Bloggasm

For my latest article at PBS’ MediaShift, I interviewed activists from Firedoglake and Daily Kos to explore the various ways netroots bloggers are influencing Occupy Wall Street:

But though the decentralized structure of OWS has helped its public perception, its sluggish decision-making has made it ill-prepared for one major obstacle: winter. As the protests stretch on into December, many of the northern locations will be plunged into below-freezing temperatures. NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg has already predicted OWS will peter out with winter, and unless the protesters adequately prepare for the next few months, the cold will likely pose a significant challenge. Yet because of an inefficient mass-voting system, it’s difficult for any particular encampment to make the kind of executive decisions needed to purchase the expensive supplies that would shield protesters from the chill.

Jane Hamsher initially addressed this problem by purchasing supplies out of her own pocket. Hamsher, founder of the popular progressive blog Firedoglake, had been attending Occupy DC protests when she realized that the protesters didn’t seem to have a contingency plan in place.

My most recent article in Harvard’s Nieman Lab explores why Occupy Wall Street is perfect for web journalism. I interviewed editors from the New York Observer, The Atlantic, and Reason to determine how hungry news consumers are for OWS content.

Bob Cohn, the online editor for The Atlantic, told me that 10 percent of the publication’s top 100 posts for the month of October concern Occupy Wall Street — by far the largest concentration of any one topic. “The full range of the digital vocabulary — videos, slide shows, text articles — is doing pretty well,” he said. “I think it’s a complete reflection of reader interest.”

Growing coverage from media outlets, Cohn said, also signals the evolution of Occupy Wall Street from a single protest to a genuine movement. He believes that many journalists were surprised when it gained legs — three to four weeks ago nobody would have been able to predict that the coverage would have blossomed into what it is today. And part of the reason news outlets are seeing so much traction on it is because it’s a movement that lends itself well to the Internet. “I think this kind of fast-moving story from city to city really is tailor-made for web coverage,” he explained. “On the other hand I’m certain that for many print publications there’s tremendous opportunity for long-form print coverage. But in the early days it’s so dynamic; it’s a great opportunity for web journalism.”

At Media Matters’ headquarters in Washington, D.C., scores of headphone-wearing staffers spend their days (and nights) staring into their television screens and computer monitors, waiting for the latest bits of “conservative misinformation” to emerge from the Fox News Channel and other corners of the right-wing media landscape, all of which are saved on “the big TiVo”—270 terabytes’ worth of hard drive that store over 300,000 hours of TV shows—so that the offending clips can be uploaded to Media Matters’ website. Are you in need of a compendium of the “50 Worst Things Glenn Beck Said on Fox News”? Fear not, Media Matters’ site has one.

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From a pair of computer screens in a lime green bedroom in Upper Manhattan, a 27-year-old man from China is working to bring about a popular uprising.

Two months after calls shot across the Web for a Tunisian- and Egyptian-style “Jasmine Revolution” in China, he is among the few online dissidents still trying to promote a popular protest movement inside the country. The effort has failed to provoke any major street demonstrations, but it has led to a fierce crackdown by the authorities.

Trying to Stir Up a Popular Protest in China, From a Bedroom in Manhattan

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When President Obama announced his candidacy a few years ago, Facebook had way fewer than 500 million users, the most-followed Twitter user was Kevin Rose with a mere 70,000 followers, and Myspace was still king of the social networks. With his recent social media gear-up for the 2012 campaign, it’ll be interesting to see what his campaign has in store.

One thing that may strike you is that there’s just not as much here as there used to be. As this campaign gets off the ground, we want to start small—online and off—and develop something new in the coming weeks and months.

The idea is to improve upon what’s worked for the past four years, scrap what hasn’t, and build a campaign that reflects the thoughts and experiences of the supporters who’ve powered this movement. That means we’d love to hear your comments so we can be sure to add the resources, tools, and content you need as a part of this campaign

As TechCrunch notes, the first foray into social media is a Facebook app that allows you to get your friends engaged — what some may argue is Facebook wall spam. With close to 19 million fans amassed already on Facebook, Obama’s Republican contender will have a high hill to climb to even come close to those numbers. The YouTube channel has over 200,000 subscribers, the Twitter profile over 7.2 million followers, and the Myspace profile over 1.7 million friends.

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The internet hactivist group Anonymous first gained mainstream attention when it targeted Scientology, disabling its websites and staging mass protests. It also engaged in dozens of smaller skirmishes, carrying out a kind of vigilante justice on a number of individuals, at one point even launching a Denial of Service attack at Gawker. In most instances, there seemed to be no political motives other than protecting freedom of speech.

But in recent weeks it has become one of the prime defenders of Wikileaks, completely disrupting the website’s antagonists — Paypal, Amazon, Mastercard — and arguably ruining the career of a security consultant who had been planning how to take down the whistleblower website. And then today we learn that the group has taken down the Americans for Prosperity website, citing the Koch brothers in the process:

It has come to our attention that the brothers, David and Charles Koch–the billionaire owners of Koch Industries–have long attempted to usurp American Democracy. Their actions to undermine the legitimate political process in Wisconsin are the final straw. Starting today we fight back.

…Anonymous cannot ignore the plight of the citizen-workers of Wisconsin, or the opportunity to fight for the people in America’s broken political system.

If the group becomes increasingly politicized, will it lose some of its allure with its supporters? And if it did, would it even care?

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For the last several years, thousands of blogs — many of which are anti-war — have displayed a small widget on their sidebars with a wildly fluctuating number that jumps up by several thousand nearly every second. The widget comes from Costofwar.com and purports to detail the money spent thus far on both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. If you happen to be for one war and against the other, you can choose which cost to display, and if you’re against both it includes a widget logging the combined cost.

At the current rate of increase, the combined cost of these two wars reported on this site will reach $1 trillion on Sunday, May 30, the day before Memorial Day. Of course the true monetary cost of war, just like estimating casualty from wars, is a hotly debated topic, one in which the factors calculated into the number make all the difference — the money spent caring for injured veterans for years after the war has ended, the cost to the government by the rising price of oil that comes as a result of a war in the Middle East, etc. In the case of Costofwar.com, it claims that it’s just calculating the spending allotments passed by Congress that go directly toward the war. It then projects the rate of spending of that money by dividing it by hours, minutes and seconds — hence the continually scrolling number.

But while we won’t ever truly know when we’ll pass the trillion dollar mark — or whether we’ve already passed it — Internet activists won’t let the May 30th date go by unnoticed. The Brave New Foundation — a progressive non-profit affiliated with Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Films — has launched a new interactive Facebook app that the group hopes will educate users on the true cost of war — and where that money could be better spent.

“It does act as a symbol,” said Derrick Crowe, political director at Brave New Foundation, referring to the Costofwar.com counter. “I’m looking at it right now, and we’re at 999 billion and 300 million and some change. As you watch these numbers fly by I don’t think unless you’re looking at something like this it’s possible to comprehend just how fast the wealth of our country is flying out the door for these wars … The idea of spending a trillion, it’s the reason why when you look at an infomercial and the price is always $19.95. It’s because $20 sounds like a lot more. For us, with the trillion dollar mark we’re crossing into a different order of magnitude now.”

The Facebook app provides an online shopping cart — similar to what you’d see on Amazon — that allows you to choose from a variety of spending options. You can “hire every worker in Afghanistan for a year” (COST: $12 billion), pay for “health care for 1 million children for one year” ($2.3 billion), or even “buy out Bill Gates and Warren Buffet” ($133 billion).

“There are two reasons for doing this,” Crowe told me. “One is to show the opportunity cost for this kind of spending. When you go to our app, just take one of these trade offs. If you, for example, bought 10 million university scholarships for graduating seniors this year, and you add that to your cart, that leaves you with $920 billion left to spend. You haven’t even begun to put a dent into the total amount we’ve spent in the war. That’s the thing we’re trying to drive home, is that you could make an entirely new country with this money, you could change the face of the United States if you prioritized these other things and spent the money here. Can you imagine 10 million federal government scholarships, what that would mean for the level of education and the skills for our future workers if we decided to invest the money in them? That’s one piece, the second is to kind of come at it from a negative way at the same time. As you’re tooling around with this, it’s really hard to hit the trillion dollar mark. And when you spend about five minutes on here, and you use this really comprehensive list, and you go to your cart and find you’ve only spent like $300 billion, and you’ve already done things like buy out Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, a private island, and fund a new Apollo program and things like that, it really drives home just how much a trillion dollars is. Folks have done graphical illustrations showing a stack of bills to the moon and back or something like that, what we wanted to do is to show you just how difficult it is to spend this kind of money when you’re not dumping it on a war.”

The fact that the trillion dollar mark comes on the eve of Memorial Day, Crowe said, helps drive home the group’s message even more. Brave New Foundation is promoting this primarily on Facebook — its page has over 30,000 fans — and on outlets like HuffPo and Alternet. This activism also happens to come right before Congress votes to appropriate even more money for the wars.

“While that’s going on, we want to make sure voters and constituents and people in general understand that when they’re talking about adding billions, that’s on top of $1 trillion that we’ve spent on these two wars.”

Given that the GOP recently launched its own website, America Speaking Out, to crowdsource its spending agenda, one would think Congress would be open to such suggestions. But it’s worth noting that in past talks of budget cuts suggestions to decrease war spending are few and far between. Whether placing a $1 trillion price tag will sway voters on war spending depends on if it can overcome what many consider to be an untouchable target of budget cuts: the American military.

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