Peter Daou, a leading online strategist and former adviser to Hillary Clinton has a rather fascinating post on the current health care debate that pertains to some of the discussions about social media and information strategy examined here over the last few months:
"[M]y fellow digerati: it's time to admit that the communications landscape, at least in politics, isn't necessarily tilted in favor of new media. The health reform showdown is powerful evidence that the much-touted online advantage of the left, if not a chimera, is certainly questionable when it comes to major political confrontations. ...It's been fashionable in tech/political circles to think of the Internet as an establishment-slayer that destroys business models and shakes up the political landscape and to consider 2008 a watershed for citizen empowerment, but the more sober scenario is one where the establishment stops the bleeding, stabilizes, and reasserts its capacity to shape public perceptions. The health care battle bolsters the latter case."
Why is this so? Dauo argues that the "establishment" has co-opted social media, established hybrid forms of media (such as Politico), and that old forms of media such as cable news still set the agenda. Let's put aside Daou's simplistic "rebels vs. establishment" binary (a myth and a rhetorical device that the netroots propate) for a second and unpack the meaning of this essay.
What Dauo is essentially stating is that it is difficult to transform "online power" (tweets, blogs, facebook profiles, etc) into political power. Curtis Gale Weeks explained why earlier in an analysis of the Iranian Twitter uprising. While the greening of thousands of Twitter profiles may seem like the mobilization of a movement, Weeks argues argues that it is in fact “the sound of multiple people clapping one hand in the effort to increase the volume of their outrage.” The self-multiplication effect makes it difficult for one to objectively assess the amount of power he or she can employ at one point in time.
Second, while it may be fashionable to bash centralized and hierarchal organizations, they have a number of important advantages. They have their heft and power, and a "topsight" that gives their efforts strategic coherence. And they can enable their lower elements to move with a surprisingly flexible articulation. Citing German "mission tactics" has by now become something of a cliche in strategic studies, but I think people keep coming back to it simply because the example is so basic and powerful.
People who consider themselves "insurgents" often vastly overestimate their ability to keep their opponents off balance. They imagine their opponent as a kind of shapeless mass that can't fight back, or is supposed to be bowled over by superior technology. They severely underestimate the opponent's ability to adapt and use both old and new tools.
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