---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ####### ######## ######## ########### ### ### ## ### ## # ### # Interpersonal Computing and ### ### ## ### ## ### Technology: ### ### ## ### ### An Electronic Journal for ### ######## ### ### the 21st Century ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ## ### ISSN: 1064-4326 ### ### ### ## ### April, 1993 ####### ### ######## ### Volume 1, Number 2 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Published by the Center for Teaching and Technology, Academic Computer Center, Georgetown University, Washington, DC Additional support provided by the Center for Academic Computing, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802 This article is archived as SAKKAS IPCTV1N2 on LISTSERV@GUVM (LISTSERV@GUVM.GEORGETOWN.EDU) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITICS ON THE INTERNET Lee Sakkas, Marist College, Poughkeepsie, NY ABSTRACT This article will recount the events associated with the conception, implementation and existence of three discussion lists that were devoted to the campaigns of the three major candidates in the 1992 U.S. Presidential Election. The three lists are managed by the Revised Listserv software which is widely disseminated on BITNET and were named for the three major candidates, BUSH, CLINTON and PEROT. INTRODUCTION To the best of my knowledge, this Presidential Campaign was the first where candidates and a portion of the voters made an organized effort to utilize some of the potential that has become available as a result of the development of large computer networks such as BITNET, The Internet, Prodigy, and Compuserve. The thread of time runs throughout this story, from the larger sweeps which appeared to frame the beginnings and endings of various eras to the daily, sometimes hourly, happenings where expanded use of technology seemed to compress time as viewed through a traditional campaign prism. Therefore, I will begin at the beginning of the story. THE BEGINNING I was born and grew up in Hot Springs, AR. Though I've lived in New York State for almost 30 years, I still have family in Hot Springs and I periodically 'go home'. I went home in early July of 1992 and while there, talked a lot with family members about the upcoming election and Bill Clinton's campaign for President. Bill Clinton is well regarded by most of my Arkansas family. One of my brothers and his wife are both health- care professionals and they particularly hold him in high esteem for the changes he made in the area of child and maternal health services. Another set of conversations that I happened to have with this brother was about the incredible resources for communication and information that were becoming increasingly available through the large computer networks. While I was there neither set of conversations appeared to relate to the other but the stage was set for an 'idea whose time had come'. An idea, as it turned out, that occurred to many people in various guises. This trip home I had opted to fly from New York to Memphis and drive a rental car from Memphis to Hot Springs. On the return drive I had one of those wonderful moments where, seemingly out of the blue, an idea crossed my mind that appeared to be a creative combination of the two interests that I had so recently been discussing. Why not start an electronic discussion group (often just called a 'list'), using the LISTSERV software on my college's mainframe computer, that would help Clinton in his campaign? Whoa! Right away I could see trouble if the approach was so blatantly partisan, therefore, almost immediately the idea was elaborated to a list for each of the major candidates. So by the time I got on the plane in Memphis, I was thinking about what I wanted the lists to be like. Following the LISTSERV naming conventions, I originally planned to call the lists BUSH- L, CLINTON-L, and PEROT-L. Happily those names became BUSH, CLINTON and PEROT before the lists were generally announced. The L (for List) suffix was a nice nod to the LISTSERV culture but the final names made the focus of the lists more readily apparent. Marist College, where I work as an applications programmer, has a strong tradition of community service and an institutional culture that promotes individual initiative. Thus, I felt it was unlikely that there would be strong objections to the formation of the lists. I spoke with our LISTSERV guru, Harry Williams, about setting up the lists. The major requirement that Harry wanted to see addressed was having an owner for each list. It was assumed that lists discussing anything as volatile as politics would require a fair amount of monitoring. This was, as it turned out, a correct assumption. Two other technical people in Information Services agreed to take on ownership responsibilities for the BUSH and PEROT lists. The other list owners were Martha McConaghy, our Senior VM Systems Programmer, who became the owner of BUSH and Charlie Murphy, our LAN Administrator, who became the owner of PEROT. I am deeply grateful to both of them and to Harry for making the effort and doing the work that allowed the idea of the lists to become the reality that BUSH, CLINTON and PEROT became. It took almost a month for us to set up the lists and to refine our ideas of what we wanted them to be like before we were ready to make the general announcement of their existence. In deciding what we wanted the lists to be, we came up with some general ideas and some specific criteria. Marist is not a large college but our Information Services, by virtue of an ongoing 5 Year Joint Study with IBM, maintains and manages a inventory of hardware and software that would do a Fortune 500 company proud. We, however, do it with about 1/3 the staff that such a company would have available. So, it was obvious early on, the work would be done by the list owners as volunteers on their own time. This situation precluded the lists being truly moderated. Our owner roles were cast more along the lines of monitors/shepherds. Ad hominem attacks prohibited, "Flames" prohibited. ("Flames" is the networking term referring to vitriolic or inflammatory criticisms of, or attacks on, the contributions of other discussion group members, often accompanied by name-calling and profanity.) Good manners and respect for fellow subscribers required. By temperament I'm not much of a policeman and neither Martha nor Charlie appeared to relish the role either. So we settled on a free-ranging format within these ground-rules. I wanted very much to keep the discussion at a level that would make it worthwhile. A CB-like chatter of nothing but personal opinion was not what I had in mind. I felt, early on, that it would help promote a higher level of discussion and further the aims of aiding the candidates and educating the subscribers on their positions and plans if each list could establish some kind of link to the campaign of 'its' candidate. Only CLINTON eventually succeeded in this. The final decision was to try and not let 'our aim exceed our grasp'. We felt there were risks that we couldn't justify taking if we let the lists get linked up haphazardly with outside net or campaign sources where we could, conceivably, windup on the end of a flow of input or throughput over which we had no control. This, too, turned out to be a good decision. The volume of traffic generated by the subscribers alone was pretty close to overwhelming. In the final days before the election, CLINTON was regularly exceeding its daily, agreed-upon maximum of 100 posts. On Saturday, August 8th, 1992 I posted separate announcements of the formation of the three new lists, BUSH, CLINTON, and PEROT to the NEW-LIST list. NEW-LIST has a subscribership today of 4300 plus from over 50 countries. Its audience in August. 1992 was similarly large and diverse and the announcement of our campaign lists in this forum generated a high degree of interest in them very quickly. THE MIDDLE Once the lists were announced we were off and running - the response was terrific. Within three days the CLINTON list had almost 200 subscribers and BUSH had 100. Perot had announced his withdrawal from the campaign by then, so PEROT became a much different list than the other two. Several things happened with CLINTON right away which proved to be quite fortunate and gave the list its own 'personality'. One of the first was that a Clinton delegate to the Democratic National Convention from Pennsylvania, Jon Darling, saw the announcement of the creation of the campaign discussion lists, and sent me private email volunteering to provide CLINTON with full text of some of the position papers and speeches that the list subscribers might enjoy reading. Access to full text versions of official campaign documents came early and easily to CLINTON, providing the list with one of its strongest points of appeal to its readers, especially the librarians that subscribed. Additionally, this material provided the means to achieve what I regarded as a major goal, that CLINTON serve as forum where the list membership could educate themselves on Bill Clinton's positions in enough depth that they would be able to become effective volunteers and supporters should they so choose. By the close of that first week, we not only had material from the Pennsylvania delegate, Jon Darling, but we had begun getting volumes of speech texts and position papers from one of the Clinton campaign's most energetic and dedicated email volunteers, Mary Jacobs. Mary, associated with a University of Illinois library substation, was in contact with the Clinton/Gore campaign and she was our first source for a really comprehensive collection of campaign texts. Another fortunate occurrence early on, by August 11th, three subscribers had posted the email address for the Clinton campaign. One of those three had posted the email addresses for not only Clinton but also Jerry Brown, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan and Andre Marrou. I used the Clinton email address to send the campaign a note to let them know about the existence of the lists and to invite them to subscribe. I received a response from Jock Gill, who was the Clinton campaign's email coordinator, on August 13th saying that he would be happy to subscribe but was in need of some instruction in how to do so. The other lists, BUSH and PEROT, never established similar links with 'their' campaigns. President Bush's campaign either never had an email address or, if one existed, it was not widely disseminated. Perot's campaign had an email address but, by then, he had withdrawn from the race. I have a CompuServe account and Jock was coordinating the Clinton email effort through another CompuServe account so I had no trouble in getting the necessary information to him and getting him subscribed to CLINTON. We agreed that, because of the volume of mail that CLINTON was generating, Jock would have his subscription set to NOMAIL. This strategy would allow him to post to CLINTON and retrieve material from the list archives if he wanted to but wouldn't inundate him with a flood of mail. The third fortunate happening that occurred early on was that we got off on the right foot. People were reticent at first, but when they did post, their posts were thoughtful and contained good questions and serious attempts to address prevalent concerns. The level of discussion was well above the typical 'flaming' exchanges that political topics seem to ignite so easily. That initial higher level of discussion didn't always prevail and sometimes it seemed to me that it had been 'lost forever'. Whenever I really thought that worthwhile conversation was gone for good though, someone would make an incredible effort and get the discussion back on track. It was during the early 'Middle' part of the story, that the different expressions of 'an idea whose time had come' began finding each other. Usenet newsgroup readers apparently set up newsgroups devoted to the candidates pretty early. (Usenet newsgroups, over 2000 of them, are disseminated over the Internet to the sites that subscribe to them, rather like the 'feed' from a news gathering service like UPI is to subscribing newspapers) Our LISTSERV lists at Marist had no direct contact with these Usenet newsgroups but we did gain contact very quickly with an effort being mounted at MIT to provide mail servers for the Clinton campaign. During September, Eric Loeb and John Mallery at MIT set up servers that became CLINTON's major source for the official campaign electronic texts (etexts). Jock worked with them and the flow was from him to the MIT servers and thence to us and others. Information became widely available about FTP sites where the texts from both the Bush and Clinton campaigns were archived and could be retrieved and MIT put up multiple servers to deliver electronic texts to those who requested materials. However, by this time CLINTON had filled its unique niche, a discussion forum that also provided the official etexts. The MIT effort was much more of a high-volume operation. The number of transactions they handled was in the tens of thousands, whereas CLINTON, at its peak didn't exceed 200 posts a day. Because CLINTON was a more personal forum, we were exposed to displays of human failings on a more personal and immediate basis. Among the recurring problems that I found in dealing with the list were: 1) Individuals whose beliefs or temperaments made them very prone to 'flaming', both in response mode and initiation mode. 2) People who appeared to deliberately attempt to provoke hard feelings and injudicious exchanges. 3) We had our fair share of subscribers that indulged in excessive posts, banal posts, and pointless posts. 4) Technical ineptitude and unwillingness to learn the basics of list operation was not uncommon. 5) Bounced mail occasionally reached truly mammoth proportions. I had to spend at least an hour to an hour and half in the morning from home and usually that same amount of time at the end of the day dealing with bounces and misdirected UNSUB (unsubscribe), NOMAIL and SUB (subscribe) requests. I found two big things in dealing with these failings that I didn't anticipate, and which were quite common. The first was the position, explicit or implicit, that the person commenting or complaining about the problem, regardless of whatever the problem might be, was not part of the problem. The second was how ready people were to invoke 'freedom of speech' when they were taken to task for failing to display a willingness to abide by our basic ground rules. Our ground rules were indeed basic and they pretty much boiled down to no personal attacks and no profanity. Personal attacks were a recurring problem and one that I found both annoying and hard to deal with. Freedom of speech is a serious matter and having this principle appealed to frivolously as a cloak for bad manners and an inability to conduct rational discussions went against the grain. However, I was not happy with the situation where it was me making the call on what was bad manners or a personal attack. It seemed to me that a lot of our subscribers were new to list culture. Many seemed to be unaware that there is such a thing as "netiquette" or were unable to grasp the fact that once they hit the 'Enter' key whatever they had written was going to be distributed to upwards of 500 people, bulletin boards, campus- wide information servers or other lists. This gave rise to the kind of situation that developed one night where two undergraduates exchanged about 30 messages with each other at 3 in the morning. They were apparently oblivious or uncaring that all the rest of us were going to have to deal with the results of their appropriating the list for use as their own, private bulletin board. The flooded email boxes of over 700 people appeared to count for little or nothing with them. I found though that my attitude toward CLINTON underwent a shift during this 'middle' period. In the beginning I was very anxious about the list. I had expectations for it much like a parent having expectations for a child. Sometimes it turns out that those expectations don't have much to do with the child they are attached to. As CLINTON went through its middle period I found that my anxiety for it to 'do well' lessened and I could begin to enjoy it on its own terms. After all, a discussion list IS for discussion and, a good deal of the time, the discussion generally tended in the direction of self and peer education about the issues that were being raised in the campaign. One of the interesting things that I really began to enjoy was the process of people 'talking it out'. Frequently the exchanges didn't appear to change viewpoints or positions or beliefs but there WERE exchanges and points WERE raised, responded to, taken into account. This process of 'talking it out', continues to this day. It is a significant characteristic that makes CLINTON different than many other discussion lists. The subscribers can be intolerant. They frequently express very personal and very strongly held viewpoints, but more often than not, they talk TO each other. They offer personal experiences, they tell personal stories. They literally RELATE to one another. Frequently there is a real sense of community evident on CLINTON. It is a more personal 'take' on the discussion list structure than is commonly found. Illustrative of this uniquely personal spin are the efforts that CLINTON subscribers make to meet each other in person. A number of us met with each other in Washington, DC during Inauguration Week and others of us try to link up when our personal or professional activities take us into each others' 'backyards'. Another thing that I began to enjoy during the middle period was evidence that CLINTON was being put to use in ways that I had never imagined that it would. Chief among these was how it was used by the librarians who subscribed. They routinely downloaded the official position papers, announcements, schedules, and press releases and then made them quickly available in hardcopy to their patrons. Several doctoral candidates in communications expressed interest in all three lists relating to thesis work they were doing. At least one history professor incorporated aspects of CLINTON into part of her coursework. Finally, during the middle period, I came to enjoy the sense of connectedness that CLINTON generated. Most of the subscribers, though not all, were Clinton supporters. CLINTON gave us a focal point where we could rally around in our efforts to follow the campaign and do what we could to get Clinton and Gore elected. THE END (DURING THE CAMPAIGN AND BEYOND) The period of time toward the end of the Presidential campaign marked a new phase in the life of the three lists. As CLINTON and BUSH became even more active the subscribers on these two lists were literally inundated every day from mid- October until Election Day with a very high volume of posts. CLINTON was getting large numbers of official releases from the Clinton/Gore Campaign. Both of these lists had enormous subscriber activity during this period when the debates were being televised and all the candidates were appearing on national television talk shows. Once Perot re-entered the campaign the PEROT list became more active also. As the campaign entered its final weeks, CLINTON had the great good fortune to have as a subscriber, James Barrett, who made available the transcripts of the televised debates and the candidate appearances on the "Larry King Live" show. These transcripts added enormously to the fun of the list because we were able to read the transcripts and discuss them, in addition to having seen the television broadcasts. Points that were in dispute could be settled by going to the transcripts. I found it interesting to have the ability to read what I had just watched and compare my memory, or my sense of the television event, with the text, not to mention with the memory of others. This final period during the campaign really brought to the forefront one of the major problems of an active discussion list. The volume of mail becomes so much a factor that, for some, it imperils the value of the list. I toyed with several solutions to the problem; one being to limit the number of posts that any one subscriber could make per day, and another to set up an an additional list, "CLINTON Lite" if you will, with only the official releases posted to it. I conducted a survey, post- election, to see what things people liked about CLINTON, what they disliked and suggestions for improvement. Generally, people liked the mix of discussion and official releases, although a substantial fraction would have been very happy to see a second, "CLINTON Lite" list come into being. During the end days of the campaign, one of the list's ingredients for success was revealed on CLINTON. That period was a time of high emotion and was perhaps the most confrontational in tone. People were very partisan and we had a number of intense Bush supporters posting their opinions and positions on CLINTON. Sometimes these posts bordered on incoherent because of the intensity of their emotion. Many of the list's subscribers, myself included, tended to dismiss these posts as rantings, which only served to exacerbate the problems. One of our subscribers, though, had the good sense and the communication skills to get beyond the 'ranting' aspects and address seriously the intense emotions of the writer. Several times he virtually ended "flame" wars by himself. I owe Frank Walters a debt of gratitude because he showed all of us that, for a serious discussion to take place, you have to be able to take all of its participants seriously, even if they are expressing themselves incoherently or ineptly. As we worked through the campaign and into the post- election period, there were developments that once again changed the character of the lists. BUSH became REPUB-L, the electronic equivalent of the 'honorable opposition.' Jock Gill from the Clinton/Gore campaign, became the first holder of a totally new position, "Director of Electronic Publishing and Public Access Email." I think that the existence of Jock's position validates in the most emphatic manner the 'changing of the guard'. It is the official recognition that the technology of computer mediated communication and information dissemination is coming into its own in areas that it has not been a presence in before. This technology is becoming much more widely available to ordinary people. The commercial services like Prodigy, CompuServe and America Online reach millions of people and the election campaigns utilized them. The Internet is expanding at a phenomenal monthly rate and the ripple effect of the explosive access to information and communication resources that results from that expansion is only beginning to be perceived. We were witnesses to the beginning of what I believe will be recognized as a communications revolution. In the post-inauguration era, CLINTON started evidencing more of a single topic structure. We tended to get into very active and intense discussion of the 'topic of the week'. This became very evident during the time when it seemed that everyone in the country was discussing the lifting of the ban on gays in the military. Going back through the list logs in the LISTSERV archive has an almost geological aspect when the list is structuring itself this way. The layering of topics within time, one upon another, focused on a single issue and then moving on to something else is something quite different than the 'thread' structure that is more commonplace on most discussion lists. The 'talking it out' character of the list really comes to the fore when the list is closely focused on what amounts to a single topic. The Post-election pre-Inauguration period, particularly in late November and early December was a time on CLINTON when the list went far afield in its discussions. There was no certainty at this time that an electronic link to the Clinton/Gore administration would come into existence to replace the electronic link to the Clinton/Gore campaign. The conversations on the list were very speculative and somewhat impatient to see whether the campaign commitment to utilizing the technology would hold. However, this time of uncertainty and post-election decompression yielded some of the most powerful writing and some of the more entertaining exchanges to appear on the list. In mid-November we were treated to the spectacle of several of our distinguished subscribers engaging in the academic equivalent of 'doing the dozens' when they posted a series of 'top this' pieces interpreting the lyrics to rapper, Ice T's "Cop Killer" and other songs. Early December brought an extraordinary and powerfully moving post from Dan Flasar, one of our really talented writers, on his reactions to seeing a friend and co-worker reveal on a local tv news show that she was HIV positive. These stand out in my memory but I feel that CLINTON is fortunate to have an unusual number of writers who take the time to write compelling posts for our common enjoyment. IN CONCLUSION I finally decided to let the list remain as it is, with no limitation on the number of daily posts from individuals. I have also decided not to implement the "CLINTON Lite" option because there already exist a number of channels to obtain only the official posts. That is really not our niche. We were conceived as a DISCUSSION list. Having the texts of the official releases to discuss makes CLINTON more valuable as a discussion forum but it is the ongoing 'multilog' (as opposed to 'dialog') that is our reason for being. It is what we can bring to each other, from our varied viewpoints and expertise, in the context of talking about national political issues, that creates the forum. I am sorry to say though, a high volume list is not for everyone and we lost participants because of the flood of posts. CLINTON, BUSH, PEROT and all other manifestations of new uses of a relatively new technology, from the MIT servers to the Question and Answer format used by Clinton and Bush on Prodigy, mark a watershed in the American political process. The flow is just a trickle now but it has the potential to grow to a very respectably sized stream, one that influences the national political landscape and carves out its own channel. I have very high hopes that the tentative beginnings that were evident in the use of computer mediated communication in the Clinton/Gore campaign, coupled with the apparent commitment of the Clinton administration to its continuing use, will eventually yield a whole new method to get people reconnected to their government. Computer mediated communication is an interactive media and there are countless issues that need attention and that pose potential dangers. However, because it requires something from those that use it, I hope that it will counteract some of the passivity that television has induced in us. Television has caused massive changes in many areas of our cultural and political life. I personally feel that it is a technology that we did not assimilate well; rather, it assimilated us. The incorporation of computer mediated communication into our political processes is something that is going to continue to expand. It should be regarded vigilantly and we should attempt to ensure its role as a technological "servant". It can be a technology that can serve us well in that it promotes the attributes of good citizenship in a democracy: participation, information and communication. I hope that CLINTON will be regarded as an example of one way to work toward those goals. The citizens of our list community USE this new technology to conduct discussions that retain some old-fashioned but very serviceable values: respect for diversity of opinion; the willingness to try to listen and learn from each other; the courage to share something of ourselves and our lives with each other. There are quite a few CLINTON subscribers that are very open about their experiences. There are a number that willingly respond to requests for information or help in locating information resources. We are fortunate in having many entertaining, well-spoken writers. We have a few, exceptionally articulate writers whose abilities far exceed anything usually seen on discussion lists. It has been my privilege to 'get to know' them. It has been my privilege to be in on the beginning. It has been my privilege to share in the fun. You can join the fun, too. To subscribe to CLINTON send the following interactive message to LISTSERV@MARIST SUB CLINTON YOURFIRSTNAME YOURLASTNAME. From Internet addresses send an email message in the following form: To: listserv@vm.marist.edu ---------------------------- sub clinton yourfirstname yourlastname Substitute your own name for yourfirstname yourlastname. If you experience problems with these instructions, please consult your local site administrators for instructions that maybe specific to your location. ---------------------------------------------------------------- BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: I am a native Arkansan who has lived for the past 28 years in New York's Hudson Valley region. I attended the University of Missouri as an English major in the 1960s but became a computer programmer when I went through the fabled post-family work-force re-entry. I am a programmer/analyst at Marist College with primary responsibility for the Financial Aid area of our Administrative computing system. I'm married to a retired IBM engineer and my husband, Gus, and I have one son, Matthew, who is a lawyer in New York City. ------------------------------------------------------------------ Lee Sakkas Programmer/Analyst Marist College Computer Center Bitnet: URLS@MARISTC or URLS@MARIST Poughkeepsie, NY 12601 Phone: (914) 575-3000 xts. 2533 or 3252 Processor: IBM 3090-200E Operating System: MVS/ESA 3.1 w/CICS 3.2 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Interpersonal Computing and Technology: An Electronic Journal for the 21st Century Copyright 1993 Georgetown University. Copyright of individual articles in this publication is retained by the individual authors. Copyright of the compilation as a whole is held by Georgetown University. It is asked that any republication of this article state that the article was first published in IPCT-J. Contributions to IPCT-J can be submitted by electronic mail in APA style to: Gerald Phillips, Editor IPCT-J GMP3@PSUVM.PSU.EDU