Over the past two months, I have grown increasingly interested in the opportunities that social networking sites such as MySpace hold for political organizing. Considering Ari Melber's new article as The Nation,
MySpace, My Politics, I clearly am not the only one:
In California's largest public school district, more than 100,000 students -- one-quarter of the middle school and high school population -- boycotted class on the May 1 "day without immigrants." For national organizations spearheading the events, finding first-time student protesters is hard enough, let alone mobilizing them. Yet it appears that many young people found one another with little formal direction.
Many students got involved through MySpace.com, a social networking website that lets people link to friends and create profiles with photos and music. With 70 million members, most of whom are teenagers, it is one of the top ten most popular destinations on the Internet. (MySpace and its parent company, Intermix Media, were acquired last year for $580 million by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, but the site does not share the politics of its corporate cousins, such as Fox News, because most of its content is produced by users themselves.) Students were already communicating about their lives through MySpace, so when immigration became a hot issue, why not that too?
Sprinkled through the website's millions of pages, comments cropped up about the protests, the national boycott and how students felt about Congress trying to criminalize their parents' existence.
MySpace could be just the beginning, as new social networking sites linked directly political activism (rather than the musical foundations of MySpace), begin to appear:
One new website, Essembly.com, is betting the answer is yes. Founded by Harvard senior Joe Green with venture capital, the start-up is billed as a "fiercely non-partisan" networking site for the "politically interested" to debate ideas and organize. While social sites tend to connect people based on where they live and what they like to do, Essembly adds ideological links to the matrix. Green contends that people usually visit social networking sites because they're trying to "get laid or have a conversation." Essembly encourages the latter, by asking users to vote on simple statements, called resolves, which are provided by both the website and users.(...)
While many popular Essembly groups have been created by users, such as "Socially Conscious Surfers" and "Proponents of Minor's Rights," several organizations are experimenting with top-down recruitment through the site, including the College Republicans, NARAL Pro-Choice America and the Appollo Alliance. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, DC, has already organized two Essembly groups: An official group featuring its logo and mission statement and a group for "Heritage Interns." Meanwhile, the Campaign for America's Future, a progressive policy center, formed an Essembly group that allows users to compare their ideology to its founder, Robert L. Borosage, who has voted on twelve resolves and written seven original comments.
I feel pretty confident this will take off, even if Essembly or MySpace do not turn out to be the ideal platforms. With the rise of the netroots, it has been revealed that the demand for DIY political organizing is clearly very high. The political blogosphere, for all its free-wheeling nature, it ultimately not a very effective location for organizing actions and events. While Democracy for America and MoveOn.org have shown some promising ways to find like-minded members of their organization near where you live, those networking actions are still, generally speaking, limited to the events officially sanctioned by the parent organization. Eventually, platforms will be created for mass public use where anyone can begin organizing an political event they want. They will be able to find like-minded people in their local area, or build mini-national email lists and discussions around their actions. Howard Dean's campaign had something like this in late 2003, but to my knowledge nothing like that exists now. Combining an old "Dean Space" type model for general progressive action along with a social networking platform would result in a devastatingly powerful online action engine for the progressive movement. The political power of the netroots has already been revealed in countless ways. Creating an engine to release that energy--an engine that is not owned by News Corp--is key to our future success.
