Global Digital Politics: Fall 2021

I am scheduled to teach a new course this fall on "Global Digital Politics" (POLS 507), which is open to both advanced undergraduates and graduate students. When I was chair, the department created a master's field in Digital Politics:

The Digital Politics field focuses on the intersection of information technology and politics and includes an applied component, providing students with training and experiences useful to their career pursuits. Areas of study include e-government initiatives, social media advocacy and narrative strategies for non-profit organizations, and online political campaigns.

Over the years, the department has offered courses in this track that emphasize American and comparative politics, but I think this will be the initial offering of a truly Global Politics class.

The syllabus will include most of the topics mentioned above -- e-government initiatives, social media advocacy, and narrative strategies for both governmental and non-governmental organizations. My recent research agenda has included a great deal of work on narratives and I am currently involved in a project with colleagues Jason Gainous and Melissa Merry (who both teach regularly in this track) that has implications for social media advocacy. In other words, this is genuinely an area of interest to me.

Because of the lack of central authority in international politics (anarchy), the global context arguably offers a perfect opportunity to promote deliberative democratic forms of e-government. Indeed, my 2004 coauthored book with Nayef Samhat discussed the apparent emergence of deliberative norms (transparency and participation, primarily) in global governance, with case studies of the World Bank and World Trade Organization. To promote democratic accountability, NGOs and international organizations employ various digital tools that we discuss in the book. Nayef and I have also written about deliberation surrounding the buildup to the Iraq war and other topics of shared international concern. Some of my solo writing has also addressed the potential of deliberation on global security and environmental issues. Though some of the conjecture seems dated now, I also previously explored the prospects for deliberation in the digital world.

The course will not cover political campaigns per se, but it will certainly discuss state and non-state interference in various national elections, including the 2016 (and 2020) U.S. presidential election, the Brexit referendum, and various European elections over the past few years.

Indeed, this last point suggests a major theme: the class will focus extensively on the dark side of global digital politics -- surveillance, hacking, ransomware, disinformation campaigns, etc. Some of this will align with the class consideration of social media and narrative strategies. I am trying to decide how much to include about the large tech companies that monitor individuals primarily as consumers. At minimum, we will discuss the overlap with politics -- when governments turn to these corporations to provide data about their customers. 

I am tinkering with various ideas to bring the necessary practical elements into the class, potentially including service-learning elements tied to real-world global social movements and NGOs active in the digital realm. Students would have a great deal of latitude selecting a real world movement or organization, but I will especially encourage selection of human rights, environmental, and peace activism given my own background studying and teaching in these areas. 

The class will not teach students how to employ the tools of the dark side, but it also won't teach much about the specific tools to counter them. We will instead address broad strategies and best practices, addressing the need to identify and employ trustworthy technical expertise in the political realm. 

Right now, the class only has 4 students and I think it would work best with around 15. The cap is set at 20. More students are needed and I'm engaged in active recruitment. 

The class will be organized as an in-person seminar, which means I expect students to interact with one another and with me. I will figure out a way to evaluate the practical component and assign at least one long and one short paper. Any exam would be in essay format and would likely be take-home. I am still working out the details. I am obliged by UofL policies to make the workload a bit tougher for graduate students . 

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Digital Activism

For years, I've been interested in the possibility of political activism and public deliberation on the internet. As department chair, I recently hired a former graduate student, Matt Evans, to teach an online course on "Political Activism in the Digital Age."

Here's the course description, for students who might be interested in enrolling over the next month:

How do we change the world? 

Over 100 years ago, Henry David Thoreau answered this question by suggesting Americans should vote with their whole ballot. This means utilizing the better part of politics – the aspect that could change the world in the face of impossible obstacles through all those activities outside the realm of voting called activism. 

Political Activism in the Digital Age – an online political science course in Fall 2016 – examines activism through the concrete tactics of activists in groups and social movements within and outside of the US. Rather than work through overpriced textbooks – an oxymoron – the class will draw on readings, videos, and other material accessible through Blackboard to empower students to change the world. For more information, contact the instructor Dr. Matt Evans.

Since it's an online class, students don't have to live in Louisville to enroll. Indeed, the instructor lives and teaches in Arkansas.


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Fear and Technology

In my graduate course, we've been talking a good deal about the role fear plays in international politics. Though war is on the decline and the risks of dying of terrorism are tiny for most North Americans, public policymakers continually invoke fears about other states or terrorist groups to promote preferred policies and to justify unnecessarily high levels of defense spending.

In the February 2 edition of The Nation, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow discusses the role of information technology in fomenting fear. Basically, there's always bad news somewhere and our connectivity makes it possible to know about it:

We don’t have less time than ever; on the contrary, life expectancy has steadily increased. What we have, at this latest point so far in human history, is more of so much else—more people, more books, more cultural products of every kind, in addition to the staggering volume of online content. We feel ever more acutely the mismatch between available time and all the possible ways we could spend it. Population growth has overlooked effects: even if Steven Pinker is right that per capita violence has declined, something horrible is always happening to someone, and thanks to our ICTs [information and communications technologies], we’re going to hear about it in “real time.” This fosters a sense of relentless drama, of the world spiraling out of control, and chronic low-grade anxiety. 

...Too much of life is spent in the same essential way: clicking and typing and scrolling, liking and tweeting, assimilating the latest horrors from the news.

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Could Google Rig an Election?

Research psychologist Robert Epstein, a former editor of Psychology Today, has coauthored a study with Dr. Ronald E.  Robertson of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, on this question called “Democracy at Risk.” It is slated for presentation at this year’s meeting of the Association for Psychological Science:

In a double-blind, controlled experiment, web pages and search engine results from an actual election were presented to three groups of eligible voters. In two of the groups, rankings favored one candidate or the other. Preferences shifted dramatically toward favored candidates, with 75% of subjects showing no awareness of the manipulation. In a second experiment, voter preferences again shifted in the predicted direction, and the proportion of people who were unaware of the manipulation was increased by slightly altering the rankings to mask the favoritism. In a third experiment, a more aggressive mask was used to hide the manipulation, and no subjects appeared to be aware of it, even though voter preferences still shifted in the predicted directions. We conclude (1) that the outcomes of real elections—especially tight races—could conceivably be determined by the strategic manipulation of search engine rankings and (2) that the manipulation could be accomplished without people being aware of it.

Based on his reading of the work, Evan Leatherwood (Associate Director for Communications at Fordham University’s Schwartz Center for Media, Public Policy, & Education) concluded in the May 6, 2013 edition of The Nation: "insiders at a dominant search engine (at the moment, Google) could, if they chose, covertly pick members of Congress and even the president. What’s more, says Epstein, it is perfectly legal for a search engine to behave this way."

Michael Fischer, a professor of computer science at Yale, agrees that there is cause for concern. “To the extent that somebody wants to build a politically biased search engine, they are certainly capable of doing that,” Fischer says. “We don’t have any way of knowing what biases, if any, the search engines we currently use have, and this is a concern not just for elections, but for all areas of our democracy.”

Much of the rest of the article discusses the First Amendment implications of regulating search engines. Leatherwood favors a public and transparent search engine that does not take advertising dollars.


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Out of Print

As I noted about a year ago, advertisers have spent the past decade or so abandoning print media in favor of the internet. The data from 2012 suggest the trend is worsening -- mostly to the benefit of Google:

A new study from Statista has revealed that Google (GOOG) is making more advertising revenue than the entire U.S. print media combined. The Internet giant has raked in slightly more than $20 billion in ad revenue in the first six months of 2012, while the U.S. print media industry has generated just less than $20 billion as a whole.

“Google, a company founded just 14 years ago, makes more money from advertising than an industry that has been around for more than a hundred years,” Statista notes.

Here's what the trend looks like in a graph:

Back in 2000, I believe my household subscribed to at least 10 different magazines. However, No Depression folded nearly five years ago. The American Prospect was a biweekly, became a monthly (published 10 times per year), and is now a (thick) bimonthly. Most other magazines we receive have dropped the total number of issues published per year or reduced their content. Utne Reader jacked up subscription prices to a level that made each bimonthly issue cost about $6. We dropped it.


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Additional Blogging and Writing

This week, Millennium: Journal of International Studies has published my article on "Cooperative Security: Grand Strategy Meets Critical Theory?" The piece is a revised version of the paper I delivered at the London School of Economics conference during October 2011. Here's the abstract:

Major powers are frequently urged to embrace grand strategies tied to particular International Relations theories. In the case of United States foreign policy, scholars generally analyse a well-known set of strategic choices – primacy, selective engagement, offshore balancing, collective security and cooperative security – favoured by relatively mainstream realist and liberal thinkers in International Relations. This article explores the evolution of cooperative security as an idea from its clear ties to liberal and neoliberal international relations theory to its current understanding in world politics, which is surprisingly consistent with many emancipatory ideals of critical International Relations theory. Cooperative security no longer merely implies multilateralism, negotiation and arms control. Rather, security is now more frequently described as indivisible, and genuine cooperation is said to require shared decision-making and consensual practices. Non-governmental organisations are more and more granted a voice in security discussions, as are international institutions. While weapons and warfare remain important security concerns, the cooperative security agenda today includes ideas associated with human security, including environmental calamity, global inequality and hunger.

Last Tuesday, May 22, I posted "How the Sausage is Made" on the Duck of Minerva group IR blog. Andrew Sullivan kindly linked to the post and nearly 15,000 people have viewed it to-date. Apparently, in the 7-year history of the Duck, it is the most-viewed post!** Thank you Zack Beauchamp.

If you haven't read the piece, it includes audio (with pictures) of world leaders speaking frankly about their negotiating position on greenhouse gas emissions reductions. The audio track is from  the 2009 Copenhagen climate change summit and the leaders apparently didn't know the session was recorded. I cross-posted "Making Sausage" on the e-IR climate blog as well on May 23.

On May 5, I posted "Climate Change and Godwin's Law" on Duck of Minerva and it was cross-posted on e-IR on May 6. In case you are not familiar with the phrase, "Godwin's Law" refers to the implications of someone referencing Hitler or the Nazis in an internet debate.

This is me a few years ago, playing poker.

** It appears that the Google source I used for this information has only been tracking Duck of Minerva since July 2009.

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I read it in a magazine...

The internet has helped foster many changes in modern life, but not all of them are desirable.

In a December 2011 review of The Fall of the House of Forbes: The Inside Story of the Collapse of a Media Empire by Stewart Pinkerton, Jamie Malanowski identifies some harsh numbers for the publishing industry:

Facing dramatically declining advertising revenue (in the year 2000, Forbes had more than 6,000 pages of advertising—this was during the high-on-your-own-supply years of the dot.com bubble)—and was charging about $75,000 per page; in 2010, it had 1,640 pages of advertising, and was charging between $23,000 and $25,000 per page. The numbers from magazine to magazine no doubt differ, but throughout the industry the basic story is surely the same. Revenue declined, and the Internet, with all its power to deliver information quickly and cheaply, and all its nifty gadgets, pushed magazines into yesterday.

By my calculations, Malanowski is identifying a revenue drop from $450 million in 2000 to $41 million in 2010 -- and those figures assume the highest charges were always collected in the more recent year.

So Forbes, at least, lost over 90% of its advertising revenues during the decade, before accounting for inflation.

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Baseball Prospectus

A few days ago, the good folks at Baseball Prospectus announced that they are soon releasing a 2-volume Best of Baseball Prospectus: 1996-2011. I think it is going to include a mix of web articles and book pieces, as well as some new essays. It would likely make an excellent Christmas gift.

So far as I know, unfortunately, it will not include my two old pieces written for BP many years ago. One of those articles is still available on-line at the BP website: "Do Top Prospects Get Traded?" It was posted April 8, 1999.

However, the other one is apparently not to be found anywhere. It was a defense of then-KC Royals manager Bob Boone, written in response to a piece by Rany Jazayerli. On the Wayback Machine, I found Rany's critique of Bob Boone posted March 3, 1997: "Is There a 12-Step Program for Overmanagement?"

Rany and I are both KC fans and we co-authored the Royals team comments for the Davenport Translations published exclusively on the web (in the group rec.sports.baseball.analysis) during the 1994-1995 winter. Unfortunately, I cannot find those team comments on the web either -- though I did find them for nearly 20 other teams. And I have the February 1995 files on my hard drive.




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Tech check

Obviously, these past few weeks and months, members of the media have filed numerous stories about the important role of Facebook, Twitter, cell phones, and other technologies in empowering democratic activists around the world.

This is not fundamentally new. I've been in meetings about the Grawemeyer Award when serious people suggested and discussed the prospect of Twitter (its founders, I suppose) winning the prize because it was such a useful tool during the (failed) Iranian Green uprising. Similarly, a number of former students have contacted me electronically during the past few months to discuss the role of technology in coordinating demonstrations in Egypt and other middle eastern states.

This is a topic I've been thinking, writing, and teaching about for many years. In many respects, I have been a technological optimist and my former students recall the pre-9/11 discussions we had about information technologies and the Chiapas rebellion in Mexico in 1994 (remember Subcomandante Marcos?) and the democratic movement in Indonesia in 1998.

However, it now seems obvious that information technology can be used effectively by non-progressive forces as well. As Chris Lehman wrote recently in The Nation:

plenty of equally unsavory nonstate actors have also adapted to the new networked web—most notoriously in the cellphone-enabled Mumbai terrorist attacks, in which jihadists used Google maps to identify their targets. Mexican crime gangs have used Facebook to compile lists of kidnapping targets, while Indonesians can use a Craigslist-style service to arrange the sale of children’s organs. While Kenya has played host to a vital and influential site called Ushahidi, which helped modernize accurate citizen reporting of violence during the disputed 2007 elections, in that same episode ethnic leaders on both sides of the dispute used text messaging to spread violent attacks on their enemies.

Lehman also discusses the ability of governments to censor the internet and the willingness of western corporations to help them deny access to their populations.

Other pundits are also taking this position. This week, for instance, Harvard's Niall Ferguson's Newsweek piece argues that social networks can "empower the enemies of freedom." "Our most dangerous foes," he writes "are the Islamists who understand how to post fatwas on Facebook, email the holy Quran, and tweet the call to jihad.:

While critics and skeptics like Lehman and Ferguson make some good points, I continue to argue that decentralized information technology is bound to have progressive consequences. Wikileaks demonstrates that it is very difficult even for a powerful national security state to censor sensitive information. Useful technologies are cheap and getting cheaper, making them quite widely available around the globe. Given that participation in open discussion is a recipe for democracy in the public sphere, I do not see how some undesirable users can outweigh the communicative potential of everyone else. Sure, criminals and terrorists can foment hate in their niches of the world wide web, but that's certainly no reason to censor the rest of us. What's Ferguson's take home point?



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How fast did this page load where you live?

AT&T's U-verse service has arrived in Louisville -- potentially challenging Insight Communication's dominance of the cable television and broadband markets.

Maybe the consequence will be improved service (and lower price). Right now, Kentucky ranks 31st in internet download speed -- 4.6 megabits per second. That's roughly 10% below the national average of 5.1 mbps.

Granted, Louisville residents probably benefit from a higher download speed than do rural Kentuckians -- but readers should keep in mind that US speeds are not especially fast by world standards. Many European countries have internet download speeds that are much faster -- France, Sweden and Finland average between 15 and 20 mbps.

Korea and Japan obliterate the US, with speeds average 45 and 60 mbps, respectively.


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