Given the meltdown in the economy, and the looming presidential debates, treat this as a mental health break, my piece on the primary wars has just been published in Prospect Magazine .
I first joined MYDD in 2004, and was an avid geeky follower of Chris Bowers (in fact I thought he ran the site) but as most of you know the site got a very different reputation during the primary war.
Though it's subbed and simplified for a British publication where the Netroots has to be explained as Blogosphere 101, I you might be interested to read it: in short, through an adversity, it's a paeon to the blogosphere and the possibilities of online advocacy and political campaigning
In the fierce urgency of defeating McCain Palin, I don't want to reignite any unnecessary and ancient flame wars, but you might be interested in the following themes such as this disquisition about SNARK:
It may seem puerile, but by then the primaries themselves had descended into farce-partly because the old "made for television" politics no longer worked in the digital age. This is something Armstrong foresaw in Crashing the Gate, arguing that the old Karl Rove-Dick Morris days of mass media campaigns were over...
Saying one thing to one electorate and another thing to another was viable in an age of local radio, television and newspapers. But with Google and YouTube, where every archived interview and campaign speech is just a click away, the contradictions could be burrowed out, held up and shown to be cynical and manipulative.
This is to me the other salient issue. Thanks the availability online of sources and stories, we've seen the rise of 'citizen journalists', who have provided many early leads on stories, especially in the vetting of Palin in the last month or so. My guess - my hope - is that it's going to be a lot harder in the future to fix, frame and spin stories without popular support.
I also try to question the structure of blogs and the promise of some kind of collaborative venture:
The paradox of the netroots is that for all their bottom-up inclusiveness, these sites are run by sole proprietors-Armstrong on the pro-Hillary MyDD, Markos on the Obama backing Daily Kos-the rock stars of the liberal blogosphere. The economics of the web means that clickthrough ad revenue, driven by visitor numbers, is the main source of funding. (Based on a rough estimate of traffic and Google ad rates, Daily Kos could be earning almost $1m a year through advertising.) As with early rock stars, the balance between driving up commercial success and retaining authenticity is proving hard to pull off.
The result is an uneasy mix of democratic collectivism and Rupert Murdoch-style autocracy.
But big Kudos to Jerome. Though in some ways, through my bannings and removal of privileges, he is the apparent enemy of the piece, he slightly stunned me, and showed his capacity to take flak, by frontpaging his take on the essay this morning
Its a compelling account, but I've a few inside-baseball quibbles that I'll point out. They don't point out flaws in the article, but just a different point of view (and if there were 10,0000 participants we'd have 10,000 pov's too).
First, I make it a point to distribute a majority of the income from ads on this site to other writers, and after the overhead and platform investment's I make, this has never been a profitable venture that I depend upon for revenue (which is how I'll always keep it too)...
(snip)
Whatever editorial moderation's we attempted here with trying to limit the pile-on gang-ratings failed or at best just caused a meta-uproar. But, like all things, the primary came to and end and we found a way to restore those privileges to everyone that stayed to fight the next battle.
