[Air-l] howard dean, social movements and clay shirky

[Jonathan Marshall]

I don't know if people saw Weinberger's response to Shirky.  Weiberger wrote "small peices loosely joined" and is Dean's web campaign person.

http://www.corante.com/loose/archives/001636.html

The arguement seems to  be the old one.  The Net leads to fantasy, or online satisfaction, rather than real world action (Shirky) vs. the Net challenges everything and is a new public space going to forge new social alliances [social software](Weinberger).

At the moment this seems to a matter of assertion.  Weinberger asserts the Dean campaign would be nowhere without the Web and it has allowed the raising of funds etc.

It would be nice if we could actually get beyond these kinds of dichotemies even if it was just to ask "what kinds of offline social interaction is furthered by the Internet, and which is not?"

It may be that established powers are not yet threatened by the net, they can use it better etc. It may simply be that people forget that the Net is embedded within a society which has very specific conflicts and dominances and is thus not simply going to escape those dominances, who are as good at colonising new spaces as ever.  

However it  might be worth asking if there some aspect of power - what Michael Mann calls 'interstitial power', which is invisible to the dominancies and thus able to be organised through the net?

Or is it simply that we old folks, have not yet got into the habit of integrating online life with offline? Is the perception of the gap the problem, both ways....?

Oh well, nothing useful i guess..

jon





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