Letters to the Editor

Does "Obama Girl" help Obama? Author Clay Shirky explains how the Internet's capacity to create ad hoc groups has altered the media, business and politics -- especially the 2008 campaign. [2008-03-07]

• The value of email campaigns

  I loved Clay's book, but I should probably say that the summary of my views is misleading here (and it's certainly not a direct quote, as Salon's punctuation would imply). As someone who uses email campaigns as a tool of activism, and in the UK built the tools that allowed citizens to contact their MPs in this way, I would never say that the value of email campaigns was zero.

  When I spoke to Clay's class last year, I did stress that the traditional comparison of email campaigns with old-fashioned letter-writing campaigns is inaccurate in describing their results. But that's not to say they don't have a positive effect. Congress no longer maps single communications to a certain number of votes, it's true -- but email campaigns have a different kind of effect. They draw attention to issues that might not have been considered (to give an example, EFF members emailing about the WIPO Broadcast Treaty took it from a non-issue in D.C. to a hot topic: and MoveOn has many successes in pushing issues to the forefront of the national debate in this way); they highlight sentiment en masse (a million emails isn't a million man march, but it says something); and they also provide a simple action that leads many people to other, more involved activism.

  To borrow Clay's language, co-ordinated email actions like this are below the "Coasian floor": actions that would have impossible to co-ordinate before the Internet. They're not the *same* as pre-Internet gestures, but that doesn't mean they're ignorable or don't count, as so many of the examples in Here Comes Everybody amply demonstrate. The answer to the question "How many votes in an election does an email count for?" isn't "zero", it's "that question generally doesn't apply any more".

  -- dannyobrien
  [Read dannyobrien's other letters]
  Permalink Flag Friday, March 7, 2008 09:28 PM
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