IP Democracy: More on Trust, Politics & Internet Policy

After thinking more about the Dallas Morning News article Cynthia cited in her last post, I thought I’d add a little more to my comment on that post.

Here’s an excerpt from the article that discusses the campaign for mayor of Plano, TX:

Airtime fees for the 30-second Gilliam ad on local cable have ranged from $7 to more than $100 per spot, Mr. Lambert said. But e-mailing a link to the video is free. In Ms. Evans’ case, producing the video was free. Friends recorded her campaign video, and then she e-mailed it to supporters and posted it on her Web site. “It’s really inexpensive if you can do it with just someone with a camera, and it can be so easily circulated,” Ms. Evans said.

A group of Plano teenagers led by Jennifer Goebel sparked another Evans video. Jennifer, a 14-year-old freshman at Jasper High School, first met Ms. Evans through a National Junior Honor Society project. Jennifer invited students from across Plano to record the video at her home. She and her dad edited the spot, posted it on Google Video and got the word out via e-mail and MySpace.com…Jennifer said the video had received 4,681 Web hits as of Tuesday.

You gotta love it. But its not a given that video will get to realize its potential as a tool of invigorated grassroots democracy.

In my comment I raised the question “if campaigns (or any participants in the political process) have to pay a premium to obtain video-capable bandwidth to deliver their message, doesn’t this work against this democratizing trend?”

Wouldn’t it mean that voters willing to pay access providers for video-capable bandwidth wouldn’t have comparable access to the messages of less-well-funded campaigns that couldn’t afford the cost of “fast-lane” carriage for their message? I can imagine how this could end up mirroring the unhealthy (to democracy) imbalances we’ve seen in the broadcast-centric world of modern politics. Campaigns backed by big-moneyed interests would be streaming slick HD-quality messages, while messages supported by people and organizations without lots of money might be relegated to jerky, low-bit-frame thumbnail videos.

Reading the story about the Plano election reminded me of a point in the 2004 primary season when I was considering the various Democratic hopefuls and got an email link to a relatively long and relatively high-quality (at least for the web at that time) video message from the candidate I was leaning toward supporting. I remember watching it several times, rewinding and replaying some segments and scrutinizing the candidate, sizing him up as a person and as a leader. I then invited my wife, who has a healthy aversion to too much politics, to watch the video with me. She proceeded to do her own version of sizing up the candidate. Along with a lot of other web-based research on the candidate and the issues, this web-video-mediated “person-to-person” encounter with the candidate helped both of us decide that this was a person who had the smarts, vision, integrity, courage and personal skills to justify our active support in the primary. Normally we just vote, but this time we ended up getting a lot more involved, including helping to organize local Meetups, blogging and sending strategy memos (never read, I’m sure) to the national campaign.

Part of what was refreshing and valuable about that “political video moment” was that our experience of it felt so much more personal and in our control than the video exposure we’d become so used to in broadcast-mediated political campaigns—the endless and often repulsive 30-second spots, the increasingly inane, ever-shorter and endlessly repeated sound-bites, and the “gotcha” interviews by TV journalists too focused on scoring points against politicians and their competitors at other news outlets.

This diet of political video junk-food has, I believe, contributed to Americans general distrust of political figures and to the latter’s reliance on manipulation and communication style rather than substance, leadership and honesty. In comparison to it, the simple video message we pondered that evening on my PC monitor was an intimate, inspiring and informative experience of political communication.

So, I return to the final point of my earlier comment:

This suggests to me that the issue of access-tiering, as favored by telcos, has potentially large political implications beyond the question of whether Google and other web-based service providers pays AT&T a fee for fast-lane access. Given the current state of our democracy and its importance to our future, I think these kinds of issues need to be a central part of the current debate over Internet policy.

Posted by Mitch Shapiro on May 12, 2006 1:40 PM to IP Democracy