Patrick to Increase Electronic Contact With Voters

If I tell less technologically savvy people I have a blog, I get a puzzled look as if I was describing some sort of gastric complaint.

If I tell my students I have a blog, they give me a look that says "What's wrong with you?" They think I must be spending my life on MySpace and posting pictures of wild parties (which I don't have) and baring inner soul to anyone bored enough to read about it.

There are millions of blogs out there today, but there also are millions of people who don't know a blog from an uncordial release of gas from the digestive track. To my chagrin, among the technologically unlettered is our governor Deval Patrick.

At least he's honest about it. Podcasts may be passe, but the promise of a government blog with interactivity shows, as the State House News Service says, real promise.

By Craig Sandler
STATE HOUSE NEWS SERVICE
STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, JAN. 25, 2007

Gov. Deval Patrick this week said he was so old-school with technology he had trouble lighting a fire in his office fireplace. Given that, he may not have realized podcasts are a bit behind the times as well.

That's not meant to be a criticism - there were a couple of steps forward taken when Patrick told the Mass Tech Leadership Council he'll start podcasting this week, and hopes to "create a state blog, in effect, so that people can talk to us and talk to each other as well."

Anything that augments the Web presence of Massachusetts state government, quite laggardly and sparse compared to other states, is in fact progress. And podcasts do exploit the exciting, evolving dynamic of New Media, where the go-betweens (newspapers, broadcast stations, etc.) are dispensed with, and communicators speak directly to their audience without the inevitable, occasionally intentional, bias and inaccuracy of media filters.

But at the same time, podcasts are extremely Web 1.0, in that they use the old one-way model of communication. They are just another Web advertisement, really, or the president's weekly radio address viewed with Quicktime or Media Player. You download the video (and you don't need an ipod), and passively absorb whatever the posting entity chooses to dish out. Web 2.0 is about exploring the possibilities of allowing every to join in - which, let us just add here, is the premise behind Democracy 0.0.

That's why the truly eye-catching part of Patrick's speech was the section in which he suggested his administration will soon begin a true blog, in which he and other administrators share their thinking and experiences in office, and citizens are invite to respond, suggest, debate. That idea is just as fraught with uncertainty, complexity and promise as the rest of the infinite Internet. What happens when Howie Carr calls on his listeners to log on and blog in?

The drunks and overt racists are barred from Carr's show and others, and the mass.gov blog would no doubt operate with the same mediation. But what happens when someone asks, cogently, why Patrick promised property tax relief and an increase in local aid and full-day kindergarten and more police, and then didn't deliver? What happens when the Big Dig kills someone else? What happens when people don't find the answers good enough? Or, more to the point - what happens when an important, high-stakes, high-visibility policy isn't working as promised, as is precisely the case on the state's new health care law?

We may be broke, but some progress is being made. And instead of handsoffish, standoffish, presidential candidate Mitt Romney, we have a governor who is going to try something that hasn't been done since Mike Dukakis: govern.

--Mb