Online Journalism Review, a Web-based journal produced at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California cranks out a nice article on Network-centric advocacy. Unfortunately, they focus to much on the tools and not the underlying shifts in strategy that enable campaigns to exploit the power of the tools.
OJR article: Net Changes Game of Political Advocacy for?Groups on the Right and Left
My favorite Highlights:
"The government is still figuring out how to deal with the enormous upswing in citizen participation," Bucholz said. "Most congressmen now use Web forms instead of e-mail addresses in order to manage constituent mail. But action center vendors spider the forms and fill them out anyway. In other words, the government is coming to the realization that policy or technical 'fixes' to public participation will not work."
The idea of Flash fatigue...
The successful element of flash campaigns -- the threat of immediate danger -- could also prove their undoing, as people tire of getting so many alerts about so many pieces of legislation. Brendan Nyhan, co-editor of the nonpartisan Spinsanity Web site, says that Net alerts only work by creating fervor. "The only way to have an impact is to punch through and really grab people by the lapels and say, 'You've got to do something about this outrage right now!' " he told me. "People get outrage fatigue, and there's only so long you can sustain it. You become the interest group that cried wolf."
Addictive Power
We are coming up on the first generation of voters that regularly use action centers, read candidate blogs and have access to a much broader range of information than they might find on cable," said Bucholz. "My sense is that, right or wrong, they feel that they have more power in the political process. This belief that the government is accountable will, I think, generate some of that accountability."
These threads all deserve a closer look in the days ahead. The real revolution is not at the end user side of the advocacy movement but on the internal plotting and strategy development of the professionals within organizations. Here we have only started to see a tiny fraction of campaigns become network-centric.
