Greetings fellow Kossacks. My name is Mike Plugh. I'm a 37-year old Masters candidate at Fordham University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and an active member of Democrats Abroad Japan.
This is the first in an ongoing series of diaries designed to further my Masters thesis, and I'm humbly asking your help to "rec" and participate in order to get the best possible results. The working title of my thesis is "Comparative Analysis: Social Networking Structures and Progressive Political Identity." A mouthful, for sure, but I think many of you will find it interesting both as a subject of study, and as a participatory experience. Follow me after the fold...
To give you a sense of where this thesis is going, I'll start you off with a short background, and then get to the meat of this diary series. My study is of the Media Ecology field, made famous by the late NYU professor Neil Postman. For those unfamiliar with his work, I encourage you to click his name and look into his publications. The Media Ecology field was described by Postman, thus:
You will remember the time when you first became acquainted with a Petri dish, that a medium was defined as a substance within which a culture grows. If you replace the word "substance" with the word "technology," the definition would stand as a fundamental principle of media ecology: A medium is a technology within which a culture grows; that is to say, it gives form to a culture's politics, social organization, and habitual ways of thinking. Beginning with that idea, we invoked still another biological metaphor, that of ecology....We put the word "media" in front of the word "ecology" to suggest that we were not simple interested in media, but in the ways in which the interaction between media and human beings gives a culture its character and, one might say, helps a culture to maintain symbolic balance.
As you can see, this idea describes much of what is happening here at Daily Kos. The specifics of my thesis suggest that the structures of web-based social networking enable a more well-defined progressive culture to emerge, where it has successfully eluded us in the past. The interactivity of this social network allows a more fully explored and communicated cultural identity to form, where less interactive media, of the more traditional variety, did not.
I call Daily Kos a social network, rather than a blog, because I see this community as a far more evolved virtual environment than the standard notion of blogging. This is a place where people converge to promote ideas, pool resources, and share experiences. A fully developed symbol system is apparent here, by which communication takes place and traditions are built. Facebook and MySpace may be the popular notions of web-based social networking, but such a narrow definition of the medium robs it of its broader application.
Rather than burden the community with more specifics about Media Ecology or my thesis at this point, I'd like to explore some important opportunities for all of us to develop my project together. This study is, in part, an ethnographic research project. The Wikipedia entry on ethnography explains it best, saying:
Ethnography (Greek ἔθνος ethnos = people and γράφειν graphein = writing) is a genre of writing that uses fieldwork to provide a descriptive study of human societies. Ethnography presents the results of a holistic research method founded on the idea that a system's properties cannot necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other.
My research contains various important components, outside what I'm describing here, but the most interesting and rewarding of these components is the cultural anthropology present in the form of an ethnographic exploration. As a part-time observer and part-time participant in the Kos community, I intend to probe for answers to key questions developed in my thesis. This task will be conducted via this series of diaries, your comments, and an occasional online questionnaire. In addition, I will eventually solicit interviews with kossacks interested in participating more fully in this work.
What are we trying to get at? There are several questions that come to mind right away, and I'm confident that many more will arise as this goes on. For starters, we have to ask ourselves what we mean by "progressive." What is a progressive identity? What is included under the umbrella of progressivism? What is not included? How does this medium promote the formation and growth of a progressive culture and identity? Where does it fail? There are literally dozens of questions that are ready to be explored, but I will save them for specific diaries aimed at exploring specific parts of this line of reasoning. Today is simply a day for introductions, and an opportunity to gauge the level of support I might expect from the Kos community in fully realizing this portion of my research.
I hope that my work here will provide important answers about the power of Daily Kos, and other forums in this family of media, to shape and evolve cultural identity. As a progressive, it is my sincere desire to see a lasting and more fully realized community emerge from this new medium. Your task today, should you choose to accept it, is to "rec" this diary to the big board. This is not a gimmick designed to garner attention, but rather a challenge to the community to demonstrate the power of communication to promote an idea. Of course, failure to garner sufficient support may also prove an important lesson in the community's power to suppress an idea, but I rather think this project might be of some good to our cause, and a little bit of fun along the way.
I will begin this diary series in earnest at the start of next week, so please subscribe to my diary and be on the lookout for my next offering. In the meantime, I'll provide a few names pertinent to the field of Media Ecology for you to peruse at your own discretion by clicking the appropriate links. Thank you very much, from the bottom of my heart, for any help you provide in the future on this project.
Mike Plugh
Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Neil Postman, George Herbert Mead, James W. Carey, Edward T. Hall, Gregory Bateson, Paul Watzlawick, Alfred Korzybski, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Norbert Weiner, Ervin Laszlo, Niklas Luhmann, Walter Benjamin, Edmund Burke, N. Katherine Hayles, Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, Jeremy Campbell, Wendell Johnson, Edmund Carpenter, Erving Goffman, Susanne K. Langer, Roland Barthes, Joshua Meyrowitz, Lance Strate, Paul Levinson, and many many more.