![\"Intersectionality](\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3605\/3465796009_b273bc73e3.jpg?v=0\")
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Opening slide from early draft of Hashtags at #polc09<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n Politics Online (1<\/a>, 2<\/a>) was a great conference, at least from my perspective.\u00c2\u00a0 Starting with the opening session by Secretaries of State Debra Bowen and Jennifer Brunner, every session I went to had great content.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 It was a wonderful opportunity to meet friends and colleagues in-person, many for the first time,* and to be on a panel with people like Judith Donath and Clive Thompson.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 And of course was also a good chance to continue the Twitter *is* a strategy<\/a> debate and explore progressives’ bizarre resistance to embrace social network activism; more on that soon.<\/p>\n First, though, I’d like to follow up on the experiment in cognitive evolution and revolution I kicked off in the opening panel. Jill Miller Zimon’s live blog<\/a> is an excellent summary of the opening panel.\u00c2\u00a0 The topic was how the technologies we use shape our thinking — and what impact this has for political organizing online.\u00c2\u00a0 All the panelists are doing interesting work here and had interesting things to say, and so I hope they’ll accept my apologies for not doing them justice … and that they’ll take the opportunity to blog about the session!<\/p>\n With only a few minutes to speak, I decided to talk about Twitter hashtags<\/a> … and to invite attendees to experiment with evolving their consciousness in a revolutionary way.\u00c2\u00a0 My presentation’s available on the #p2 wiki<\/a>, along with a chunk of references.<\/p>\n In retrospect, I probably should have been more explicit about what this had to do with cognitive evolution.\u00c2\u00a0 Like wikis and my.barackobama.com, Twitter hashtags are hard to wrap your head around.\u00c2\u00a0 They’re simultaneously a mechanism for collaboration, a communication channel, name for a campaign, word in an emerging language, tribe (in the Seth Godin sense of the word), and a lot more.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 To fully take advantage of their potential, you need to evolve your thinking; and the more deeply you get into them, the more your thinking evolves.\u00c2\u00a0 So it was a great opportunity to give people first-hand experience with cognitive evolution as applied to politics online via the #polc09 hashtag<\/a>.<\/p>\n More specifically, I chose to focus on diversity.\u00c2\u00a0 As anybody who’s ever been at a conference where the speakers are overwhelmingly white, mostly male, and dominated by technologists knows, it’s very difficult to have discussions of this issue.\u00c2\u00a0 While there were some great women speaking at Politics Online, there were also plenty of sessions like\u00c2\u00a0 “six guys talking about how email is the future<\/a>” , “four guys talking about advocacy 3D<\/a>“, and “four other guys talking about fishing for users<\/a>.”\u00c2\u00a0 Evolving thinking and using technology to give more voice to perspectives typically marginalized in these discussions would truly be revolutionary.<\/p>\n In Strategies for progressives on Twitter<\/a>, Tracy Viselli and I proposed using the #p2 hashtag as a way of engaging with communities that have been marginalized by the progressive blogosphere, and early results have been very encouraging.\u00c2\u00a0 This session seemed like a great opportunity to continue the experimentation with a different hashtag.<\/p>\n The next fifty minutes of the session were filled classic examples of marginalization.\u00c2\u00a0 Like @JillMZ pointed out on Twitter, people largely vanished from the discussion partway through as the overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male panel shifted to technology triumphalism … and the usual privileged and techie-elitist perspectives emerged:<\/p>\n etc. etc.<\/p>\n Y’know, I’ve seen it enough times that I shouldn’t be shocked … but as always I was.\u00c2\u00a0 In response to the “somebody will fill the niches” I asked for a show of hands: how many people in the audience emphasized access for people without computers, non-native English speakers, people with disabilities?<\/p>\n Each time only a few hands went up.*<\/p>\n At this point the data-driven guys I was debating with all said “Wow, Jon, you’re right, thanks for calling it to our attention!\u00c2\u00a0 This is something I personally need to be paying more attention to … and I will!”<\/p>\n Just kidding.<\/p>\n The actual response was the hoary chestnut: “well, as long as there’s one application that addresses these issues, that’s enough.”\u00c2\u00a0 Because, you know, having a broad array of tools to choose from the way all of the panelists do isn’t an advantage that should be shared with others.\u00c2\u00a0 Or something like that.\u00c2\u00a0 Sigh.<\/p>\n So while there were plenty of interesting things being said, the panel discussion was a classic #diversityfail.<\/p>\n At the same time, on the Twitter backchannel, there was a very different conversation happening involving much more diverse perspectives<\/a>.<\/p>\n Here are some excerpts: Hmm.<\/p>\n It sure looks to me that by evolving our thinking and focusing on a Twitter hashtag, we were able to give more voice to perspectives being marginalized in the discussion in the room.\u00c2\u00a0 And in my closing statement, I wove together @jillmz and @digitalsista’s points from Twitter as well as my own observations — a great example of how hashtags can indeed enable collaboration that countered the matrix of oppressions … just like I said in my opening slide!<\/p>\n So no doubt at this point the data-driven guys I’ve been debating with will all say “Wow, Jon, you’re right, thanks for calling it to our attention!\u00c2\u00a0 Use of Twitter hashtags can <\/em>counter these kinds of dynamics, just as you and Tracy suggested!\u00c2\u00a0 And I guess that means we should try to understand your view that Twitter is a strategy<\/a> rather than mocking it!”<\/p>\n A guy can dream, can’t he?<\/p>\n And this was just the opening panel of Politics Online!\u00c2\u00a0 #polc09 remained a valuable backchannel throughout the conference and is now shifting focus to include community building and information dissemination.\u00c2\u00a0 Diversity issues came up again<\/a> in Jen Nedeau’s session on old media paradigms shifting to a new media world<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 And Twitter was a major focus at the conference, including a Golden Dot for Twitter Vote Report and the great panel moderated by @arimelber<\/a> <\/span> featuring @clairecmc<\/a> @timryan<\/a> @cathymcmorris<\/a> and <\/span>@repsteveisrael<\/a><\/span> (for more, see the CSPAN video<\/a> and the live blog, <\/span>once again by <\/span>Ohio political blogger extraordinaire, Jill Miller Zimon<\/a> on Writes Like She<\/em> Talks<\/em> ). One of the topics that came up a lot was conservative leadership on Twitter — how real it is, why progressives are going to do about it.\u00c2\u00a0 I got some great insights here from Patrick Ruffini, Soren Dayton and others I don’t usually get to talk with.\u00c2\u00a0 It was also a chance to get perspectives on Get FISA Right and Facebook activism from different folks, including Sam Graham-Felsen, Bob Fertik, and Ari Melber.<\/p>\n So there’s much more to talk about.\u00c2\u00a0 Continued in the comments! jon<\/p>\n * I hope I was complimentary enough to those willing to tackle these tough issues!<\/p>\n Opening slide from early draft of Hashtags at #polc09 Politics Online (1, 2) was a great conference, at least from my perspective.\u00c2\u00a0 Starting with the opening session by Secretaries of State Debra Bowen and Jennifer Brunner, every session I went to had great content.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 It was a wonderful opportunity to meet friends and colleagues in-person, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7,13,16],"tags":[25,113,268,378],"class_list":["post-687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meta","category-political","category-social-computing","category-tales-from-the-net","tag-activism","tag-diversity","tag-polc09","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=687"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4308,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions\/4308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2024.thenexus.today\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n<\/p>\nOn hashtags and diversity<\/h2>\n
#diversityfail<\/h2>\n
![\"digital](\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3619\/3467546334_dbd6f92198.jpg?v=0\")
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Meanwhile, on #polc09 …<\/h2>\n
\n![\"various](\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3598\/3466732231_c568e5301b.jpg?v=0\")
<\/p>\nBut wait, there’s more<\/h2>\n
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