Presidential Debates: The Social Medium is the Message

This post originally appeared on Cyborgology – read and comment on the post here.

Presidential debates might be the single political event where Marshall McLuhan’s infamous phrase “the medium is the message” rings most true. Candidates know well that content takes the back seat, perhaps even stuffed in the trunk, during these hyper-performative news events. The video above of McLuhan on the Today show analyzing a Ford-Carter debate from 1976 is well worth a watch. The professor’s points still ring provocative this morning after the first Obama-Romney debate of 2012; a debate that treated the Twitter-prosumer as a television-consumer and thoroughly failed the social medium. 

Can ‘Americans Elect’ a Wikipedia President?

This was originally posted at my blog Cyborgology – click here to view the original post and to read/write comments. 

PJ Rey and I have been following the 2012 presidential campaign on this blog with social media in mind. We watch as President Obama and the republican contenders try to look social-media-y to garner dollars and votes. However, the social media use has thus far been more astroturfing than grassroots. There have been more social media photo-opts to appear tech-savvy than using the web to fundamentally make politics something that grows from the bottom-up. Presidential politics remain far more like Britannica than Wikipedia.

But this might all change, at least according to Thomas Friedman yesterday in the New York Times. He describes Americans Elect, a non-profit attempting to build an entire presidential campaign from the ground up. This might be our first glimpse of an open and social presidential web-based campaign. From their website,

Americans Elect is the first-ever open nominating process. We’re using the Internet to give every single voter — Democrat, Republican or independent — the power to nominate a presidential ticket in 2012. The people will choose the issues. The people will choose the candidates. And in a secure, online convention next June, the people will make history by putting their choice on the ballot in every state.

Celebrating Bin Laden’s Death and the Return of the Knowable World

It is only hours since President Obama announced the killing of Osama bin Laden, resulting in celebrations across the United States (in the streets, on Facebook and elsewhere). I want to point the Sociological Lens at this spontaneous and widespread cultural celebration not to argue that it is wrong or right to cheer for death, but to ask, in these first few hours, why. Beyond the obvious points surrounding Bin Laden’s involvement with the events on September 11th, 2001, I think he symbolized much more. Ultimately, what people are cheering about is the momentary return of the familiar black-and-white world of good and evil that we understand.

Gidden’s and others have discussed how our modern world is becoming increasignly unknowable and Bauman discusses ethics based on some universal good and evil as out of date. Gone are the days of World War II where we went to war against the “bad guys” and when you killed them you won. September 11th, 2001 sparked a “war on terror,” a war on an ideology rather than a country, that has been unending and unclear. It is also unclear for many why we went to Iraq -a conflict that has dragged on without clear objectivies and metrics for victory. About all the United States as a country could agree on is that Osama bin Laden is a bad guy and should be captured and/or killed, but even this dragged on for years with many wondering if we would ever capture him. This all creates a listless feeling of confusion about war and geopolitics that upsets Americans used to the Hollywood version: we know who is good and evil and the winner is clear.

This pent up confusion was cathartically relieved last night when the news broke. The world finally succumbed to the movie script where there is a bad guy and there is some clear result. However, this brief moment of clarity will pass and we will quickly move back into a world where geopolitics is confusing, winning and losing won’t be clear and neither will be just who we are fighting and why. After Bin Laden, who will be the new symbol to ground our naive presumption that the world, who is good and who is evil, is simple and knowable?

Who Will Be the First Facebook President?

The 2012 presidential race is beginning to take shape, and it is interesting to see how social media is being differently used by candidates. Obama kicked off his re-election campaign on YouTube and is at Facebook today with Zuckerberg to do a Facebook-style town-hall Q&A. Mitt Romney (R-MA) annouced his presidential bid on Twitter and Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) announced on Facebook and even created a Foursquare-style gaming layer where supporters earn points for participating in his campaign. I’ll be analyzing how social media is used throughout the 2012 cycle, but I’d like to start all of this with the question: who will be our first social media president?

FDR became the radio president with his famous “fireside chats” and JFK the television president with his image-centered debates with Nixon. Many consider Obama the first social media president due to his massive fund raising and organizing efforts during the 2008 campaign using the web (though, Howard Dean was there four years earlier – remember his use of meetup.org). However, now that Obama has been in office for more than two years, has he really used the social web effectively in interesting new ways? The New York Times states that Obama treats the Internet like a “television without knobs,” using it primarily to simply upload videos for us to consume. Obama-as-president has thus far been a Web 1.0 leader instead of embracing the Web 2.0 ethic of users collaboratively and socially creating content.

To put it another way, go to Obama’s Twitter account and ask yourself if he is really using the medium in an effective way? It is clearly

culture de-jamming

by nathan jurgenson

The old point that capitalism subsumes everything -even that which is precisely meant to be anti- or non-capitalistic- has been exemplified recently by corporations jamming the culture jammers by co-opting the jammer’s strategies.

Culture jamming follows the Situationist (prominently, Guy Debord) tradition of challenging the status quo, including political and corporate structures. However, even these anti-capitalistic actions have been and still are co-opted and put to work under capitalism. This is nothing new. Previous literature tackled the commodification of resistance. The Punk aesthetic was quickly subsumed by the logic of corporate fashion (e.g., this magazine[.pdf] sold back the punk aesthetic). And today, one can clearly see the commodification of hippy culture in the Haight-Ashbury area of San Francisco.

But it is the very recent examples that motivate this post. I previously wrote about Pepsi’s advertising campaign that mimicked Obama’s political campaign, including the street-art theme that draws directly from the culture-jamming and Situationist playbooks. Starbucks has also pasted advertisements in urban areas that look like street art, an art form that typically stands against such corporate invasions of the public aesthetic. As was poignantly discussed on this blog last week by NickieWild, Starbucks has gone even further down the route of what I call culture de-jamming (i.e., corporations jamming the culture jammers by commodifying their resistance to commodification). Starbucks sent people to observe local coffee shops to best create the first “inspired by Starbucks” store, rustic décor and all [pictures]. Sans the Starbucks logo, the store allows you to walk in and play your own music, attend organized poetry readings and so on. Interestingly, this follows precisely the trend George Ritzer laid out in Enchanting a Disenchanted World, arguing that Starbucks is attempting to create enchantment, which will ultimately fail because disenchantment follows in the very rationalization and reproduction of the ‘local coffee shop.’

More recent examples of culture de-jamming include corporate-organized “flashmobs”, another tool taken from culture jammer’s, this time used for corporate ends (note that Wikipedians claim that the gathering cannot be considered a flashmob if it is corporate). Examples include A&E’s “Hammer Pants” mob and video and T-Mobile’s large dancing mob at the Liverpool Street Station in London. The latter example also explores how consumers are in part producers (that is, prosumers) of this culture de-jamming, making this jamming of the culture jammers even more insidious. Can capitalism really co-opt the very logic of resistance, or will resistance just take on new forms moving forward? ~nathan

Obama and the Spectacle in an Era of Diminishing Consumption

by nathan jurgenson

Less Credit/Less Consumption
Consumption is down. While this might be a momentary hiccup, it could very well be the case that Western societies will have to “reset” and pull back on consumption levels for a long time to come. Much of the consumption literature has pointed to Western conspicuous and hyper-consumption as an integral ethic of modern society. We have been consuming well beyond our means by relying on debt to fuel our consumer economy, an unsustainable habit as credit markets have dried up. So what does it mean to pull back on consumerism, something, arguably, so central to our society? Does this leave a void? If so, what fills this void?

A Civic-Centered Spectacle?
One void that seems appropriate to discuss is that of the spectacle. The (increasingly distant) era of hyper-consumption was a time of the consumer spectacle (e.g., mega-malls, Las Vegas, etc), and when consumption is down we might expect to see different sorts of spectacles. Spectacles built around more modest, live-within-your-means activities. The green movement is, arguably, a spectacle in this way. Perhaps a more vivid example is the Obama campaign, inauguration, and early-presidency. Truly a spectacle. Has civic engagement, to some degree, replaced consumption in the realm of a shared ethos (as Benjamin Barber hopes)? Additionally, has civic engagement, to some degree, replaced corporate consumption as the site of the spectacle?

The Commodification of Everything
Of course, the picture may be less rosey than this. Corporate commodification and it’s hold on the Western spirit of consumption (as well as it’s near-monopoly of the spectacle) will not fall easily. In addition to generating their own spectacles, we might also see in this economic and consumptive downturn corporations commodify the very non- or anti-commercial spectacles mentioned previously (i.e., the green movement and Obama-style civic engagement). We are seeing corporations use the green movement to sell products -to the extent that some are questioning the greenness of the movement in the first place. On the Obama front, and this was very apparent on Inauguration Day in DC, Pepsi, Ikea and others have commodified the idea of Obama’s campaign. In the hyperlinks to the Pepsi and Ikea campaigns, as well as with the pictures above, we see that they are not just using his image or name to sell their products, but the very ethos of the campaign, such as “hope” or “change” (in the image above, note Pepsi’s word choice, font and even logo redesign). In this way, while Obama might represent a turn away from consumption towards civic engagement (he called for this, at least) and a turn away from consumer products as the site of the spectacle, this spectacle is still brought into the realm of the corporate. In an economy where branding is still important, ‘hope’ is ultimately used to sell soda. ~nathan