A Four Year Old Looks for a Mouse

by: Matt Stoller

Mon Apr 28, 2008 at 10:09


I'm excited to read Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, and I'm already reading his blog.  There's lots of good stuff to noodle on, and I've been doing a fair amount of writing on my own to try to figure out how the larger architecture of participation is impacting the political system.

This tidbit stuck out for me.

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

I remember being a kid and having nowhere to go and nothing to do, no public spaces and no conception of what one would be like.  TV was TV, I wasn't allowed to watch it on the weekdays, but what else was there?  Now you see Wookiepedia for Star Wars fans and an entire ecosystem of fan sites and communities for every show out there, as well as every hobbyist subculture, of which politics is in many ways just one.

All of which is to say that there are larger cultural shifts happening, and I'm not quite sure how our core argument for partisanship fits in.  But I think it does.

Matt Stoller :: A Four Year Old Looks for a Mouse

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A Four Year Old Looks for a Mouse | 13 comments
Fan Base For The Common Future (4.00 / 1)
I'm not quite sure how our core argument for partisanship fits in.

That's what Dems are:  New Deal, Civil Rights, Women's Rights, GLBT Rights...

Fan base for the common future.


"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

Agreed, but are those inherently partisan issues? (0.00 / 0)
I totally agree that they're the partisan issues today, and ones that I wish the Dems were more assertive about.  However a different way of looking at it is that our challenge is to get to the point where these aren't primarily partisan issues, but are meaningfully accepted by the major parties.

Yeah, that would potentially be a disadvantage for the Democrats; but to the extent that these become transpartisan issues, we're much more likely to see societal change.

Again, though, that's talking longer term (which is how I took Matt's musing).  In the here and now of 2008, they are indeed intensely partisan, and we should not be letting the Democrats who compromise on them off the hook.

[ Parent ]
Well, They Have Been Inherently Partisan Since At Least 1912 Or So (0.00 / 0)
Although there have certainly been plenty of individual exceptions.

So my guess is that it's going to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

That doesn't mean that the GOP will always be equally antagonistic, of course.  I'm not saying that at all.  In fact, success in the next 8-10 years might well look like bringing the center of the GOP in Congress about to where the Blue Dogs are right now.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
My big problem w. TV (4.00 / 1)
is that it's a normalizing medium. I remember feeling like a freak because my parents weren't like the Cosbys. I really, truly believed that everyone else's parents were, because that's what TV told me.
   Can you imagine the difference the internet must make for any kid that feels marginalized in any way, be it excess bookishness (ok, that was me,) sexual orientation, what have you?
 
Instead of Watching Cosby (0.00 / 0)
You should have been watching Max Headroom, Star Trek, TNG and Dinosaurs.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
LOL, that's awesome! (0.00 / 0)
I for one am VERY glad that the world is moving in that direction.  I just hope we do it right.
Awesome book (0.00 / 0)
I read this when it first came out and was blown away. Shirky's accounts of people in Egypt and Belarus using collaborative toys for serious organizing -- that stuff is amazing and inspiring.

I think that by and large, the Netroots is already exploiting the effects he describes to great effect. You can find almost every principle of his embodied in DailyKos, for instance. But the cheapening of organization is particularly powerful for a coalition party like the Democratic Party to pull its various voices together. It's akin to the birth of right-wing talk radio. The quicker and easier we can bring people together for a quick victory on a small issue, the better we can address the attack-on-all-fronts-at-once strategy of Republican governance on issues that aren't marquee ones.

For example, the ongoing FISA fight. It's so hard to get the trad media to run even one story on this issue and grassroots support is hard to rally because it's just not emotional. But by keeping up a constant conversation on certain blogs and keeping close watch on lawmakers and opinion makers, we've succeeded in halting the steamroller that would've rolled over this issue in a week back in '06.

It's always been easy enough to mobilize outrage against the war, for instance, or for abortion rights. But net neutrality? Media consolidation? The writers' strike? These would have been impossible to take national just a decade ago.

exciting stuff (4.00 / 1)
I am reading "Here Comes Everybody" right now, and I find it facinating.

I wasn't very into the technological aspects of the internets, but the societal ramifications are amazing.  

I know people get caught up in how the presidential race is a piviotal point in our history.......but for me the social and organizing gamechangers of the internet is huge - and not going away.  

The younger generations see things differently from mine (Gen X).  They are more interactive and more understanding of diversity.  How could they not be, with access to the entire world on their computer?

Access to information and social organizing around this information (without any leadership needed sometimes) is my one hope for the future.  

I think it doesn't (0.00 / 0)
Why should you expect that the politics of the 90s will work in a web 2.0 world?



The liberal wiki
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Really? (4.00 / 1)
At the very least, it promotes grassroots engagement.

I would never get around to doing as much poli. volunteering as I do, if the internet didn't 1) make it so easy and 2) foster a sense of communal responsibility. I don't slack because I'm always reminded of other people who are busting their proverbial butts.

[ Parent ]
The politics of the 90s (4.00 / 1)
as I remember it, consisted of FOX News, Drudge, Limbaugh etc. leading the traditional media around by the noses, while the rest of us were reduced to yelling at our TVs and crying in our beers.

It was a highly partisan, class war in which only one side had weapons.

Web 2.0 evens the odds.

Montani semper liberi

[ Parent ]
That's how I remember it too. (0.00 / 0)
And even worse, the weapons were crafted in ways that inherently favored that side.

The decentralized, collaborative nature of a lot of web 2.0 technologies -- and their ability to [in the right circumstances] neutralize and even invert existing power imbalances -- is a very different situation.

[ Parent ]
It's not about us (0.00 / 0)
It's about everyone. And while it allows us to be nerds about politics, it allows everyone to be nerds about something.

Now, in the short term it is an almost inherently anti-conservative socio-cultural shift - it's about change and individual empowerment, enemies of conservatism always - and we've helped make politics of the left much more relevant to people's lives in a multi-modal, interactive way. But that aspect of it isn't inherently leftist. Eventually the right will figure out how to not just attempt to copy our infrastructure but restructure their dialogue in a way that empowers and speaks to its constituents (of which there will always be a lot). As with the left, it'll take a while - so many entrenched leaders are just basically opposed to that approach - but it'll happen. And that'll be good for politics.

A Four Year Old Looks for a Mouse | 13 comments
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