A. Fine Blog
The recent dust up over the “Vote Different” video on YouTube raised a host of issues. Just some of them were:
* Does this comprise “dirty tricks” or a new kind of politics?
The blogosphere and mainstream media assessments of the ad and de Vellis were all over the map with condemnations and commendations. These are fun, horse-race questions to mull around, but they miss the central point which is the tension between anonymity and transparency in the connected age.
Wired does a nice job in this article of outlining causes for concern of having anonymous videos that look citizen-made but are, in fact, underwritten by corporate interests or political parties. But one of the attractions of the web is that individuals can participate when and how they want to without revealing themselves.
So, should we make different rules for more transparent online participation in political campaigns? And won’t these rules automatically dampen participation?
Carol, Darr, the director of GW’s Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet, had these closing thoughts in the Wired article: "My view now is that (campaign finance) 'reformers' like me have lost the battle," said the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet's Darr. "It's time to declare defeat, and for the lawyers and political consultants to play it as it lays -- on a wide open, largely unregulated field where almost anything goes."
Monday, March 26, 2007
Privacy vs. Transparency
