Jerome Armstrong is the author of Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics
Lauren Shannon is an American expat living and working in Japan. She created the website Americans Abroad for Obama to organize voters outside the country — which is no mean task, because Americans are literally everywhere. She now runs FightingLiberals.com.
An impressive trio, a topic as large as the world, and it’s just the first 75 minutes of a three-day conference!
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Lauren Shannon wants to debunk misperceptions of the expatriate population. Of the 7 million Americans abroad, most are not military; even in the military, donations from enlisted servicemen gave at a ratio of 6-1 for Obama over McCain. Fully 99% of American expats are college educated. During the Bush years, the expat community leaned more liberal than ever, with some GOP abroad organizations disappearing altogether.
Shannon describes an online voter registration tool at her website. Her organization has been credited for swinging the election in New York’s 20th Congressional District; during the 2006 election returns of the Virginia Senate race, Senator Allen conceded to Jim Webb when absentee ballots turned overwhelmingly against him.
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Nico Pitney says that citizen-produced media has filled a gap that traditional media wasn’t filling. Facebook, Twitter, and other technologies are not being used in “new” ways, but are being used more than ever. One advantage of net-based reporting is the volunteerism: crowdsourcing not only provides translation, but does so without being asked.
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Responding to questions about government censorship, Shannon explains that most of the blocking isn’t political in nature, but the result of spam filters or perceptions of certain services as conduits for pornography. During the 2004 election, Shannon was unable to pull up the White House or RNC websites without going through a proxy server because the IP addresses had been widely used by spammers in the far east. A Turkish judge blocked YouTube because of an ethnic flame-war between Greeks and Turks.
Armstrong described the strict Malaysian press laws; because those laws did not cover the internet, the opposition found an outlet online and grew too fast for the government to control anymore. He compared this to Singapore, where press laws have been updated with every new technology and the government remains in power.
Pitney says that freeware, anonymizers and firewall-penetration software have outpaced the ability of governments to control web traffic.
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Shannon questions whether there is an economic model for traditional journalism in international affairs. Citizen-based journalism may be the only way to cover most foreign stories anymore because so many media outlets are cutting back international staff.
Pitney sees a hybrid non-profit and for-profit model as the future of journalism generally for the same reasons.
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Comments from the audience described a world of “micro-experts” and a web of relationships between bloggers across territorial lines. Shannon remarks that we need to build these relationships now so they will be ready when the news happens. Conversely, the panel and audience agree that bloggers need to learn how to better protect sources; particularly in Iran, photos and news were posted by amateurs who didn’t understand the dangers.
