California’s Prop 8, Mormons, Twitter, and the wisdom of crowds
November 11th, 2008Last week or so I was fortunate enough to get a quick email interview together with Internet personality Drew Curtis of FARK.com, which I posted to both my blog and Flip The Media. One thing Drew touched upon was, as he put it, the “bogus media creation of the ‘wisdom of crowds’.” This was also brought up again during Hanson Hosein’s latest lecture in our COM529 Research 2.0 course. The question is, essentially, is the sharing, collaboration, and collective action facilitated by social media always focused upon achieving a wise purpose? As Drew put it, crowds are “stupid, horny, and hungry”. There is an echo of this sentiment in Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody; he asks the question: who decides which cause is right? As old media gives way to new, this becomes an increasingly important question. Like your mother always told you, just because everyone else is doing it, or in this case saying it, doesn’t mean it’s right.
Photo used from the Stranger Blog
So, I come to a matter of personal importance, which I have been following closely since last week’s historic election. In California, bellwether state of the nation, the electorate voted roughly 52% to 48% to remove the rights of gays to marry in their state. Some proponents of Prop 8, a constitutional amendment, argued that they were protecting the traditional definition of marriage. Many of the “Yes on 8″ supporters were of religious persuasion, and may have felt to ban gay marriage perhaps largely for religious reasons. Detractors of Prop 8, on the other hand, may have felt that the amendment was discriminatory towards gays and represented an affront to civil rights. It appears many of these detractors have pointed to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, typically called “Mormons”, as a primary factor in the measure’s passing. I know that many individual members of the LDS church, acting as citizens, campaigned for and contributed, individually, sometimes large sums of cash to the “Yes on 8″ cause. But, the legal entity that is “the church” did not. Notwithstanding, leaders of the church state that they exercised their rights in encouraging these activities from the pulpit. These efforts and the money raised, it’s alleged, directly led to the 53% win. I don’t wish to necessarily debate the rights or wrongs of such broad-based assumptions, of the ballot measure itself, the outcome, or the issues of religion or homosexuality in general here, but I do wish to highlight some of the interesting, and perhaps disconcerting things I have seen in the “crowd’s” response to the measure’s passing. Twitter, in particular, seems to be a social media tool contributing to the fervor and organization of the response from some of those individuals and groups that are opposed to the amendment, but there is no guarantee that what is found on Twitter is ever certifiable fact.
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In my COM 597 course at UW, aka ‘Theories and Practice of Interactive Media’, our Instructor, Carolina, challenged us students to contrast the interactive designs of two separate interactive spaces that essentially provide the same service. For example, one pair of students compared the websites (interactive spaces) of two different airlines, examining the sites’ interactive designs for differences that inculcate strengths or weaknesses in one or the other. Was one sleeker and more intuitive than the other? Was one easier to navigate? Was the information a user might need easily accessed? And so forth. After this, Carolina asked us to come up with an even more efficient design for the same kind of service within the same kind of interactive space.