Just over two weeks ago, Joshua Michael Marshall of Talking Points Memo fame opened a new website dedicated to liberal political discussion. The website is conveniently titled TPM Café, which serves to note the relationship between the site and his blog, and his intent that the site act as a coffee house where like-minded people come to discuss the events of the day. The site has several blogs, provides topic-specific discussion forums, and allows readers to create their own blogs. And all of that in the creams, rich earth tones, and themes of your local coffee house. In fact, the coffeehouse theme may go a few steps too far—the forums are called ‘tables,’ the main blog is ‘The Coffee House,” and the weekly guest blog is “A Table for One.”
The Coffee House is constructed from the postings of 15 pasty white, East Coast liberals including Ed Kilgore of the DLC, who writes his own blog www.newdonkey.com, and Marshall Wittman who writes www.bullmooseblog.com, and thirteen other people there’s not a chance in hell you will recognize. Six different people contribute to a blog on foreign affairs, ten people contribute to a blog on the middle class, Matthew Iglesias has his own blog on something (Reality-Based Commentary?), and another guy, Kenneth Baer (who?) has another blog entitled “Early Returns from the Political Wilderness” (what?). If you read their bios, though, they should be more than qualified to provide interesting commentary.
Marshall has stated several times that his purpose was to design the site to encourage what he has called open source reporting. Open source reporting means that the readers of the site are primary information providers. This is a model that he has used effectively on his blog during the earlier stages of the Social Security debate. Marshall invited readers of Talking Points Memo to scour their local papers for quotes from their representatives and senators, and to contact those officials directly, and then report that information to him so that he could publicize the officials’ positions on Social Security. This has been an effective strategy of creating near real-time political accountability for Democrats who were considering supporting President Bush’s Social Security privatization plans, and for spreading praise of Republicans who bucked the party line by opposing privatization. Marshall went so far as to create meme-like names for the groups: the Fainthearted Faction and the Conscious Caucus. These categorizations have been apparently successful in helping to ensure accountability for politicians who are not used to this level of scrutiny.
The question, however, is whether this method of reporting can work on a larger scale for all the variety of topics that are being covered at TPM Café. Creating open forums for readers to post issues opens the door a crack, but Marshall has also instituted a system to allow readers to moderate the forums. Anyone can post a thread on one of the forums, and then the thread-starting post can be rated by other readers. The higher the rating, the higher the thread appears on the page. The lower the rating, the lower it appears. This serves to bring the ‘best’ threads directly into the view of people visiting the site and ensures that good discussions aren’t lost beneath new posts. This rating system also applies to comments on threads, and then also to replies to particular comments, and comments (and replies to comments) on the blogs on the site.
This moderation destroys the continuity of the discussion. Suppose Marshall puts up a new post on the main blog. Readers can now comment on that post. A reader may come to the post after several other people have posted comments. If none of the comments have been rated, the comments will appear in the chronological order, and the reader will follow the discussion normally. If the reader finds a comment in the string to his liking, he can rate it highly, and it will immediately jump to the top of the thread, and if other readers have replied to that particular comment, then those replies will be carried to the top with it. If the other commentators were having an on going discussion among themselves without directly replying to each other, the discussion can quickly become disjointed and hard to follow. And the site design doesn’t help since many readers apparently confuse the button for replying to the thread starter/blog poster with the button for replying to a particular comment. It should also be noted that this style of moderation can easily be manipulated through collusion. If you got five people together and all agreed to give each other’s comments the highest ratings, your comments would always remain at the top of the thread. Finally, the rating system is entirely voluntary. So, whether a particular comment is high or low is more dependent on it’s radical nature. A reader is motivated to rate a post only if it is particularly offensive to or confirming of their personal predilections. All told, this is an inefficient and unsatisfying method of running a forum.
And I doubt it’s efficacy in bringing important facts to fore. In a way, this a fault of the larger project. Open source reporting can work, but in order to work, it must be nothing more than reporting. It was successful on Marshall’s blog because he controlled the content of the blog. In short, he acted as editor of the information reported to him. TPM Café, however, invites the reader to act as editor. The reader has control over what is most likely to be read and has control over the content. And each reader of the site has a different political project. Some are liberals, some are left-leaning moderates, some radicals. The diversity leads to schizophrenia. On his blog, Marshall was able to construct the reporting in a useful manner, to direct the output to it’s greatest use. This is impossible on a site designed for freewheel discussions, and I will be surprised if the site gains the strength of his original blog.
Although TPM Café does not have the necessary structural elements to succeed as a site for open source reporting, there is a greater problem that the site illustrates. When it opened, TPM Café started out with very broad strokes; asking grand questions. The intent must have been related to the new beginning it provided. Here was an opportunity to start a new discussion, to rethink old ideas, to breath fresh air. The contributors managed to state the obvious as if it were a revealed truth. The result was condescension.
As a consumer of politics, I want the political sites I read to provide information and not just discourse. I have been a rather long time reader of Marshall’s blog because he had access to information that I did not have, and because it was usually an efficient condensation of recent changes in specific issues, notably Social Security and news about the last election. A site that provides unfounded or uninformative discourse is of no use to me. The goal of any political site must ultimately be to influence policy, to spread ideas. I do not need to spend time on the internet debating random people on issues that we all fundamentally agree about, and I’m having a hard time seeing why other people think they should spend time that way.
As the discussion among the contributors on the site slid into normal political discourse, the condescension left, but the obvious remained. In the writing of these experts, and in the comments of the readers, I found common opinions, common knowledge, and common thought. The posts by the apparently qualified contributors could have been written by anyone, or by me for that matter. (Note this blog). I need more than that. I need something to make me want to visit a website. I don’t know what, but something besides mere commentary. TPM Café does not provide that. All it provides is a large number of people that I wouldn’t want to talk to in a coffee house.
This post has been a bit disjointed and long, and I thought about leaving it at that. But I have been using it to think through some of the problems I have with Marshall’s new site and political thought. I have one thing left to say:
I often find myself overwhelmed by information, even without owning a TV. I wonder if this isn’t a problem with our society. It has been too frequently commented on, but to restate it one more time, we have multiple 24 hour news networks on cable, constant access through the internet, and then radio, newspapers, everything. It has been suggested that the internet would fracture our society in certain ways by decentralizing the media. Specifically, individuals could pick the information and news they get on the web, tailoring their intake to satisfy their confirmation bias and their personal politics. Blogs were supposed to do that.
Now we are moving beyond blogs, and I wonder if a limiting principle has been discovered. Discussion of politics that is disconnected from information (evidence) and that has no entry costs can serve very little purpose. In essence TPM Café was designed to create a political internet forum. There are undoubtedly thousands upon thousands of non-political forums on the internet covering everything one can think of—motorcycles, video games, law school, etc. Each of those forums, however, is about something tangible that is itself limited. Knowing what you discoursing about allows for strong discussions on the topic. Without a topic, however, no reasonable discourse is possible.
That may be what we are seeing in TPM Café. Politics just may not work as a large scale topic for discussion.
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