Strategy Strategic Strategery

As a kid, when the first generation of First Person Shooters became popular with my friends, I was still nose deep in my books and board games. The few video games that I did reach for were more akin to glorified board games than anything coming close to what systems could pump out at the time. Don’t get me wrong the sports games of the mid-90s, like Madden and NBA Jam, were near and dear to my heart. A sweep right from Aikman to Smith was a proven winner in Madden ’94. I took more than a few teams through the entirety of the NBA Jam season in a perpetual state of fire but when I met Sid Meier I never looked back.

If Civilization 1 was a young and innocent love, the second edition in the series was true, mad, and deep. My life has never been the same since. I turned into a turn-based, civilization building, strategically minded junkie. Where friends loved the pace of engagements in FPS games, I loved the ability to methodically push towards victory in my turn-based games.

A war here, a religion founded there. Guiding double digit economic growth over decades, negotiating complex treaties to prevent an upstart from contending for global domination.

These were my jams, this was my childhood. Strategy was the name of the game. Defining a long term goal, working on all fronts to accomplish it, anticipating adversity, and innovating as the situation evolved.

The urge to see the whole picture has not left me moving into a graduate education and an imminent return to professional life. When reading Strategy as a youngster I learned the value of seeing the big picture. But the big picture is elusive and always changing. Some say the Devil is in the details. If that’s the case, then a strategic platform needs to provide the big picture while retaining those devilish details to ensure that plans can be updated as the situation unfolds. Finding a platform that can replicate the games of my youth and the products of my imagination has always been a goal of mine. With Weave I had found my platform.

Weave is an open source database visualization program that runs atop Adobe Flash. It creates an interactive and nuanced presentation of data allows for large quantities of information to be uploaded and analyzed quickly from a wide array of sources. The visualizations shown are of projection from the 2010 UK election. Each Westminster BLAH BLAH is colored respective of each party’s results. The scatter plots below the mapped results capture voter turnout results against the percentage of votes garnered by the winning party and voter turnout results against income.

Weave, with its ease of data entry and visualization, can allow for election projections based on day to day data extraction from campaigns, polls, and media sources. The platform’s capacity for layers of information constructs a highly responsive model that can be adapted to a variety of strategic needs. Weave can map a variety of data inputs as varied as digital media outreach, GOTV operations, vote turn out projection, partisan performance projections, and fundraising hot spots. The University of Massachusetts - Lowell and the Open Indicators Consortium (OIC) collaborated to create a, "highly flexible and robust application development platform designed to support multiple levels of user proficiency – from novice to advanced. Weave also offers the capacity to integrate, visualize and disseminate data at nested levels of geography."

The geographically visualizing varied data inputs have the benefit linking digital efforts to political efforts to mobilize targeted peoples. This capacity to link online with the offline will be invaluable when confronting a new political landscape as the US enters the first election cycle after re-districting.

A Whole New Ballgame

There is no excuse to not tracking the actions of your audience when it comes to digital media and political campaigns. From incredibly expensive presidential contests to a local school board race, political campaigns have a proven track record of using data to target voters in hopes of identifying supporters and getting out the vote when it counts. However, the pursuit of information about voters cannot stop where the analog world ends. As voters increasingly turn to the Internet to find information about politics and discuss it, they create a rich digital profile which campaigns can begin to mine for insights into their political identity.

Beyond data extraction geared towards a conventional get out the vote (GOTV) effort, namely addresses and phone numbers, new facets of a voter’s online identity can begin to be deconstructed.

No longer do voters and potential supporters need to be viewed in isolation, rather they can be placed in an appropriate social context. An examination of supporters and social media networks invites new measurements and rubrics by which to analyze influence and relevance. Robert Hanneman identifies that power in a network is relational. A voter with 10 followers on Twitter or 20 Facebook friends has less power and less reach than a voter with 1,000 followers and 2,000 Facebook friends. At its most basic level, identifying prominent members of a digital network relies on degree centrality. This form of centrality is a measurement of the number of ties an individual has to the network as a whole. The voter with 1,000 followers on Twitter has 100 the number of ties the voter with only 10 does.

A voter with a high degree of centrality in a digital network has a higher degree of influence than a voter that has a low degree of centrality.  Programs that measure and visualize a voter’s centrality allow campaigns to quickly and visually identify prominent supporters that can magnify their reach through digital media. NodeXL is a program built into Excel Spreadsheets. The program recently featured a new plug in that enables Twitter accounts, Facebook profiles, and Facebook pages to be uploaded and analyzed using Social Network Analysis.

The program allows for easy to use outputs that can be used for the identification and targeting of voters on the Internet via digital and social media in the hopes of spreading the campaigns message that much further.

The graph above is a visualization of 1,000 Twitter handles whose tweets included the phrase Pink Slime, or a meat by-product that has come under particularly harsh scrutiny lately. The visualization tracks Twitter handles that follow each other, tweet at each other, and reply to each other. Granted, it can be an overwhelming site at first glance. The cascading lines in seemingly every direction, the different colored communities densely clustered together, the different variations of keywords and #’s that define each community. But clarity does come.

These sorts of exercises are crucial for a campaign above and beyond the raw extraction of data can be harvested from Facebook Likes and Twitter followers. Prominent members of a digital network that are identified by their centrality can function as new entry points to uncharted networks of potential supporters or donors. Voters that may not have been able to be linked in the past can now be quickly identified as friends using programs like NodeXL and SNA techniques to be more effectively marketed towards.

What does the future hold for digital media and politics? The sky is the limit as we set to work each and every day creating thickly descriptive personal profiles through our actions on the Internet. Whether campaigns pursue SNA based strategies to target us, identify personal influencers in our life, and target us beyond our doorstep and landline will be decided in the months ahead.

What does your social network say about your politics?

Courtesy of: Online Colleges


A way better infographic than I could ever explain breaking down some of the findings of the Pew study from the previous post.

Birds of a Feather: Homophilizing your Facebook News Feed

Are you more or less likely to become friends with those that share your interest? Are you more or less likely to follow people on Twitter you find particularly stimulating or address similar hobbies you've managed to accumulate? Are you always clicking "Like" when you see something you enjoy float across your News Feed?


If you've answered yes to any of the above you are engaging in the act of homophily, something you might not even have been aware of. The basic idea is that individuals have a tendency to associate and bond with similar others. Research on homophily and how it relates to social network theory can be found in the work of McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Cook's work, "Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks".


A recent study, entitled Social Networking Sites and Politics, by the Pew Internet & American Life Project generated data that supports the idea of homophily on social media. Approximately 18% of all users of social networking sites have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone because of the political content that they posted.

However, there are outliers. They are rare. My fellow intern and partner in grad school misery, Matt, hides more people he agrees with than he disagrees with. Could it be then that he subconsciously rebels against the push homophily gives and Facebook’s algorithms reinforce? Maybe. Or maybe, like me, he craves information from disparate sources. Homophily, every spy’s worst enemy.


His stance is quite the opposite of most, but commendable. A push back against the algorithms that Facebook uses to accelerate homophily within our digital networks is necessary if we want to see the full picture. Studies of mass media in the Communications field have revealed that we are more inclined to reach towards partisan broadcast news sources. A not so surprising corollary of this is the boost the 18-30 age demographic gives to television viewership of shows like The Daily Show and the Colbert Report, and influence these programs then have on their viewers. We watch what we like and what we watch reinforces our view of the world. Now, social media has allowed us to further the trend towards ideological isolation.


The dangers of homophily perpetrated by search and social media algorithms for Democracy has been keenly documented by Mathew Hindman. In his book, The Myth of Digital Democracy, he navigates the Internet’s broader structure to reveal emerging information gate keepers. Homophily is not only at work when we actively click “Like” or de-friend on Facebook, but also in the aggregation of key words by Google as it crawls through the Internet. Our reliance, potentially over-reliance upon search engines like Google to get at information on the Internet is leading to a state he defines as “Googlearchy”. This new situation we find ourselves in as information consumers can undermine the free exchange of information, a tenant so necessary to Democracy’s ability to thrive and grow.


Cass Sunstein, in Republic 2.0, reiterates the points Hindman makes about the Internet in general by way of the American political blogosphere. Here he finds greater segmentation than anticipated between left and right wing bloggers, and more importantly a similar segmentation of the audiences. Liberal leaning readers preferring only left wing bloggers and vice versa. His concerns for the health of Democracy stem from citizens and voters perpetuating the cycle of ignoring information and view points that contradict their own.


Can polarization of American digital political discourse be blamed on a single word? I don’t believe in miracles, but it’s difficult to argue with human nature.

New Media Old Ideas

This blog is a project for a class but it will allow me to work through whats become a major facet of my learning and professional life, namely the use of digital media to generate political activism. Everyone from Barack Obama to local politicians running for the state legislature have a campaign website, and outposts on social network sites like Facebook.


Digital media and social networking sites' influence cannot be understated. A recent study conducted by Dr. Phil Howard of the University of Washington's Communications department found that the "evidence suggests that social media carried a cascade of messages about freedom and democracy across North Africa and the Middle East, and helped raise expectations for the success of political uprising”. You can find a full copy of his fascinating research here.


The power inherent within digital and social media appears to be unlocked by the Arab Spring and the compelling images its beamed onto our computer and television screens. However, I feel that it's easy to overstate the power and relevance of Facebook and others in isolation. Images like this one where al-Jazeera and Facebook appear to be on equal footing are powerful and striking, but they are not the whole story.

Another researcher on the issue of Digital Media and the Middle East, Merlyna Lim, argues that without a preexisting opposition network these technologies and their ability to impact the Arab Spring would have been negligible. She creates a compelling video with a timeline capturing the history of digital media and opposition politics in pre-revolution Egypt.


I hope to update this blog with many more posts on the power of digital media and its capacity to generate political activism, but I approach it with a healthy bit of skepticism. For all the flash in the pan that a modern day campaign website may have, for all the allure that the hash tags of revolution may conjure, activists still need to enter the streets. Either to do battle with repressive regimes or to drop ballots into old fashioned boxes.