MoveOn
: Wes Boyd of MoveOn is speaking and I’m struck at how soft-spoken he is, to the point of droning. You might expect an energetic firebrand. Not at all.
: Matt Welch asks him for details of his relationship with George Soros. Not much comes out.
: A questioner scolds him for not having a blog. He says, oddly, that the problem with having content on the site is that someone can come in an attack you for it. Huh?
: Boyd: “I don’t know whether this medium is going to be driven toward monopoly or driven toward diversity.” Oh, come on, the medium is all about diversity, diversity that can’t be stopped. But, listen to that point above: MoveOn, not unlike the Dean space, isn’t quite as open as it seems; it selects issues from within a like-minded sphere; it controls the process if not the outcome.
: This is another echo chamber. And that’s OK; it’s people united behind a common cause. But you can’t act, as Boyd does, that he knows what “the people” are saying, that “the people” really care about, say, media consolidation. Wishful thinking.
: Tim O’Reilly asks about trying to get people who disagree to talk together “so we build a participatory decmoracy that isn’t still one side against the other.” Right question. Boyd: “You pull people in not through extreme partisan rhetoric” and instead talk like a centrist. O’Reilly calls him on it: It’s not centrist. Boyd: “We feel pretty centered.” That’s about yoga, not politics.
It’s a right line of questioning. Can one site or service bring together dialogue or does the medium do it, creating bridges across divides from one like-minded sphere to another, differently like-minded sphere?
