Crossposted on Mediafuturenow.com.
My colleague Brad Fitch writes in the K Street Café about the bailout plan, “What’s Driving Citizen Outrage?”. Fitch takes a smart look at the factors underlying the passion, and recognizes a true “grassroots” advocacy campaign when he sees one. In fact, the bailout may be one of those seminal – and rare – political events where the citizenry is truly engaged in an uncoordinated explosion, and Fitch cites the 2006 immigration debate, the 1998 Starr Report and the 1989 Congressional pay raise as the only seriously comparable recent examples.
Wired magazine makes an analogous point in its coverage of the case, in “Online Bailout Outrage Jumps to Streets, and Into Lawmakers’ Inboxes”. It seems that the major advocacy groups organizing massive email, letter-writing and telephone campaigns are being eclipsed – at least this time around – by the virality of individual journalists and bloggers and websites launching often comical but all-too-effective pitched battles. As just one example, Wired mentions BuyMyShitPile.com, a parody site organizing collections of junk for submission to the government to also be redeemed in the junk mortgage bailout. (As of this writing, BuyMyShitePile claims stated value of its “junk” assets at $801,501,210,139.11.) (more…)
