-Kos is a fine fellow, but he has become a campaign consultant and media entrepreneur, -and their business is to figure out -how to manipulate public opinion. -He has never been an organizer, as far as I know. But all of that is utterly -divorced from what is involved in building a radical movement that -puts forward new ideas and that engages and changes hearts and minds. -That's not his business.
Max, Kos is definitely not an organizer in the traditional sense, although his work has been far more than traditional media. He has used technology to create a community of people in constant dialogue who are organizing day-to-day with each other for social change. He has nearly a million people visiting his site every day, with thousands posting messages, discussing strategy and planning actions in response to that discussion.
A whole range of organizations and organizing efforts have spun off directly from his site with his assistance. Folks around the site are holding a massive founding convention next year, the Yearly Kos, and other organizing campaigns have been launched not just for political candidates but for a range of other campaigns were legislators have been lobbied or corporations targetted.
There goal is explicitly not merely information but to influence action in support of their agenda.
So why doesn't Kos and his compatriots count as organizers?
And the idea that media has nothing to do with "new ideas" or engaging "hearts and minds" is kind of bizarre. Not all of organizing is about the media, but many people saw the marches on Saturday were about influencing the media and the public through the media.
Kos's whole orientation on providing alternative information on the war has been to effect that public "hearts and minds." Information is a key part of organizing, so creating some complete separation between media work and organizing makes little sense.
At Bard College, where I'm teaching a couple of course this semester, the big banner recruiting people to the march said, "The Iraqis watch TV, let them know we care." That's a nice reformulation of public opinion but it's still a media strategy. And many people going to the march-- as was evident afterwards by comments discussing how the media treated the march -- were oriented to effecting the media.
Kos doesn't want to run any particular organization -- he's not a bureaucracy builder, which I think is a problem in some ways for his goals, but he's definitely an organizer in the sense that anyone who brings together people who had not been together before, and encourages them to take action with greater unity-- that's an organizer.
Nathan Newman -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20050930/5f101121/attachment.htm>