[LINK] Electioneering

[Craig Sanders]

On Mon, Oct 15, 2007 at 02:00:46PM +1000, Stilgherrian wrote:
> More seriously, there's a very interesting point here, which I've previously
> blogged about http://stilgherrian.com/politics/bennelong_time/ and which is
> well-illustrated by the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_zulGddP6o
> ... in that it doesn't have a ³written and authorised by² blurb at the end.
> Does that matter? Or is this really just ³a citizen expressing an opinion²,
> as he might over a pint at the local pub?
> 
> It used to be that producing and distributing ³political advertising² took
> money, and plenty of it. Now, the means of production are in everyone¹s
> hands, and the means of distribution, like YouTube, are there for the taking
> too. No longer is Davo¹s incredibly amusing impersonation of George W Bush
> confined to the front bar ‹ 15 minutes later it¹s online for the world to
> see. And yet our rules on political advertising are still stuck in the 20th
> Century.
> 
> Clearly something needs to be changed, somehow ‹ but how?
> 
> Or does it?

regulating political commentary (not censoring, but requiring truthful
disclosure of who is behind it) is just as important, if not MORE so, in
today's world of google, blogs, youtube etc as it has been in the past.

yes, it's now cheap enough for any citizen to publish such commentary.

but it's also cheap enough for lobby-groups and other vested interests
to create astro-turf and/or anonymous smear campaigns.

i don't know if it's happened here, but i have read of several
historical campaigns in the U.S. where candidates were smeared with
true but deliberately misleading labels like 'thespian' (actor) or
'pediatrician' (children's doctor) - misleading because it preys on
the ignorance and illiteracy of the voting public. there's a lot of
money and cunning that goes into such dirty-tricks campaigns - money
and cunning that can easily drown out self-publication of citizens'
opinions.


in short, organised advertising creeps benefit from the new technology
at least as much as ordinary citizens...and probably a LOT more as they
have the finances and resources to throw at it.




craig

ps: your mail client is doing weird microsoft-isms with quotes,
apostrophes and dashes (they appear as superscripted 2s, 3s, 1s, and
"~K"). please make it do plain text, not microsoft-perverted text.

a quote is the " character, not ³ or ²
an apostrophe is the ' character, not ¹
and the dash is the - character, not ‹ 



-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>

"Most religions do not make men better, only warier."
              [Elias Canetti]