PEOPLE AND POLITICS

Cascades and the Political blogosphere by Jeff Swift

ABSTRACT

FM VOL 16-12 DESEMBRE 2011

Despite the fact that political blogs seem to be just as dominated by elites as traditional journalism, networks of individuals play an essential role in spreading arguments in the political blogosphere. The hyperlinking economy of political blogs is powered by competition, elevation, and access. This economy values networks of individuals just as much as — if not more than — it values elite top–tier bloggers.

http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3744/3118

Jeff Swift is a Ph.D. student in the Communicaton, Rhetoric & Digital Media program at North Carolina State University.
E–mail: jswift8@gmail.com

Hollande in the footsteps of Obama?

Alongside the official website campaign, francoishollande.fr, the team of the socialist candidate for the French presidential election has just launched "toushollande", a website for mobilizing activists. The objective is to organizing door to door and convince at least 5 million people to vote for him. Through targeting of priority areas with high potential to mobilize 10,000 activists will be trained to recruit 150,000 volunteers to go and meet directly voters. it is also possible to forward content to Facebook friends, invite them to join the candidate Facebook page, or make a donation.

The strategy is directly inspired by the Obama campaign of 2008, which had shown that 14 abstainer met personally had moved to vote, 10,000 times more efficient than leaflets. The French socialist team is also accompanied by Blue State Digital, the agency headed by the Obama former online campaign director, Joe Rospars, who came to Paris himself. The Internet campaign of Francois Hollande has a budget of 2 M¼ and led by 35 people.

Why do small states have big governments?

Karen L. Remmer (2010).

European Political Science Review, Volume 2,

Issue 01, March 2010 pp 49-71

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?aid=7205144

Building on the literature on public finance, this article explores the consequences of political scale for government spending. The central argument is that the tendency for small political units to have big governments is not merely the result of economies of scale in the provision of public goods, but a reflection of the greater pressures for public spending faced by politicians in smaller and more homogeneous political units.

The importance of such political pressures relative to other influences on spending is assessed on the basis of subnational data by comparing the relationship between size and spending under democracy and dictatorship. To the extent that government expansion is driven by citizen demands, the impact of size on spending may be expected to be more pronounced under democratic than authoritarian governance.

Results from a time-series cross-sectional analysis of growth in government spending are consistent with this expectation. Government growth is shaped not only by the population size of political units but also by the interaction between regime and size. Analysis of spending patterns under democratic rule further indicates that size is an important determinant of spending even after controlling for variations in citizen preferences, political institutions, electoral competitiveness, and economic performance.

The results have important theoretical implications for the study of fiscal policy and democratic governance around the world because they suggest that political scale conditions the linkages between citizens and the state, creating widely varying incentives for government growth across differently sized political units.

Keywords

small states; government size; political scale; government spending; fiscal policy

remmer@duke.edu

Ley SOPA

MOLT BO!

Shunning Facebook, and Living to Tell About It

December 13, 2011

By JENNA WORTHAM

Tyson Balcomb quit Facebook after a chance encounter on an elevator. He found himself standing next to a woman he had never met — yet through Facebook he knew what her older brother looked like, that she was from a tiny island off the coast of Washington and that she had recently visited the Space Needle in Seattle.

“I knew all these things about her, but I’d never even talked to her,” said Mr. Balcomb, a pre-med student in Oregon who had some real-life friends in common with the woman. “At that point I thought, maybe this is a little unhealthy.”

As Facebook prepares for a much-anticipated public offering, the company is eager to show off its momentum by building on its huge membership: more than 800 million active users around the world, Facebook says, and roughly 200 million in the United States, or two-thirds of the population.

But the company is running into a roadblock in this country. Some people, even on the younger end of the age spectrum, just refuse to participate, including people who have given it a try.

One of Facebook’s main selling points is that it builds closer ties among friends and colleagues. But some who steer clear of the site say it can have the opposite effect of making them feel more, not less, alienated.

“I wasn’t calling my friends anymore,” said Ashleigh Elser, 24, who is in graduate school in Charlottesville, Va. “I was just seeing their pictures and updates and felt like that was really connecting to them.”

To be sure, the Facebook-free life has its disadvantages in an era when people announce all kinds of major life milestones on the Web. Ms. Elser has missed engagements and pictures of new-born babies. But none of that hurt as much as the gap she said her Facebook account had created between her and her closest friends. So she shut it down.

Many of the holdouts mention concerns about privacy. Those who study social networking say this issue boils down to trust. Amanda Lenhart, who directs research on teenagers, children and families at the Pew Internet and American Life Project, said that people who use Facebook tend to have “a general sense of trust in others and trust in institutions.” She added: “Some people make the decision not to use it because they are afraid of what might happen.”

Ms. Lenhart noted that about 16 percent of Americans don’t have cellphones. “There will always be holdouts,” she said.

Facebook executives say they don’t expect everyone in the country to sign up. Instead they are working on ways to keep current users on the site longer, which gives the company more chances to show them ads. And the company’s biggest growth is now in places like Asia and Latin America, where there might actually be people who have not yet heard of Facebook.

“Our goal is to offer people a meaningful, fun and free way to connect with their friends, and we hope that’s appealing to a broad audience,” said Jonathan Thaw, a Facebook spokesman.

But the figures on growth in this country are stark. The number of Americans who visited Facebook grew 10 percent in the year that ended in October — down from 56 percent growth over the previous year, according to comScore, which tracks Internet traffic.

Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner, said this slowdown was not a make-or-break issue ahead of the company’s public offering, which could come in the spring. What does matter, he said, is Facebook’s ability to keep its millions of current users entertained and coming back.

“They’re likely more worried about the novelty factor wearing off,” Mr. Valdes said. “That’s a continual problem that they’re solving, and there are no permanent solutions.”

Erika Gable, 29, who lives in Brooklyn and does public relations for restaurants, never understood the appeal of Facebook in the first place. She says the daily chatter that flows through the site — updates about bad hair days and pictures from dinner — is virtual clutter she doesn’t need in her life.

“If I want to see my fifth cousin’s second baby, I’ll call them,” she said with a laugh.

Ms. Gable is not a Luddite. She has an iPhone and sometimes uses Twitter. But when it comes to creating a profile on the world’s biggest social network, her tolerance reaches its limits.

“I remember having MySpace for a bit and always feeling so weird about seeing other people’s stuff all the time,” she said. “I’m not into it.”

Will Brennan, a 26-year-old Brooklyn resident, said he had “heard too many horror stories” about the privacy pitfalls of Facebook. But he said friends are not always sympathetic to his anti-social-media stance.

“I get asked to sign up at least twice a month,” said Mr. Brennan. “I get harangued for ruining their plans by not being on Facebook.”

And whether there is haranguing involved or not, the rebels say their no-Facebook status tends to be a hot topic of conversation — much as a decision not to own a television might have been in an earlier media era.

“People always raise an eyebrow,” said Chris Munns, 29, who works as a systems administrator in New York. “But my life has gone on just fine without it. I’m not a shut-in. I have friends and quite an enjoyable life in Manhattan, so I can’t say it makes me feel like I’m missing out on life at all.”

But the peer pressure is only going to increase. Susan Etlinger, an analyst at the Altimeter Group, said society was adopting new behaviors and expectations in response to the near-ubiquity of Facebook and other social networks.

“People may start to ask the question that, if you aren’t on social channels, why not? Are you hiding something?” she said. “The norms are shifting.”

This kind of thinking cuts both ways for the Facebook holdouts. Mr. Munns said his dating life had benefited from his lack of an online dossier: “They haven’t had a chance to dig up your entire life on Facebook before you meet.”

But Ms. Gable said such background checks were the one thing she needed Facebook for.

“If I have a crush on a guy, I’ll make my friends look him up for me,” Ms. Gable said. “But that’s as far as it goes.”

New videogames give civil uprising tips

by Staff Writers
Los Angeles (AFP) Dec 5, 2011

The Arab Spring uprisings and Occupy-style US protests have inspired a new genre of serious videogames designed to help activists develop strategy -- all in the safety of cyberspace.

Games like "People Power (The Game of Civil Resistance)" allow would-be protest leaders to build and test their plans for peacefully opposing the police or the government without actually hitting the streets.

The game, which promises "an opportunity to join a community of others who want to learn about civil resistance and nonviolent strategies," was created by York Zimmerman Inc, along with the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.

"We certainly did not aim at a mass audience," said Steve York, "People Power" executive producer. "I suppose it's not for everyone, certainly not casual players wanting to be entertained.

"Still, I think it will be interesting and fun for people who enjoy strategy games, even people who like chess," York added from the documentary production company's Washington headquarters.

"And for our primary audience, activists engaged in real-world conflicts for freedom or rights, it would be unhelpful to make a game which is too simple or too easy," he said.

"People Power" is a followup to a game launched in 2006, "A Force More Powerful," when the group realized there there was a need to help activists learn non-violent stategies.

"Most of all, they needed help -- experience, actually -- in developing a strategy. They knew how to choose and make tactics, such as protests, strikes, and boycotts. But they didn't know how to put everything together," said York.

"They sometimes neglected the essentials, like recruiting, organizing, and acquiring funding and resources. Too many of them relied almost exclusively on public protest and street action."

Specialist game designer Greg Costikyan told AFP: "People Power's focus is on building networks across a society in order to enlist support for a dissident movement.

"From a gameplay perspective, that's the most interesting aspect of the design: the use of the social graph as a gameplay mechanic. It does, however, present a very simple model of what is, in reality... very complicated."

Using videogames as a training aid or to share views on current events is not new: for example the Pentagon uses virtual scenarios to help commanders and fighters understand war strategy, while so-called "newsgames" have existed for a decade or more.

It is no surprise then that the generation of activists behind the protests in the Middle East, North Africa and the West should look to videogames to help them develop their plans.

"Occupy The Game," created by activists in Arizona in November, advises players: "Collect money, water and the Constitution. Dodge the tear gas, bean bags and flash grenades thrown by riot police. Dont get arrested!"

"It's time to fix this broken machine," it adds.

National Public Radio (NPR) meawhile last month launched "Occupy America: The Commemorative Game," a very basic online game in which players roll a dice to move from city to city, pitching as many tents as they can.

"Games are another medium in which new technologies can be used to empower people through education and potential fundraising," said Hanni Fakhoury of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which promotes online freedom of expression.

"I think even more interestingly, videogames could raise money in support of protesters," he told AFP, citing "Humble Bundle," which offers games for whatever the player can pay, with money going to the organization they name.

"People may feel more comfortable contributing in these ways, rather than going to a Occupy camp where law enforcement presence is strong," he added.