meish dot org: life, unfolding

Long-time readers of this site will know that I’m not known for writing about politics, usually - I leave that to others more ranty and/or time-rich than me - though I am rapidly turning into a complete junkie for all the car-crash-like coverage of the upcoming US election.

With that in mind, I’ve been watching the stream of news, opinions and links unfolding at election.twitter.com all day. It’s fascinating seeing how people are interpreting, reacting to and recirculating facts, opinions, coverage and events from the US election.

(Tangentially, I’m also interested and somewhat incredulous to see a small group of UK twitterers grumping about the irrelevance and boringness of such foreign events - just because we can’t directly influence the outcome, doesn’t mean we won’t ourselves be directly affected one way or another. But I digress.)

Within the twitter election stream, there are the usual clutch of newsfeeds masquerading as twitter accounts - so annoying (for me, anyway) in regular twitter consumption, but actually quite compelling and reasonable in this constantly unfurling topical context.

Then there are the retweeters - the ones relaying links and opinions expressed by others (whether originally on Twitter or otherwise), who bulk out the stream through sheer repetition.

And then there’s the opinionators - all the voices calling for McCain to grow a pair and show up to the debate (current rumours suggest he will) and for Palin to, well, drop off the case of the earth and/or stay and be ridiculous AND ridiculed (can’t decide which they’d prefer at this stage, tbh), plus an occasional flurry of pro-Obama voices. Of Biden, not much at all, apart from people noting how little he’s being discussed and the occasional Republican whinge for people to stop picking on Palin because he’s a bit gaffe-prone himself, which is like saying that people shouldn’t call Stephen Hawking a great scientist because my old Physics teacher was quite good, too. IMHO, Biden may have made a few boo-boos, but Palin is showing world-class Bush-esque levels of incompetence. But I digress. Again.

But the overwhelming sense from the electrion stream on Twitter is of a pro-Obama (or at least, anti-McCain) landslide of opinion and links. There’s very little being said in support of McCain (and certainly Palin) at all, despite current polling data showing the two candidates roughly neck and neck in terms of domestic support.

This leads me to four possible hypotheses:

1. That Twitter is still not a mass-audience application, and therefore most users are, broadly, “early adopters”, who by their willing and experimental nature tend to be more open to new experiences and probably count as liberal in their approach to technology at least (the converse is also true: that those conservative with technology experimentation may well be more conservative in their views, too)
2. That opinion about the election is split along class lines, and there’s a powerful argument that those living in rural areas or working several jobs/on farms or too well-connected/busy to be internet connected either can’t or don’t want to engage online
3. That the twitter-using (and crucially, talking-about-election-on-twitter) audience represents a more diverse and international than the polling data can capture: we are seeing the views of people who are not necessarily American.
4. That the window on the conversation afforded by the Twitter election stream is skewed by the time difference, so here in London throughout the working day we’ve seen mostly European and (later) East coast US opinions unfolding across the screen: perhaps the hardcore McCainists in Arizona and Idaho (and Alaska) haven’t got online yet, given that it’s only the start of their day.

I think there’s probably an element of truth in each of these possibilities.

If you looked purely at the (people-powered) internet coverage and opinion, you’d assume that the election result was a foregone conclusion; that Obama would walk it and McCain shouldn’t even bother showing up (to tonight’s debate, or at all).

But the problem is that we’re just seeing a self-selecting sample of opinion and shouldn’t extrapolate from it. The medium directly reveals the biases of those who participate.

If I took a microphone and hid it in the eaves above the bar of the Coach and Horses (the pub just behind The Guardian and Observer offices), and recorded an evening’s conversations, I’d probably get a fairly liberal, professional, educated, middle-class, London-based take on the day’s events (from football to fashion to foreign policy), because that’s the sample represented in that pub.

Twitter, in a lot of ways, is like a Shoreditch pub - maybe one near Silicon Roundabout? - where an ethnically-diverse yet culturally-homogenous group of digitally-comfortable, relatively well-off, twenty to thirty-somethings with interesting trainers and hair (you know what I mean) collectively reinforce the assumptions and preferences they all share. A representative slice of London life, this is not.

So I think that this election stream is revealing the true emergence of the Twittering classes - a new version of the Chattering classes, a term which emerged in the 1980s, with a remarkable amount of similarity to their predecessors:

No one has ever had much good to say about them, noted Stephen Perrault, the director of defining for the Merriam-Webster dictionary. “Chattering is like prattling,” he said, “and it has the same connotations of idleness, of useless talk, that the noun ‘chatter’ does.” The implication, Mr. Perrault said, is that “these people don’t amount to much — they like to hear themselves talk.”
The Peculiar Power of the Chattering Classes - New York Times, April 2, 2006. [Emphasis mine.]

See also: Twittering, especially as regards this election?

—-

Incidentally, P and I have been rewatching the very excellent West Wing all the way through the seasons, for the last few months. It’s a great way to wind down after a hectic day/week at work, and we can usually happily chew through two or more episodes in a sitting.

The aim originally was to conclude the whole seven seasons to coincide with the US election on 5 November, but it seems that life is conspiring to get in the way and we’re only up to S3, which means we’ll probably get through to the election in season 4 by the time the start of November rolls around. Still decent timing, if not the (young, ethnically alternative, liberal progressive) Santos vs (aging, conservative, experienced) Vinick showdown at the end of s7 which would have made particularly timely viewing.

Regardless of our poor planning, though, it’s been really interesting to rewatch the show with the background accompaniment of an actual election rumbling on - the debates, the senate vs congress tussles, the press conferences and behind-the-scenes machinations (both on-screen and in real life) all seem more real and make more sense. I’d recommend it to anyone, especially now.