From Dau's piece:

What is unclear is how the online activist community benefits. Bloggers - the heart and soul of the online commentariat - continue to be troubled by the chasm between their oversized real world impact and their disproportionately limited insider clout. Part of the challenge is figuring out how to leverage unpredictability, no easy task. And part of it is to distinguish between the community’s active and passive power, John Locke’s useful distinction between the power to receive change and the power to make it.

No easy task, for certain, but there is a great difference between not easy and impossible. This emerging Internet community, through all of its facets from blogging to Facebook and Twitter networking, appears chaotic but it is not. It is rather highly complex, and that is much better than chaos. For anything beneficial to happen, the interrelationships emerging through the new high-speed network will have to self-organize - and that is what the presence of Complexity not just allows but mandates.

Reaching back into the memory banks, there is this from Howard Zinn circa 1966:

Thus, we face a dilemma: wars and revolutions today cannot be limited and are therefore very perilous. Yet parliamentary reform is inadequate. We need some intermediate device, powerful but restrained and explosive but controlled, to pressure and even to shock the decision-makers into making the kinds of changes in institutions which fit our world. Walter Millis, in an essay written for the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, has argued persuasively that the price we may have to pay for a world without war is a kind of intermittent guerrilla warfare, constantly bringing society into rough accord with popular demands. It turns out (and we have the experience of all bourgeois, socialist and national revolutions to support this) that no form of government, once in power, can be trusted to limit its own ambition, to extend freedom and to wither away. This means that it is up to the citizenry, those outside of power, to engage in permanent combat with the state, short of violent, escalatory revolution, but beyond the gentility of the ballot-box, to insure justice, freedom and well being, all those values which virtually the entire world has come to believe in.

Zinn's solution:

I speak of non-violent direct action. This encompasses a great variety of methods, limited only by our imaginations: sit-ins, freedom rides and freedom walks, prayer pilgrimages, wade-ins, pray-ins, freedom ballots, freedom schools, and who knows what is on the horizon? Whatever the specific form, this technique has certain qualities: it disturbs the status quo, it intrudes on the complacency of the majority, it expresses the anger and the hurt of the aggrieved, it publicizes an injustice, it demonstrates the inadequacy of whatever reforms have been instituted up to that point, it creates tension and trouble and thus forces the holders of power to move faster than they otherwise would have to redress grievances.

I don't in any way disparage thinking or writing; every movement needs clear-headed theoriticians to put ideas into order and explain their relevance, along with articulate and compelling spokespersons to inspire and raise the call to action. But thoughts and words are not enough; until there is action, those complacent in their power will not be "disturbed" nor will they be "forced" to change.

The primary benefit that can come from the Internet community is to mobilize concerned citizens and put feet on the street. Those in power fear one thing above all, and that is mass action. It was mass action, millions of people in the streets, that drove FDR however sypathetic he may already have been to create the New Deal. It was mass action that either allowed or drove, take your pick, Truman and Eisenhower and Kennedy and Johnson to make big strides with racial civil rights.

However sympathetic Obama may be to Progressive causes, he will surely tend towards the interests of those already established in power unless the people rise up and demand that they be paid attention to and their needs be met. We don't need Obama to be another FDR; what we need is to treat government as did Labor in the 20s and 30s. We don't need Obama to be another LBJ, what we need is to treat government as did the Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60's. We need, IMHO, to concern ourselves less with reacting to what Obama's thoughts may be and focus more on how to proactively grab his attention and enlighten his thinking.

For the blogosphere to be meaningful it will need to create "tension and trouble" while inspiring and creating movements that get people out from behind their computers and into the streets, disrupting the complacency of the comfortable and literally frightening Obama and those who stand behind him into doing the right thing. The challenge is to transfom connectivity into common purpose and constructive non-violent mass movement. Not easy, but neccessary.

From Daou's first paragraph:

The pyramid of Internet political functions consists of message (communications), money (fundraising) and mobilization. Atop that pyramid sits communications. Message drives money and triggers mobilization. Devoid of a compelling message to spur their use, the most advanced web tools will lie fallow. The impetus to use technology is always external to the technology; the impulse to connect and contribute begins with the inspiration to do so and the inspiration derives from the message.

No, the inspiration does not derive from the message. This is fundamentally, blazingly wrong. The need is to connect and communicate, and that need belongs to individuals. Action can be shaped and directed by message, but we're not all sitting here waiting for a message to inspire us. If that's all it took, we would have solved all of our problems because there are plenty of messages out there to direct us to do so.

The inspiration an individual may develop can be for good or for bad. Or for neither. My point here is that one can say they're inspiring people to good, but there's no way of knowing if people are acting because they hate and fear, or because it's more fun to be against than to be for something or someone. The need, however, stays the same: to connect and communicate. What you connect and communicate about is secondary to the fact that you're reaching out and touching someone.

That need to connect can, has, and will trump morals, principles, and sense of fairness. People will swallow their own sense of what is right and wrong to make connection, even when it means picking up a rock and throwing it at someone to show you're part of the group. Being part of the group despite principle is alarming in any situation, but I think I could argue that the anonymity of these connection tools called the Internet has resulted less in the good and more in the rancid.

In short, Daou (and he's not the only one) fails to mention that whipping up of people using this technology may be closer to creating a mob than birthing activists. That perhaps the "messaging," the turning of complexity into one-line accusation and mischaracterization, is a negative, and key to the manufacture of a moral panic. That the mob is virtual means no one gets stoned to death, which is good, but the psychology is exactly the same.

Technology makes no moral judgments, but neither does it automatically bestow goodness. People who use the Internet for political purposes are not automatically good people. Technology is merely the means people use for good or ill, just as the rain falls on the just and unjust. The rain does not care. Neither do the rocks. Neither do the electrons.

Another argument I could make while sipping my cocoa (mmmm, chocolatey goodness) is that the Internet has been used---for example, in the last election cycle---as a tool to create a moral panic. A moral panic is a slow-moving, largely symbolic, moral rather than physical, and often non-existent type of collective delusion. It's different in other types of panics in that its crucial element is the folk devil, the villain, the deviant. A moral panic has at it's distinct characterization from other mass delusions that it assigns agency without regard to fact.

Combine it with these communication tools and moral panics (something U.S. culture thrives on even without fancy computers), can occur at the speed of light. (Erich Goode wrote an an excellent article on moral panics in the latest issue of _The Skeptical Inquirer._ Not online yet, but I'll try to remember to link to it if they do.)

Finally (and a minor point), Daou is incorrectly emphasizing the importance of the number of people involved in the political process as opposed to the percentage of the population. For example, 62 million is a huge number, but if you have a population of 620 million, then it is only ten percent and an egregiously low participation rate in a representative democracy. There are historical examples of political involvement at higher rates. I think percentages may be the key metric, and not sheer number.

because i'm annoying like that.

i really think it depends on the group in question. take health care (and the lack of it). it "inspires" people like me to be very active politically, to th extent that in every communication i have with my elected representatives, i remind them of the need for universal single payer, and other reforms. it motivates me to stay active, as we do not yet have those things. it frightens me in a way no "message" ever can or will, because it's a very real issue in my life where slogans and narratives are not.

and yet- there are millions of people just like me, without adequate health care coverage, equally suffering from the effects of that, who are completely oblivious nonparticipants in the political process. they may have anger, fear, and a desire for their situations to change as i do, but for a host of reasons, to them, being involved in the political process is not the answer.

and then there are those who have perfectly wonderful health care coverage, who don't want anything to change, and who are very attached to a message, and indeed inspired by it. "no socialism" they cry. "free markets" the chant. to them, despite what those messages may do to the political reality that in turn crafts policy that affects people like me, the more important thing is that "america is free, and has a free market system!" and they will thus continue to work against what i believe to be my interests, because the message/ideology is what drives them.

i understand why you take issue with daou's formulation tho. he's...um, not exactly what i'd call an academic theorist. which isn't a bad thing! goodness no. but that's part of the fun of blogging. people can sort of free-form in their intellectually heavier lifting; sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes both.

or so I understand him. It is intrinsic in the medium used to transmit information, and often obscure to both the sender and the recipient:

McLuhan tells us that a "message" is "the change of scale or pace or pattern" that a new invention or innovation "introduces into human affairs." Note that it is not the content or use of the innovation, but the change in inter-personal dynamics that the innovation brings with it.

where

a medium is "any extension of ourselves"...But McLuhan always thought of a medium in the sense of a growing medium, like the fertile potting soil into which a seed is planted, or the agar in a Petri dish. In other words, a medium - this extension of our body or senses or mind - is anything from which a change emerges. And since some sort of change emerges from everything we conceive or create, all of our inventions, innovations, ideas and ideals are McLuhan media.

The nature of the Internet, the comprehensiveness of the archive, the universality of the power of retrieval, the speed of communication and the size of the audience are unprecedented compared to any previous medium and so then is the potential power of the message. Whether we are aware of it or not, the "message" exists external to any literal content and drives the inspiration to connect through a particular medium.

The challenge is in finding what is worthwhile and rejecting that which is not. I believe I can assert without fear of documented contradiction that 99.999% of every new thing on the Internet is garbage. This compares to 99.99% of television and radio, 99.9% of printing press literature, 99% of hand-transcribed literature and 90% of oral recitation, meaningfulness of content declining by exponential power as the ease of communication increases. Back in the day it took a great deal of effort to remember and recite the tribe's collective wisdom; today any fool can put out any sort of unedited and unreviewed claptrap and in literally the blink of an eye spread it worldwide.

I agree that there is danger in collective agreement, that mass movements can be either good or bad and it is a short hop from civil disobedience to a mob, but that only emphasizes the need to maintain an attitude of non-violence; without violence, for whatever purpose assembled and however massive in number, a group is just a group. Fear of the possible downsides to collective action is in my opinion no reason to hold back from organizing real life action via the Internet; for damn sure the forces of evil will be doing so and it would be unwise in the extreme to cede them exclusive use of the tool.