emptywheel

The best article, by far, on Howard Dean's campaign is this article in the IT magazine, Baseline. It provides a deatiled look at the way that Meetup.com and blogs have served Dean's campaign. The article gets what a lot of people have not--Dean's campagin uses technology as a way to build a great grassroots network, not as a campaign in itself. It's worth it for a review of the ways they're using technology.

But I most enjoyed glimmers of a sense that the Dean campaign tells a different kind of story. This is a story without a dominant narrator, one that evolves but is richer because of it:

Television, radio, print and mail can create awareness and desire for a product. Senders control the presentation and, if intelligently worded and presented, the messages cause an individual or company to vote with its dollars, by buying the product. But the lesson of Dean's campaign is that the Web is not for micromanagers. With the Internet, an effective campaign creates a community that will on its own begin to market your product for you. Properly done, you won't be able – or want — to control it.

The advantage of this is that everyone becomes a storyteller. So rather than one orderly, controlled message radiating from a center (and paid for through expensive ad time), you've got a lot of little conversations, many told by a narrator who has built in credibility for the listener:

But Dean's Net effort is about getting individuals to give time, not just money. Trippi and Teachout want others to tell the Dean story, not themselves.

Of course, this has one more advantage. It allows you to tailor for different markets, so you can be more things to more people. Given the kind of marketing people are used to in this day and age, I imagine it is a pretty powerful marketing tool:

Dean himself discourages the language of marketing, yet this is marketing of a new sort. "It's not marketing and branding in the sense of demanding complete fidelity to a very succinct message, saying you can't waver on font, color, or verb – 'Coke Is it,'" says Teachout. "We've allowed for local-interest, geographic, ownership of the campaign. That necessarily runs counter to it. We have a flowering of different brands. If this was a branding contest, we'd be losing."

There is a caveat of course. At times, Dean does send out an old-style top-down message. This is part of creating a legitimate story that can be repeated over and over again:

Sometimes, though, the candidate's own message trumps this diffuse branding effort. Rather than sending targeted e-mail to specific interest groups, for example, the campaign sends the same message to everyone, whether it concerns healthcare or foreign policy. If the Internet is being used to recreate New England town meetings all across the country – and to involve all those meetings in the same discussion – the candidate can't say different things to different people.

This is the way most successful narratives work in this day and age--from Harry Potter to Left Behind to LOTR. You've got to have a strong message (I doubt, for example, that someone without Dean's strength of personality could have pulled this off). But you've also got to find a way to saturate with the story, you've got to find a way to get people to participate in it, rather than just sit in a darkened theater absorbing it.

Let's just hope that the passive theater crowd goes the way of the last century because of it.

It is no secret that the conservative movement is trying to take back the universities. People like David Horowitz are advocating a new-fangled affirmative action program, in which conservatives are guaranteed a certain number of positions in university departments to counteract the liberal "bias" of universities.

The latest salvo in this effort is an attempt to require university Area Study departments to openly support America or stand to lose their funding. If passed, this bill would establish a committee to review the policies of Area Study centers to make sure they had enough faculty that supported US policies:

If it becomes law, it will create a board to monitor how federally funded international-studies centers impact national security. The board will evaluate whether supporters of American foreign policy are adequately represented in university programs.

The real target here is Middle Eastern studies departments. Neocons complain they have been taken over by leftists--often natives of the countries themselves--who support the "islamo-fascist" revolution. But the program would institute the review on all of the programs. And it would bring with it an expectation that the Area Studies departments would produce more spooks for the government.

Now, actually, this move is not all that distant from the urge that established the Area Studies centers in the first place, nor is it entirely removed from movements already underway in universities. Most Area Studies programs were formed during the Cold War in an attempt to train professionals sufficiently to work intelligently in the regions. Area Studies programs would not only give people advanced language training, but they would provide the interdisciplinary background that gives a real understanding of a region.

Even now, students working in Area Studies centers are likely to be aware of the security-related concerns behind their programs. Most notably, Area Studies programs are the avenue for receiving funding to study languages overseas; this funding is limited to languages that are underrepreseted in the US. The notion is that the funding program will compensate for this shortage in expertise, no matter if the interests of the people involved tend more to (as Martin Kramer, one of the proponents of the bill, scoffs in the Salon article) gender in eigth centry Cairo than it does to contemporary terrorism.

Some scholars associated with Area Studies centers have recently been rethinking the model. Some note that the regions of the Area Studies centers are artificial constructs that often prevent one from learning about more general trends in globalization; they would like to move the centers under a larger International Studies umbrella (this is how Michigan's program is organized, for example). Other complain that these regions were originally formed with an eye to Cold War considerations, and that they therefore continue to look at the regions from a geopolitical strategic standpoint, rather than a neutral one.

Now I'm not sure that such a neutral standpoint exists. However, I'm sure there are problems with this bill. Right now, Area Studies centers tend to compensate for the biases inherent in the sub-disciplines of the area. For example, because Slavic departments are largley staffed by Communist-era exiles, the departments tend to shy away from any kind of materialist analysis. To their detriment. But working within a Russia and East European Studies center offers schoalrs a way to use such methods in their work.

But the effect of this bill would move the work of Area Studies away from compensating in these ways to a way that analyzes all regions through the same lens--that of the US as a benevolent actor. As Martin Kramer admits, "The idea that the United States plays an essentially beneficent role in the world is at the very core of this approach."

We've just learned the dangers of such tunnel visioned thinking. And that is the point some of its opponents clearly articulate:

For professors of Middle Eastern studies, though, it's outrageous, and dangerous, that the government is meddling with academic freedom. And it's especially galling that those who are calling for government intervention are the very neocons whose fear-mongering claims about Iraq have been shown to be false. "The thing that burns me, these are the guys who told us that Saddam had an active nuclear weapons program and would have a nuke within three years," says Cole. "And they're coming back and telling us that our scholarship is shoddy and we need to be overseen by them?"

Looking at regions of the world as pawns of the Cold War, as Area Studies originally did, was blinding enough. But starting with the assumption that the US is a force for good in this world is certain to cause us to miss some things.