Coleman believes there is a disconnect between government and the people, based on a growing public fear that individuals no longer have the power to influence the political world.  

Join Professor Coleman as he draws upon new research and public survey data to argue that the internet has the potential to open up a new space for civic efficacy.

Respondent: James Crabtree, senior editor, Prospect Magazine and trustee, UK Citizens Online Democracy

Chair: Matthew Taylor, chief executive, RSA

The speakers point out that while the Obama campaign was great at getting people involved in the campaigning side of things (funding, getting out the vote etc), it never allowed ordinary people to get involved in policy formulation. Which raises the question that the Internet is great at marketing but much less good at providing spaces where citizens can put forward ideas in ways that the existing system can embrace.

Worth a listen.

• Preliminary data shows an increase of more than 20 percent in activity on the site on election day vs. last Tuesday (measured by page views).
• More than 5.44 million people clicked the “I voted” button on Facebook to tell their friends they voted.
• John McCain: 625k supporters on Facebook
• Barack Obama: 2.5 million supporters – the most popular page on Facebook (no. 2 is Michael Phelps with 1.6 million)
• Since Sept. 5, McCain has added more than 330k fans and Obama has added more than 750k fans.
• On Facebook, Obama added more than 18k supporters Sunday night, more than 25k Monday night, and added more than 40k supporters on election day.  That is the largest single day of growth we have on record.
• McCain lost about 300 Facebook supporters on election day.
• Total election-related virtual gifts given: more than 2 million
• Shortly after midnight on Nov 4, about 1 million people used the Causes application to simultaneously set their Facebook status with a unified message to remind their friends to vote.  This kicked off one of the largest online rallies in history, with currently over 1.5 million people participating and growing quickly.  So far, 4.5 million status messages have been posted.
• In October, Facebook partnered with Rock the Vote to register more than 50k.
• In the days leading up to Nov. 4, the site was averaging about 200k wall posts per day related to the election.  On election day, wall posts mentioning Obama surged to more than 1.1 million and those mentioning McCain went to 280k.  There were more than 2 million total wall posts related to the election on election day.

But, anyway, so what? It’s clear that Negus is using it in an Australia sense of ‘who’s a busy boy then’ and is not being racist.

Negus has an exemplary record on race issues and, in particular, aboriginal issues here in Australia and over the years has done more than most to promote awareness and the cause of reconciliation.

It raises questions about major media outlets employing columnists who are also key players in the political processes they are observing.

Kristol’s many critics are no doubt enjoying his current difficulties:

William Kristol, a neocon who, along with Paul Wolfowitz and a gang of what Saul Bellow termed “high I.Q. morons,” helped sell President Bush on the idea that American troops would be welcomed in Iraq like they were in Paris after the D-Day invasion, didn’t stop there but instead went on to strongly lobby McCain for Palin. Oops.

Part of the problem is that in defending Palin, and his role in criticising the McCain camp, he dumped on the NYT calling it ‘untrustworthy’ and ’suspect’:

Appearing once again on The Daily Show, Bill Kristol, Jon Stewart’s favorite whipping boy (”Bill Kristol, aren’t you ever right?”), on Thursday night defended the McCain-Palin ticket, at one point informing the show’s host that he was getting his news from suspect sources. “You’re reading The New York Times too much,” he declared.

“Bill, you WORK for The New York Times!” Stewart pointed out.

Kristol wrote a column on Oct. 13 calling on Mr. McCain to fire his campaign because it was “close to being out-and-out dysfunctional’ and “its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic”.

There are questions about where Kristol got his information about the internal workings of the McCain and Palin camps and the purpose he had in writing about it in the NYT, Andrew Sullivan has little doubt:

it seems clear that Scheuneman was funneling pro-Palin spin to Kristol, who was just spewing it directly, like raw intelligence reports, into the New York Times, using his column – how else does he see journalism? – as a pure means to advance his own interests within the GOP factional battle.

Last Wednesday, the NYT reported rumors that a close friend and contact of Kristol’s, Randy Scheunemann had been sacked, and quoted an anonymous McCain aide as saying Scheunemann was feeding a “constant stream of poison” to Kristol. Scheunemann denies he had been fired. But Scheunemann admitted to CNN that his email had been temporarily disconnected.

According to the NYT article:

Advisers in the McCain campaign, in suggesting that Palin advisers had been leaking damaging information about the McCain campaign to the news media, said they were particularly suspicious of Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain’s top foreign policy aide who had a central role in preparing Ms. Palin for the vice-presidential debate.

The fact that the NYT named Randy Scheunemann is also seen as a sign that the paper maybe about to cut Kristol loose.

At the centre of all this post-election recriminating is the selection and performance of Palin.

Kristol is believed to have played far more than a media observer’s role in the discovery and selection of Palin:

Kristol can fairly lay claim to having “discovered” Palin for Washington political circles. Palin’s name appeared in 41 Weekly Standard articles … starting with a paean entitled “The Most Popular Governor”.

Rove engaged in heavy lobbying in an effort to get McCain to embrace Romney. Others, of whom Kristol was the most prominent, pushed Sarah Palin—arguing that she was young, popular, vigorous, unknown and had the right connections to the Religious Right bloc which had proven so important to Republican wins in 2000 and 2004.

Kristol now claims that the McCain staffers searching for the source of the damaging leaks about conflict between the McCain and Palin camps in the final weeks of the campaign are ‘paranoid’. Kristol is vigorously proclaiming his loyalty to Senator McCain, as he did in this Fox interview:

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is an imbroglio with a fair distance to go.

Huffington says flat out that if it wasn’t for the Internet, Obama would not be president. Trippi notes that Obama’s YouTube spots gathered an aggregate of 14.5 million viewing hours. The Internet was used by candidate previously, he said, noting the Howard Dean campaign, but Obama really leveraged it fully with online video, blogging, social networking and fundraising.

The panelists also note how mainstream media tends to fail in politics, simply reporting on what each candidate says without saying who’s right or wrong. The blogosphere, they say (particularly Trippi and Huffington), tends to call out factual inaccuracies better than mainstream media.

Adams’ main point is the familiar one that the breakdown in mass media will see a breakdown in society; instead of one conversation there will now be many of them. Our media will become fragmented and our society will become ‘messy’:

we’ll miss mass media when it’s gone. What many saw as dangerously anti-democratic – the domination of press, radio and broadcasting by a few powerful families – may turn out to have had some good points.

The main ‘good point’ revolves around the idea that we the audience can’t really be trusted with all that choice:

It’s good that they have alternatives to oligopoly media – or to the public broadcasters. But too many retreat into a world of media that takes user-friendliness too far. That is, they censor their inputs. They garner their information from the sources and blogs that echo their views, and are deaf and blind to the other side(s) of an argument. For many the widening choice means a narrowing mind.

This ‘echo chamber’ idea has been around for a few years, of course, but there is no evidence for it that I’m aware of it, and Adams doesn’t offer any. With choice, most of us are accessing far more viewpoints than ever before.

A lot of the problem with Adams’ viewpoint is that it is based on the idea that traditional media can’t survive the advent of social media and social networking. Obviously, existing media will have to make major adjustments, including accepting the idea that the audience can no longer be controlled.

Adams’ final paragraph is also not new but I think quite strange:

Mess media will be a problem for governments. How to get an urgent message out about a bushfire? An epidemic? A tsunami? A war? For all its flaws and faults the mass media provided a community notice board. Will government be forced to have a “Big Brother button” to press – a way of interrupting everyone at once?

Strange in the light of the role of Twitter in the aftermath of the Chinese earthquake and also the Obama campaign effort which relied so much on social media and social networking. Last week, I wrote:

Obama’s genius was to put together old-style, person-to-person community-level campaigning with the power of new technologies. He took a pre-television model and welded it to a post mass media technological environment. In doing that, he raised more money than anyone before him, recruited more volunteers, registered more new voters and succeeded in his goal of putting people back into the political process. Obama has re-invented centre-left politics as a participatory activity.