Ionrock Dot Org

Like the rest of us, I've been hearing quite a bit about politics lately. I'm a staunch supporter of keeping my political beliefs to myself, so this is not about what or who I support. Instead, I'd like to point out a pattern that is difficult to overcome.

I think Lessig has essentially brought this up with the Change Congress movement. The issue being that people are expected to vote based on some semi-qualified basis. Yet, this means that they have the responsibility to educate themselves on the issues along with how the parties and candidates plan on dealing with them. In short this doesn't scale. We don't have time to do a lot of research so we depend on other sources to help us make a decision.

The two basic categories of sources are media and associations. The media provides coverage of the issues, candidates and generally everything people are interested in. They are commercial though and must cater to the desire, not the needs, of its audience in order to survive. Associations are groups such as churches, employers, unions, clubs, or anything else that functions as a group. The issue here is that as people participate in the group, they essentially offer their impact to the group leaders in the form of endorsements. A good example is when the Teacher Union, AFL/CIO, or the AARP endorse a candidate. The group has offered to support the candidate as whole, and while the members are free to choose as they wish, the group has been the target of persuasion by the candidates and political parties.

The problem is essentially a scalability problem. No one has the resources to effectively communicate because the resources are not available in one way or another. Candidates and parties cannot speak to the public as a whole, so they turn to groups in hopes the members follow the leadership. The media must present what will be watched by an uninterested audience in order to support itself through advertising. Again, the message becomes tainted and/or misdirected in order to meet orthogonal needs.

There really is no solution, but the recent social networking movement and technology has been somewhat helpful in changing the landscape. By empowering more people to be producers of content and news, there are more opportunities to communicate messages that are unencumbered by outside forces. This doesn't imply there is truth in the messages. It simply means they are not impacted by a need to survive. The problem now is that there is a wealth of information and no way to meter and decipher it all. Again, I don't really have a solution outside of continuing to improve our use of semantic technology to find meaning and allowing interfaces that meet the needs of users.

This is actually what makes technology so interesting to me. It is the center of information, which has proven to be powerful in almost all facets of life. While answers are not easy, it is exciting to think that, at the very least, I'm working towards changing the way society works by helping further the discourse.