REPLY TO THOMAS

Thomas Nephew responded to my post below with a typically thoughtful post, here. Here are some thoughts that run the risk of being banal, silly, or pedantic (take your pick).

If you're still reading, imagine the following argument:

Person D said statement S

Statement S is indicative of disposition H

Person D has disposition H

Person D is a member of class L

Members of class L have disposition H

Now imagine a political marketing campaign that is designed to reinforce and disseminate the idea expressed in line 5: “Members of class L have attribute H.” The existence of such a campaign gives a premium to the discovery of statements that can take the form found in the first line. I think that you can’t understand any actual example of the publication and dissemination of such arguments without understanding the dynamics of the political marketing campaign itself. By describing these dynamics, Stoller’s piece helps to provide the background context.

Now imagine a hypothetical empirical research program that attempts to categorize the typical kinds of arguments that are made on the web on any given stretch of time. Let’s call such arguments FAE’s, for “Fundamental Attribution Errors” (not to stack the deck or anything!) I would bet that FAE’s make up a large proportion of all arguments found in political blog postings. 15%? 25%? An additional prediction: the proportion of FAE’s will go up during the election season, for two reasons. First, circulating FAE’s is part of the branding effort of both campaigns. Second, as Ken Mehlman has noted recently, the political harnessing of blogs in a particular way -- top-down and focused on daily talking points -- is part of the Bush campaign. Particular FAE’s are likely to be circulated with increasing vigor. One might make the same point about the Kerry campaign, although my sense is that there are decentralizing forces at work on the Dem side to a greater degree than among the Bush / Cheney folks. I could be wrong, though.

As a side note, the same form of argument has been used by the Bush campaign in the context of fake “examinations” of Kerry’s voting record:

Candidate K cast vote C

Vote C is indicative of disposition U

Candidate K has disposition U

It’s pretty easy to unmask the errors in these kinds of statements, both of logic and of fact. Stoller’s piece helps to point out the errors by describing the process of abstraction that the web helps to create and that the political campaigns are helping to multiply on a massive scale. But the dilemma is this: in giving attention to such claims, you’re also part of the process of dissemination (in much the same way as you are part of a branding effort if you wear a Nike shirt while playing basketball). I hate being taken for a sucker, so I try to be careful about my participation in these kinds of communications strategies, although I admit that I’d much rather be a part of them for my side than for the other side.

As a side note, the best blog for descriptions of political branding campaigns is Seeing the Forest. Many of the things that I say above are inspired by posts on that site. Check it out.