The Political MySpace or MySpace with Politics?

I've been thinking a lot lately about the use of social networking for political organizing. An entire panel at this year's Personal Democracy Conference was devoted to the subject. Essembly has been hailed as "the political friendster." The GOP is experimenting with their own social software on their website, and there are rumors that Democrats are working to build their own social networking platform as well.

It's clearly a hot topic, but so far the solutions I've seen rub me the wrong way.

The problem seems to be this: The attraction of social networking politics (for me, at least) is that it offers an opportunity to expand the sphere of continued political participation outside of the election cycle, and beyond a core group of highly politicized people. Yet by creating new social networking sites from scratch, many of the solutions I see today don't go beyond core outreach or establish siloed communities of like-minded folks.

If the question is "how can social networking give a particular party a tactical advantage?" then some some these solutions make sense (albeit in a limited way). If the question is "how can social networking make our democracy more participatory," (which I think it should be) then the answer isn't to rip-off MySpace and build a brand new social networking tool from scratch (Why would you try to create a community from whole-cloth when the communities you want to reach already exist?). The answer is that we should figure out how to integrate political organizing into already existing social networking communities.

Right now, I don't see many people doing that - at least not successfully. The closest example I could find to a best practice w/r/t social networking and politicswas Russ Feingold's My Space profile (link through the picture above). It's interactive, its clearly updated, and with over 4,000 friends, whoever is running it is clearly trying to maximize the network effects that a good My Space profile can generate.

But as I mentioned, some of these other social networking sites - while probably not capable of the great, sweaping structural change that I'd like to see in our politics, do offer some great tactical advantages and lessons to be learned. There is clearly a lot to explore here.

So that's what this is all about. I'm signing up for as many of these sites as I can - and Future Majority will be creating accounts - on MySpace, Flickr, Odeo, YouTube, Essembly, etc. I'll be writing regularly about what I see as the strengths, weaknesses, and best uses of some of these technologies - mostly in the context of organizing Millenials for progressive political purposes.

Read my spot observations on some of these strategies/websites after the jump.

• essembly: With its explicit focus on politics, and main activities involving voting on resolutions and identifying political affinities, essembly seems to have created a gated community where politicos silo themselves while they search for kindred spirits. I've yet to hear anything about specific actions evolving on the site and moving offline. Seems like a great concensus building tool, but mostly lookes like its just a nifty way of creating an echo chamber at the moment.

  It would be great if these "resolution" capability was a widget you could integrate into your My Space profile.

  My account on essembly is Michael Connery. Search me out, send me some resolutions, and if you've got a network,invite me to join so I can test it out.

• My GOP Pages: I haven't had a chance to tool around on these yet, so take this with a grain of salt, but seems obvious that this will appeal mostly to core GOP supporters and, at best, will let those supporters more efficiently energize their personal networks. I don't see it bringing new people into the party or expanding the "activist" base too far beyond where it is already. Mostly, this seems more like a great tactical piece of infrastructure for campaign season.

  I've signed up for a GOP page - http://NYCRepublican.gop.com - but it hasn't gone live yet. I'm a little worried that something messed up with the registration. Hopefully the GOP won't kick me off for spying.

• DNC Pages: Like I said, I've only heard rumors of this. Until I see it, I think I'll just say ditto GOP Pages, and add that both of these will probalby be very useful - in fact I think mabye one of the best uses of them - is to better connect the Young/College Dems/Repubs to each other, their respective communities, and the national parties. I've never been particularly impressed with either the young or college dems in terms of their outreach beyond their membership, their adoption of technology, or their utilization of their greatest weapon - culture.

  I'll be writing a lot more about young/college dems on this blog.

• FaceBook: If anyone can get me onto facebook, I'd be much obliged. I might have to ask to borrow my cousin's account just to look around. But it strikes me that FaceBook could be the Democratic answer to all of the stunts (affirmative action bake sales, global warming beach parties, etc.) that the college Republicans pull. A satirical facebook profile, coupled with some guerilla events on campus and some smart use of flyers/chalking could probably cause a ruckus on a campus over a local (intra-university) or national issue. In fact, some enterprising college dems have already put this tactic to work.
• My Space: Like I said, this seems like the no brainer to me, but very few people seem to understand how to do it properly. We're going to be toying with our own My Space profile here at Future Majority, and I'll be looking at candidates/politicians/organization's profiles and writing up some case studies/critiques. If you have suggestions for who we should write about, let us know.
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