Writing on Many-2-ManYi a group weblog on social software, Clay Shirley uses a similar argument to explain Ho'V"ard Dean's poor showing in the Iowa caucuses following what appeared to be his remarkable successes on the Internet during the 2ooo presidential campaign. Shirky writes:
We know well from past atempts to use social software to organize groups for political change that it is hard, very hard, because participation in online communities often provides a sense of satisfaction that actually dampens a wilgness to interact with the real world. When you're comuning with like-minded souls, you feel [emphasis in original] like you're accomplishing something by arguing out the smallest details of your perfect future world, · while the imperfect and actual world takes no notice, as is its custom.
There are many reasons for this, but the main one seems to be that the pleasures of life onlie are precisely the way they provide a respite from the vagaries of the real world. Both the way the on)ine environment flattens interaction and the way everything gets arranged for the convenience of the user makes the threshold between talking about changing the world and changing the world even steeper than usual. 39
Interacting with others online feels good. It feels like action, like one is doing something, like one is making a diference. One might argue on a blog for hours on end, failng to convince another person of a single point, and still feel eficacious and involved. But this feeling is unconnected from any larger collective practice that might actually afect change.
My point is not that Web-based activities are trivial or that social softw�e is useless. The Internet is an important medium for connecting and communicating, and the Dean campaign was itmovative in its use of social software to build a vital, supportive movement around Dean's candidacy. But media pleasures should not displace our attention from the ways political change demands much, much more than networked communication and the ways intense mediality provides barriers to action on the ground (it's hard to find time to go door-to-door when one blogs twenty hours a day) . As the Dean campaign also demonstrates, without organized and sustained action, without building relationships with caucus attendees in Iowa, say, Internet politics remains precisely that-a politics of and through new media, and that's all.
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