November 22nd, 2009

Internet: A threat to government or the other way around? (Part 2)

Posted by Doug Hanchard @ November 22, 2009 @ 3:30 PM

Categories: Blogs, Censorship, Congress, Courts, Elections, Government 2.0, Government technology, Homeland security, Journalism, Justice, Multi-media, Obama, Open government, Senate, Social networks, Spam, State & Local Govt, Web, politics

Tags: News, Internet New, Spin Bad New, Internet, Portals, RSS, Government, Blogging, Doug Hanchard

Part II

It’s been suggested in many articles that President Obama won the U.S. election in 2008 because his campaign used Twitter, Facebook and other social media effectively over the course of the campaign that spanned two years.  But this new instant social media clearly it works both ways: Bad news travels much faster, and with significantly more power, than good news ever does. Face it: People love dirt and passing on bad news more often, with negative results which tend to stick in a voters mind for a longer period of time than good news does.

The snowball effect

There’s more to it than just a story being uploaded and published on a blog or RSS feed. It goes a lot farther, much much farther. Internet news is now available in every language, where anybody who has access to a computer or smart phone is now a potential audience for ‘news’. That has politicians nervous because just how many of these stories are published with incomplete information along with confirmation that the material they are publishing is true. Harder still, once it’s published, how much effort do you put into getting a retraction if the story is inaccurate? And if the politician pushes too far, it may be perceived that there is in fact truth to the article, compounding the problem.  Twitter spreads news like a virus and it’s unstoppable and often it doesn’t, if ever, post retractions or corrections at the same velocity. We thought we understood the 7/24 news cycle when the era of 200 television stations became a reality… uh no…not even close were we in understanding what this cycle means - until now.

The Spin

Bad news is also how the opposition takes aim at its targets. Once a story is in the wild, you can bet your opposite is firing out their take on a story, sometimes with twice the venom and quadruple the amount of information that can literately engulf the target.  If you thought spam was a problem, political drama is going to crush it in the years to come.  One question it raises is: Can we absorb it all? The politician may have an escape route after all. But there’s an old saying: If enough junk is thrown at the wall, some of it is going to stick…

The story

News is also about agendas that elected leaders want to you to vote for. Out go the press releases, RSS alerts, Twitter, blogs and social portal postings. You become engulfed in it. You can’t surf anywhere without it coming at you. Well, you can, but don’t worry; they’ll find you anyway and make sure you listen. As opposing sides pitch you why each respective side is right and the other is wrong, you wonder if they even remember what they represent you for in the first place. This onslaught of political news is ignored, absorbed and debated and the arguments and dilution of substance begins. Often it can be ugly at one extreme to complete blandness at the other.  Politicians rarely remember which side of the bed they woke up on, why should it be any different trying to get a bill passed on the floor of the legislature?

What some leaders are starting to realize is that if they are not careful, their constituents will tune out. So far that’s not holding true, with the majority of western world eligible voters having access to the internet and having an email address or a cell phone with a data plan. Most troubling for elected officials are secondary news sources that create perception beyond their editorial control. These secondary sources are your friends that pass on the news, as a tweet, email, blog or text message which are condensed and revised pieces of news. This audience tends to get engaged BECAUSE it came from a source they associate with. The future might hold that people create firewall or filter rules that prevent political messages getting to them, but rarely will they reject these secondary sources of news.

Reaction to government has moved from the lawns of universities and parks to the Internet.

Go to:
Part 1
Part 3
Part 4 in this series

November 20th, 2009

Internet: A threat to government or the other way around?

Posted by Doug Hanchard @ November 20, 2009 @ 6:58 AM

Categories: Blogs, Courts, Cyberwar, Elections, Government technology, Journalism, Multi-media, Net neutrality, Open government, Privacy, Regulations, Social networks, State & Local Govt, Telecom, Twitter, Web, Winter Olympic Games, politics

Tags: President, Internet, Government, Vertical Industries, Doug Hanchard

Could the Internet pose a threat to government as an institution and create significant problems that shape how governing in the future occurs around the globe?  Or are government a danger to users of the Internet — and vice versa?

The answer is maybe both.  The internet has plunged government institutions into a very steep learning curve; creating new frontiers that many bureaucrats believe help how they run the country. For many departments, it’s been a windfall in financial savings such as publishing news, services, and many other programs. But for the actual governors of a country, it’s become quicksand or worse: the death knell for an elected official. The power brokers have found that making deals that used to be done in secret are now just about impossible to do. Getting a deal done, negotiating give and take on a bill is now leaked before the ink has even dried, because a draft is already out on the internet on some blog or news forum - like this one.  Senators, Congressmen/women, parliamentarians around the world no longer worry about one single person; suddenly, anyone around them can be the next Deep Throat tell-all informer, straight from their BlackBerry to Twitter, and their career could be over.

It could be argued that the internet is the great equalizer to government and its institutions, preventing them from becoming too powerful. For other agencies, it’s an entirely new battlefront - one which they now must confront - and use.

• The Internet is the great creator and destroyer of current and next generation politicians.
• A journalist does his homework and steadfastly enshrines ethical methods.

These two statements are about to collide in a head-on crash of extraordinary proportions. When U.S. President Nixon resigned from office, it wasn’t a news story covering a week in the life of a President’s downfall. It started in June of 1971 and finally ended when he left office in August of 1974. Newspaper reporters had to maintain constant pressure on information leaking out of the White House and Defense Department for three years.  Watergate was covered by some of the most respected journalists in the world and ensured that the facts pertaining to the story followed strict guidelines before publication. Those standards were what ultimately brought down a President.

Standards 2009… I don’t have time for that!

Today, a single story with enough information that is both accurate AND false can wipe out a politician in the amount of time it takes to log into a BlackBerry, type out 140 characters onto Twitter.com and you’re done like tweet….

The amount of retractions and corrections that news organizations have published has skyrocketed over the past several years. I myself have had to correct a story’s accuracy of facts. The speed of the internet has also created a conundrum that existed already in newspapers: Deadlines, which have now accelerated from several hours to ‘hit the press’ to seconds to get it online before the person across the street on his cell phone blogs it. Competition isn’t what it used to be. A single event can have devastating effects that spread and collects unwitting victims that are also elected, thus ending that official’s colleague career.

Go to:
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4 in this series

November 19th, 2009

FCC wants public comment on digital democracy - voting online

Posted by Doug Hanchard @ November 19, 2009 @ 6:06 AM

Categories: Congress, E-government, Elections, FCC, Government technology, Multi-media

Tags: FCC, Submissions, Federal Government, Government, Doug Hanchard

Last month I wrote about online voting and the trend to continue to move towards this type of service. The FCC is looking for comments which will influence the FCC’s policy and submit back recommendations to Congress. Online town hall meetings using multimedia applications are also being reviewed.  The extent to which voting options are available are not part of the FCC’s review or mandate.  Paper ballots and in person voting are not likely going anywhere anytime soon.

It will be interesting to see if the value of online voting is swayed by the economics and accuracy of voter tabulations and participation. There are a lot of arguments for and against electronic and online voting. Another focus area likely to surface is the digital divide - many people simply do not use the Internet, let alone own a computer.  As I noted in my previous post, there are other ways it could still be accomplished such as smart phones or kiosks connected to the election service platform.

Submissions are due by December 10 of this year.

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November 3rd, 2009

The taxman goes mainstream on YouTube

Posted by Doug Hanchard @ November 3, 2009 @ 6:59 AM

Categories: Elections, Government technology, Multi-media, Obama, Regulations, State & Local Govt, UK

Tags: YouTube Inc., Video, Taxman, Corporate Communications, Government, Marketing, Doug Hanchard

Multimedia offers several things that ordinary print doesn’t: Driving home a point in person is one of them.  Press releases, bulletins, direct mail often are ignored, so what to do? But video, multimedia, regular TV news also have their limits. In an era of 200 TV stations offering a variety of specialty channels where “news” is ignored, how to reach the masses and offer an ability to go when you please to view important information? The government in the U.K. has started to post on YouTube. HM Revenues and Customs have put Dave Hartnett, HMRC’s Permanent Secretary for Tax, straight onto video about the deadline for off shore tax havens.

The challenge for most ministries or departments is costs. Constantly sending out direct mail or advertising in newspapers or phone calls is becoming expensive.  Putting out a video that anyone can download for free, view it on their own time is becoming an attractive option. The government can stipulate that public notice was given and published in a medium that anyone can retrieve and thus fair warning was established.

YouTube has been the source for political and official government messages with mixed results until the 2008 U.S. presidential election, where President Obama’s campaign used it aggressively. There are more than 137,000 videos related to the President. He’s not alone in the use of YouTube. Search results for Senator John McCain displays 179,000 videos, Former Gov. Sarah Palin 88,000, and former President Bush shows a whopping 388,000 different video clips! Many of these videos are responses or unusual commentaries on the individual and is clearly an effective medium to get one’s message out. The regular evening news may find itself being replaced when it comes to political affairs. Whether you hear about it or not, the government is coming to collect.

Here’s the HM Revenue & Customs video: