Back from that cauldron of caustic backbiting known as the Democratic primary, I’m about ready to crack  knuckles and get busy on the IPDI blog.  What’s good?  Lot to talk about, needless to say. 

In examining the intersection of technology, public policy and politics, I’ve thought, or perhaps, worried a bit about how that links into our national imagination and sense of purpose.  Does the proliferation of information technology actually contribute in fulfilling and long term ways to the common good?  It might appear like a non-sensical question at first glance, but there’s some keep it real below the surface.  Whereas there is quite a bit to celebrate or proudly observe with respect to the record number of voters who participated in the Democratic primary this year (defying past apathy and breaking records at ballot lines), there was something also quite problematic about it all.  It’s one thing to get energized over a candidate and to vote for or openly support that candidate, but how informed of a voter are you? 

The explosive growth of blogs and the insance rotation of the 24/7 news cycle blurs the line between accurate information and irresponsible speculation and innuendo.  We the people eat it up. 

But, there’s something else to it all.  The technology, as great as it is, always poses a risk in terms of our collective motivations.  It can, potentially, make us lazy and intellectually lethargic.  True research and information accessibility is lost to the instant gratification of “Googling,” and citizens are no more motivated to confirm rumors over a Presidential candidate’s religion or whether he pledges allegiance than they are in picking a nail stuck in their foot.  There is a worry here that IT overload lulls the collective society into a mass sleep, since there is this feeling that everything, the world even, is literally at our fingertips.  In pushing the concept of a 21st century modern democracy, I’m more worried about intellectual laziness than I am about apathy.  At least with apathy, much of it is connected to a negative reaction and sense of hopelessness rising from disenchantment with the process and its gatekeepers.

I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, but as someone who has had an enduring love affair with science fiction, I have global claustrophobia.  Of being stuck on this planet and not having the luxury - at least in my lifetime - of traveling to other worlds or, at the very least, orbiting earth in a space hotel.  It is a sense that we still haven’t got our collective human act together, and as I’m watching episodes of Battlestar Galactica, I’m thinking that we’re way behind.  We can’t think outside the box of our cyberspace.  The Internet being so vast and infinite, there is a danger that too many users believe they have charted unknown territories already. 

“Why explore space when I have it on my desktop?”

Perhaps, I’m a bit old-fashioned, too.  This is, simply, how societies continue to evolve and technology is here to stay, so live with it.  It’s like music: just because I prefer Tribe Called Quest to Soldier Boy doesn’t mean the former is actually better than the latter; it just means that I’m older and that hip hop has changed or evolved - for better or for worse.

But, I can’t shake this feeling that our heavy reliance on information technology has moved us away from the purely academic but intellectually fulfilling exercise of DIY: doing it yourself.  We are duped into a sense of progress through bits, code and social networking sites. 

Gregg Easterbrook’s nightmarish article in this month’s Atlantic Monthly offers a higher sense of urgency to the argument above:

Given the scientific findings, shouldn’t space rocks be one of NASA’s priorities? You’d think so, but Dallas Abbott says NASA has shown no interest in her group’s work: “The NASA people don’t want to believe me. They won’t even listen.”

NASA supports some astronomy to search for near-Earth objects, but the agency’s efforts have been piecemeal and underfunded, backed by less than a tenth of a percent of the NASA budget. And though altering the course of space objects approaching Earth appears technically feasible, NASA possesses no hardware specifically for this purpose, has nearly nothing in development, and has resisted calls to begin work on protection against space strikes. Instead, NASA is enthusiastically preparing to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars on a manned moon base that has little apparent justification. “What is in the best interest of the country is never even mentioned in current NASA planning,” says Russell Schweick­art, one of the Apollo astronauts who went into space in 1969, who is leading a campaign to raise awareness of the threat posed by space rocks. “Are we going to let a space strike kill millions of people before we get serious about this?” he asks.

We can talk all day about the political reasons for the disastrous lack of common sense described above, but we must also ask ourselves an uncomfortable question: Are we lazy? The fact that we are so comfortable as to lounge back into a somewhat half-baked pre-Copernican worldview that Earth is “aight,” means that we give little thought to the vast universe in which we are a speck of dust.    

Charles D. Ellison, 6.5.08

A few nights ago, I was invited over to one of my friend’s apartments to hang out and have dinner. While we were waiting for dinner to finish, the seven of us, all twenty and twenty-one year old college students were hanging out watching television. Sounds like a typical scenario?

Yes, until you add the fact that all seven of us were on our laptops, while watching television and four of us either had our cell phones on our laps and/or used them in the half hour before dinner was served. While this seems incredibly anti-social, and atypical, it is becoming more and more normal for my generation; a group that is called the millennials. 

The millennials, a generation group born between 1980 and 2000, grew up with the Internet and instant messaging, cell phones and text messaging, and an explosion of new forms of technology. While television, the dominant medium for the two or three generations that precede the millennials, had a large influence on our childhoods, it was battling with the Internet for our attention. This has resulted in a generation that consumes news and engages in politics in a way that is different from any generation before us.

Our consumption takes place through a large variety of different media and also generally happens with multiple forms of media at once. The millennials consume what is called “top line” information on a lot of different subjects, rather than more in-depth material on a handful of topics as is traditional with newspapers, radio and to a lesser extent television. This happens because of our typical consumption habits of using our computers, while watching television and communicating via SMS on our cell phones. However, this doesn’t mean that the millennials are becoming a generation with “trivia knowledge”, or a little information on a lot of topics; rather, once millennials read the “top line” if it engages them they choose to read more. 

So what does this mean for politics and news consumption? Well the obvious answer is that newspapers are in trouble as time progresses (something that the vast majority of the public knew anyways). However, delving further you see that the millennials are more engaged in politics and other social issues of the day than any generation since the 1960s. Last month at a Media Future Now luncheon discussion, Jack Quinn of Quinn, Gillespie and Associates, said that the youngest voting (and in some cases non-voting) cohorts are influencing their parents decisions in politics like he has never seen before. 

As the millennials continue to “grow up” and gain more power and influence into the political world, it will be interesting to see how the differing consumption norms will change how people interact and how business is carried out.

Mobile Voter, the group that innovation voter registration by text message, recently launched a program to turn people with a few minutes to spare waiting for a train or in line at the grocery store into volunteers. The program is called Volunteer Now, and it connects volunteers with projects through text messages. The combination of technology and civic action fits neatly into Mobile Voter’s mission to use technology to empower civic life and political engagement, with a specific focus on youth

Ben Rigby, Co-Executive Director of Mobile Voter, filled me in on the details about Volunteer Now. (Rigby is also the author of a ne w book, Mobilizing Generation 2.0.)

What does it do?

Volunteer Now enables people to spontaneously offer their expertise via mobile phones. Missed your train? Got 20 minutes? Review a contract for a nonprofit. Translate a document for a non English speaker. Identify craters for NASA. Give back in your spare time!

What inspired you to do it?

Projects like SETI@Home have showed that massive computational problems can be solved when a distributed group of people donate their computers’ spare CPUs to crunch data. This project will explore the possibility that this same theory can be applied to spare human “CPUs.” We believe that it will reveal a massive untapped capacity to do good.

How can people get involved?

They can contact me: ben@mobilevoter.org. We’re looking for programmers, designers, and creative people with great ideas to volunteer for the project. It’s an all volunteer/open source project.

IPDI’s very own financial director, Chris Brooks, who moonlights on campus as the chairman for the George Washington University College Republicans, made CNN last week. In a short three-minute video you can see here, Chris and a few other GW students managed to get their two cents in about college-age voters’ use of the Internet.

Chris, like most of us here at IPDI, is a compulsive Web surfer and admits as much in the video. While this expression of love for 24/7 access to the candidates might scare off a few Luddites (mostly because that’s all that is really left of that movement…just a few), Chris is a good example of how plugged-in young voters can enjoy greater breadth of knowledge about the candidates than our parents’ generation could through newspapers and once a night newscasts just by heading over to the dot-coms for the news networks or junkie sites like RealClearPolitics.

And I am not just saying this because Chris is the guy who fills out my paycheck…although a small blogging bonus could never hurt!

We see the writing on the wall. Thanks to the efforts of groups like Young Voter Strategies (we used to share the same roof and department at GW), which recently merged with Rock the Vote, there’s no doubt that young voters will impact the 2008 election.

That’s why I’m very pleased to announce that IPDI has joined forces with Outburst!, a multi-city interactive lecture series and form about political and public policy launched by one of our IPDI fellows, Charles Ellison.

Outburst! will stage events at both conventions this summer, as well as at each presidential debate location. Outburst! just launched its official website at http://www.outbursttour.com/live/.

There was an interesting article in the Politico the about how much students at NYU valued their right to vote.  Just over 70% said that even one vote can make a difference, and yet two-thirds said they would forfeit their vote for a free ride to NYU.  Half the students said they would give up their vote forever for 1 million dollars.  My favorite stat, though, is that one-fifth would give up their vote for an iPod Touch.  I like my iPod as much as the next college student, but really?

Going where the presidential campaigns themselves have not yet tread, WashingtonPost.com just released its Issue Coverage Tracker widget.

Geared a young audience that might not journey to the WashingtonPost site every hour or even every day, the tool allows user to display breaking news content about their favorite presidential candidate.

Via MediaPost:

While driving traffic back to the Web site is one of the goals behind the widget, exposing The Washington Post brand to a younger reader base that may not be familiar with it–via sites like Facebook and MySpace–is equally important.

The focus – on making customizable news portable for a young audience – is an important theme. We see it as just another step away from the tired line that young voters only care about “boxers or briefs” when it comes to presidential candidates.

Yesterday, MTV and MySpace announced a plan to hold a series of live, interactive townhall-style discussions with the 2008 Presidential candidates. Viewers can submit questions by multiple platforms – instant messaging, text messaging, email, and candidates answer live, while viewers vote on their answers through online polls.

Interesting. Refreshing even.

Less refreshing, however, is the amount of mostly condescending coverage over the course of the past day contending that an audience of young voters will have nothing better to ask the candidates than “boxers of briefs.”

We went to Google News and searched for the term “boxers or briefs.” The search engine gave us 64 stories from publications like the New York Times, Wired, Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Washington, Forbes, Politico, Variety, BusinessWeek and more.

Many of those publications predict that the question “boxers or briefs” is about as deep as they expect the young American voters who will engage in these forums to be.

At what point does a question from the 1990s become irrelevant and insulting?

Perhaps we crossed that point yesterday.

We predict that the young voters who engage in MTV and MySpace’s forums will not be as vapid as the media suggests. Young Voter Strategies (a program hosted, like IPDI, by GW’s Graduate School of Political Management), believes that young voters are engaged, informed, and enormous (over 41 million strong) and will be a tremendous force in elections.

By allowing viewers to use many platforms to post their questions – and by tapping into the millions of young voters engaged in politics – these forums have the ability to be more revealing than anything we’ve seen all summer.

We will be liveblogging this afternoon from a conference we are cosponsoring at the George Washington University, called “The Future of Political Communications — Connecting with Young Voter.”

The half-day event is focused on the Internet’s role in youth voter strategy and features adviser from the top presidential campaigns.

Here’s the description:

Young voters are spending more and more time on social networking platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube, and are getting their news from many sources including web video, blogs, podcasts, websites, television, radio, and print.

The George Washington University, Opportunity 08, a project of the Brookings Institution in partnership with ABC News, PR Newswire, I’m 18 in 08, and Business Development Institute have partnered to produce a half-day event that will bring together the best and brightest minds to showcase and explore successes and failures and discuss how political and policy communicators can make sense of an increasingly fragmented media landscape and connect with young voters.

We will also present the world premiere of David Burstein’s, “I’m 18 in 08″, a documentary film whose goal is promote and encourage more youth to vote and get involved in the political process.

Speakers include:
> Jeff Berman, SVP Public Affairs, MySpace
> Peter Daou, Internet Director, Hillary Clinton for President
> Mindy Finn, director of eStrategy, Romney for President
> Steve Grove, heads of News and Politics, YouTube
> Chris Henick, senior adviser, Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee
> Chris Kelly, chief privacy officer, Facebook
> Josh Orton, deputy new media director, Obama for America
> Mark SooHoo, deputy eCampaign director, John McCain for President
> Joe Trippi, senior adviser, John Edwards ‘08

The event is organized by the Business Development Institute, GW’s Graduate School of Political Management, “I’m 18 in ‘08″, Opportunity ‘08, and the PR Newswire.

Stay tuned, it should be an interesting and enlightening discussion. We’ll bring you the highlights, the insights, and the quotables.