On Election Day (Tuesday!), please bring a camera with you to your polling place and take some pictures of American democracy in action. Then submit your photos to the ingenious Polling Place Photo Project, which will document every one of America’s election locations through good old fashioned web-based citizen journalism.

I can’t even begin to scratch the surface of the kinds of fascinating, inspiring, and troubling things this project will potentially reveal about America’s crazy democratic process, both the good and the bad: the rogues gallery of different kinds of voting methods and machines, the long confusing lines, the aggressive party electioneers, the intimidating highway patrolmen, the hard-to-find locations… and the dedicated voters waiting as long as it takes to vote, the helpful volunteers managing the process — maybe we’ll even see some well-designed signage. Not to mention the pride in seeing the faces of American voters doing what is admittedly an inconvenient but ultimately rewarding civic obligation. I really look forward to seeing the results of this project.

To learn more, please visit the project’s official site, which has lots of helpful information about how to legally photograph your polling place and how to submit your images to the project’s web site.

Oh, and while you’re hanging around your polling place taking photographs, you should vote. Probably for a Democrat. Unless you live in Vermont’s Windham-2, in which case you should vote Progressive. Thank you!

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It seems laughably obvious that this supposedly cutting-edge voting device will feel positively ancient in only a couple of years. It already looks like a cheap peice of crap to me, hardly something worthy of being integral to the American democratic process. And believe it or not, this photo was taken in 2004 — even though it looks a lot more like it’s from 1994 (think Windows 3.1).

In 2004, Behavior worked on a web site for the Smithsonian Museum of American History’s special exhibition Vote: The Machinery of Democracy. The exhibition focused on America’s “voting patchwork”, the broad range of voting technologies used state by state, county by county. It was an enlightening experience working on the project, and I encourage you to visit the site to learn about how we got to where we are now.

The current range of voting technologies in use today includes:

• Paper Ballots
• Gear-and-Lever Voting Machines
• Punch Cards
• Optical Scan Ballots and Readers
• Direct-Recording Electronic Ballots

It’s widely assumed that the most modern technology available is obviously the best option — that is, that we should be using touch-screen direct-recording electronic voting machines. But maybe this isn’t the case — counterintuitively, perhaps an older technology is the best approach. MORE…

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WWBFD? Benjamin Franklin took for granted that part of his role as a technologist with access to mass media (he was, after all, a printer and publisher) was to make public arguments about his own political views. If he were around today, and I know that this isn’t an original thought, he’d almost certainly be a blogger. Ben Franklin is far and away my favorite “Founding Father”. BFF!

It’s almost cliche by now to talk about how the Internet has empowered regular people by giving them the tools to reach a broader audience than was possible in ye olde tymes, particularly in the realm of politics. I am still surprised, however, that so few popular bloggers bother to express their political thoughts online.

I write about politics here fairly often, for two reasons.

The first reason is self-centered: Writing about politics is personally clarifying and cathartic. It allows me to take my jumbled thoughts and emotions regarding what I read in the news and form them into a concrete opinion, which in turn gives me a sense of clarity about my views, forcing me to attempt to answer the not-so-obvious questions. It also simply lets me rant and get things off my chest (something that can probably be said about almost every blog post ever written by anyone, political or not).

The second reason is outwardly-focused, and perhaps a little idealistic: I want to use my voice to actually effect change in the world, to have some impact on the thoughts and opinions of other people by inspiring them to say and do things knowing that there are other people who think the same way. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t imagine that my little blog posts will reach the desks of important politicians and inspire them to change their positions on issues I care about. Nor do I think that my scintillating political writing will inspire millions of people and sway elections. I’m not delusional.

But I do think I can have a more modest kind of impact among the hundreds of people who read graphpaper.com regularly: By publicly articulating my opinions, I hope to (a) give some degree of moral support and maybe even a little boost of courage to others who share that opinion, and (b) provide the rhetoric and logical arguments to help them clarify their ideas and even to share them with other citizens via discussion or even debate.

You see, I believe that one of the main reasons politics is so messed up in America today is because most of us are afraid to discuss politics in public. We’re afraid of talking about it with our friends, coworkers, and families. And because we don’t discuss it, we don’t think about it and we don’t take action. And because of this lack of debate, bad stuff happens.

For example, the reason why the Iraq War happened in the first place, and the reason why it was allowed to be managed so incompetantly for so long, was in some part because the taboo against talking about politics prevented people from saying out loud, or even articulating internally to themselves, what they suspected in their hearts: that Bush’s vision for success in Iraq was (at best) a shot-in-the-dark fantasy. Those who might have opposed the war in the first place looked out among their friends and across America for voices of opposition and heard almost nothing, primarily because not enough people were taking the simplest of all political actions, talking.

I think it’s every American’s duty to make their political opinions known to their friends and peers, and to engage in political discussions, whether in the form of civil debate or plain old righteous argument, with their closest associates. I think this responsibility extends particularly to those of us with above average voices, that is, to those of us who blog.

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(This is Part 6, the final part of this series. Please check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3a, Part 4, and Part 5.)

Despite my calls for increased class consciousness, I actually think that class may be less and less important as American culture evolves and as class exploration becomes more fluid and amorphous.

Let’s look at New York’s legendary Greek-motif coffee cups. The class fluidity of this design is striking: The original design inspiration is ancient Greece, where the class system made you either a citizen or a slave. In the 18th through early 20th centuries, Greek themes became a key marker of the highest classes in the form of neoclassicism. Greek immigration to NYC in the early to mid 20th century led to the advent of the working-class Greek diner: the Greek-motif coffee cup emerges. Since the 1960’s, the design has proliferated in many varieties around New York’s diners, delis, and coffee shops. It has become an esoteric but endearing symbol of New York City, beloved by all New York coffee drinkers regardless of class. And now, super-cool earthenware replicas are available at the MoMA Design Store for $14 each.

The Flattening of Class

Although income disparities in the USA are growing more stark and economic mobility is lower than it has been in decades, class-based cultural differences are indeed breaking down. People with lower-class roots have greater access than ever to traditionally upper-class products and pursuits. And the upper classes are attracted to the cultural ideas and products from below, as well. As Steve Bryant commented in a previous post, “the rise of mass media has made fluency in low culture just as much an asset as your ability to navigate a conversation about Wittgenstein”. MORE…

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Clinton on Fox. Notice the footnote: If Clinton hadn’t done this interview, Richard Clarke’s role in fighting terror (and Bush’s role in ending Clarke’s role) would drift further away from the Fox viewer’s consciousness.

I read a post today at Sean Coon’s connecting*the*dots blog entitlted “and keep your enemies closer“, and I thought at first it was going to be about how progressives and liberals shouldn’t be afraid to get up close and personal with conservatives, that in fact it may be to our advantage to keep them close by and engaged. Specifically I was thinking about how Democrats are apparently afraid to appear on Fox News, and about how stupid that strategy is.

Bill Clinton was on Fox News Sunday today, in an interview with Chris Wallace. Wallace asked a series of questions that, in effect, accused the Clinton Administration of ignoring Al Qaeda. Wallace probably thought that Clinton, like many other Democrats, would hem and haw and foolishly attempt to actually answer his “when did you stop beating your wife”-type questions instead of coming back and attacking the question by responding with facts that undermine the question itself.

Bubba wasn’t having any of that. MORE…

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The classic Skinner box experiment.

A comment by Steve Baty on my recent series about design research got me thinking about the fine art of experimental research design:

Where research (in all forms) becomes a waste of time and effort is when the research design and methodology applied invalidate the conclusions _before_ they can be drawn.

One of the things that defines a great scientific thinker is their ability to design and construct meaningful experimental methodologies. Defining the terms and tools of an experiment in such a way as to focus on just the right question while excluding bad data, well, this is where science becomes a high art. Whether it’s physics, medicine, psychology/neurology, human behavior, whatever, the structure of a great experiment is often as interesting, surprising, and elegant as the plot of a great novel — and the insights such experiments reveal are often astonishing.

Sometimes the results of powerful experiments open more questions (often deeper, and more significant questions) than they answer.

I think of things like the Turing Test (measuring the quality of an Artificial Intelligence) or the Double-Slit Experiment (illustrating the quantum nature of light). One of my favorites is a kind of test for autism:

Typically, the child watches two characters in a scene. The first person (A) places some chocolate in a drawer. A leaves the room and B (the second person) moves the chocolate to another drawer. A returns and the observer/child is asked to guess where A believes the chocolate is. Young children (< 3 years) and persons with autism mistakenly think that A will look in the new drawer, whereas older children will correctly claim that A will look in the old hiding place.

Another favorite of mine is the controversial experiment by Benjamin Libet in which it is shown that humans begin an action a full half a second after before their conscious mind makes the decision to act. A shocking conclusion, one that throws our understanding of consciousness and free will for quite a loop. But how in the world can this be measured? Libet’s methodology is ingenius:

Libet asked his experimental subjects to move one hand at an arbitrary moment decided by them, and to report when they made the decision (they timed the decision by noticing the position of a dot circling a clock face). At the same time the electrical activity of their brain was monitored. Now it had already been established by much earlier research that consciously-chosen actions are preceded by a pattern of activity known as a Readiness Potential (or RP). The surprising result was that the reported time of each decision was consistently a short period (some tenths of a second)after the RP appeared.

What are your favorite scientific experiments? I’d love to hear about them.

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During the 1800’s (before the formation of today’s FDNY) there were some private New York City “fire departments” who would deliberately set fires then demand payment from property owners to put them out. This is how the Bush Administration is treating America regarding Iraq today: “We set the fire, so you should trust us to put it out.” (The image is from the cover of a 145-year-old Harpers magazine.)

In September of 2002, when the war in Iraq was still seen as something other than inevitable, Al Gore opposed the Bush Administration’s planned attack in an amazingly prescient speech. Almost everything he said and everything he feared has come to pass. Here’s an amazing excerpt:

Moreover, if we quickly succeed in a war against the weakened and depleted fourth rate military of Iraq and then quickly abandon that nation as President Bush has abandoned Afghanistan after quickly defeating a fifth rate military there, the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam. We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

We have no evidence, however, that he has shared any of those weapons with terrorist group. However, if Iraq came to resemble Afghanistan - with no central authority but instead local and regional warlords with porous borders and infiltrating members of Al Qaeda than these widely dispersed supplies of weapons of mass destruction might well come into the hands of terrorist groups.

If we end the war in Iraq, the way we ended the war in Afghanistan, we could easily be worse off than we are today. When Secretary Rumsfield was asked recently about what our responsibility for restabilizing Iraq would be in an aftermath of an invasion, he said, “that’s for the Iraqis to come together and decide.”

Replace “weapons of mass destruction” and “biological and chemical weapons” with “conventional armaments and explosives” and you have a pretty accurate picture of where we are right now, with a well-armed opposition killing our soldiers every day. Can you imagine how bad things would be if there were WMDs in Iraq after all? With insurgents and Al Qaeda infiltrators using them the way they’re currently using Saddam’s conventional arsenal against us?
MORE…

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Emily Dickinson’s totally awesome MySpace page

In which half-baked connections are made between American poetry and Internet social networking.

Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is like an 19th-century personal homepage, in which the poet constructs his profile/identity with the stuff he sees in his neighbors, peers, family, friends, and countrymen. He gives shout-outs to his peeps. He writes of himself and of them seamlessly, “I am large, I contain multitudes” … Whitman sees his identity as part of many collective identities, defined by its connections and its connectedness.

On the other end of the spectrum sits Emily Dickinson, the quintessential recluse, who wrote:

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us–don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Dickinson, too, equates identity with publicness, with connections to other people. Of course, she explicitly sought to avoid such connections throughout her life — perhaps this poem reveals that she was seeking to minimize the existence of her self.

When we are online, when we post information about ourselves, our identities are cybernetically extended; they overlap — and in a way include — other people’s identities via our various kinds of social networks. Our social networks overlap in the same organic-ish way that computer networks overlap. We are always plugged into multiple systems, to multiple networks both social and functional.

The beat poet Frank O’Hara conceived of something called “Personism”, in which our thoughts and ideas are defined best when they are addressed to another person (instead of to oneself or to an imagined ideal). O’Hara’s Personism Manifesto is a bracing, albeit somewhat obscure, rumination on this concept. In it he argues that when we think of new ideas we think of them as being regarded and considered by others, sometimes by particular individuals. If this isn’t the essence of creating online personas, I don’t know what is.

I’m not aware of any blogs, of course, which exist for no-one to see. Where is the Emily Dickinson of blogging? We may never know.

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