extensions and rearrangements of elements, many of whom are old and familiar. Anyone who has spent anytime in any campaign knows how paralyzing it is when the mundane technologies go missing. Smaller campaigns would probably loose more of their punch if their bus crashed than if their facebook group went dead.

I’m busy doing research on political participation these days, and much of it is confidential, so I have had little time to write here. I maintain the site more as an online business card, and hope to get back to actually writing here when time and circumstances permit.