How To Build A Political Social Network
techcrunch.comThe article all but ignores the fact that there are political social networks that exist. Experienced political organizers already know this, which is why so much effort goes into courting the endorsements of unions like AFT, NEA, AFSCME and SEIU and churches and their leaders like Billy Graham.
These ARE social networks, and they're WIRED, and have a lot of structure at the local level where, as O'Neil instructs us, is where all politics is anyways. Any up-start "political social network" that ignores that existing infrastructure is like Facebook ignoring colleges.
I certainly wasn't advocating ignoring them, I agree with you completely that all interest groups (which I think is a better definition than calling them political social networks) should take part, and I'm sure they will.
It strikes me that one aspect of the "get 100,000 people on the legislature's front lawn" mode of political speech is that it also proves that each and every one of those 100,000 people cares enough to spend hours arranging transport and then standing around outside. Short-circuiting that process by putting it on a webpage with an upvote button that takes orders of magnitude less time to click blunts the message by a similar factor.
Indeed, the advantage of online political tools is that they reduce significantly the effort required to contribute.
That's not always an advantage. I consider one "political social network" I've seen, the comments section on the political articles the CBC puts up - they're dreadful, nearly as bad as YouTube, because it makes it ridiculously easy to sound off anything that comes into your head (mostly terrible puns on parties and leaders names) and have it be "heard". I doubt anyone who doesn't comment on CBC articles takes the comments at all seriously.
Most developed countries are democracies, and democracy means that governments should obey the will of the people. The exercise of democracy means aggregating social information, and this is so easily done now through the internet. However, the use of internet for exercising democratic rights seems very limited. Why it is so? Why people spend more time on Facebook than on a political social network where the opinions they share could have direct positive impacts on those aspects of their live that depends on government and legislation?
> Why people spend more time on Facebook than on a political social network
I would guess: Because time spent on Facebook is relaxing, whereas most internet discussions feel like a drunk fist-fight without winners. (Of course, that may be the nature of democracy itself.)
Currently there are really only indirect ways to influence governments, and weak ones at that. Like I lay out in the article I think you really need a lot of pieces in place to make a political social network have enough political strength to foster mass adoption and substantial political relevance.
Most developed countries are representative democracies, and the will of the people is expressed primarily in their choice of leaders through elections.
In the U.S. at least, the Internet plays a very large and growing role in elections. In fact I would argue that in the most recent election, the Internet scored a decisive win over TV ads--the most effective political tool for the past 40 years.
Once officials are in office, they can be petitioned (lobbied), and again the Internet plays a major role in how unions, associations, nonprofits, etc. organize their grassroots to do that.
Keep in mind that "Internet" means more than Web; in the case of politics, email is still king.
I'm not sure what problem is supposed to be solved here. Sharing political opinions? I can't walk down the street without hearing someone's political opinions. That's all humans DO, is share political opinions.
The shortage is not of opinions, but attention. Why should I or anyone pay attention to your site? I can write my political opinions anywhere: Obama sucks. See? Look how easy that was.
I'm a voter. Why should I use your site? No reason.
I'm a politician. Why should I use your site? No reason.
You need to rethink. Go talk to some actual political people. No one has any reason to use your site or to give you any money. Most importantly, there's no virality factor - no one has any reason to try to get their friends to use it.
I just went to your site. It asked me something about a bike lane in Madison Wisconsin. I don't have the slightest idea what it is talking about and have never been to Madison Wisconsin. I voted no.
I guess that those websites should serve the interests of the voters, not of the current politicians.
Why should a voter use such a website? Because his/her humble click on a Support/Oppose button could aggregate with many others' clicks and make a difference when the number of people expressing an opinion is high enough to get the attention of the politicians and of the media. The random expression of an opinion on the street influences just the few listeners that happen to be arround.
And for what it's worth if anyone had any questions or comments I'd love to talk about them here. <3 HN.
Why do you think our political system is broken? I think it works pretty well, all things considered.
There's a long list, almost every problem in this country and worldwide ultimately comes down to political failures. We have almost zero long-term consideration going into political decision making. We have a terrible voting system that forces citizens to either vote for who they want OR effect the outcome of the race. This causes the two parties to eternally maintain their monopoly of political power, they'll continually shift to absorb any upstart interest groups. Which in turn leads to only two solutions being proposed for each political issue, each targeted to appeal to their constituency instead of solving the problem. Each party only needs to be less hated than the other by 50%+1 of the population.
So yeah, I think it's broken, it barely ever worked well.
And in the context of this article, I think we do a ridiculously poor job of listening to constituents, largely because there isn't a successful near-universal political social network that forces politicians to listen.
If the people can't even select representative well, why would they be able to decide issues well?
What would any of these proposals do to increase long term thinking? Making it easy to express opinions on 10 topics a minute seems virtually certain to increase short term shallow thinking.
In other words, in what concrete ways would any of this make anything better?