- Feb 2016
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quod.lib.umich.edu quod.lib.umich.edu
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Procedural arguments in the form of phone-banking scripts were distributed by the campaign, but Obama volunteers were not rigid, unwavering machines. They did not always execute the campaign’s code, or at least not in the way that we normally imagine the process of execution.
This is a fascinating application of Bitzer through Roundtree's expansion. The campaign understood the ways that successful interactions don't exist waiting to be discovered, they must be engineered by situational awareness, finding a relative understanding between the two who conversed, regardless of their relative positions. That's the strength of a volunteer on the ground.
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Rather than making it possible for players to “embody political positions and engage in political actions that many will never have previously experienced,” most contemporary political games are little more than gimmicks.
The Redistricting Game is a particular case, but there's a whole other discipline of (what mass comm. students generally refer to as) news games that do precisely this.
Minnesota Public Radio and Marketplace built such a game a few years back called Budget Hero (since removed).
As Roundtree (previously described) stated, we can't use the data output from the simulation to forecast or reflect the validity of those procedures in the real world -- the simplifying assumptions made are large and numerous -- the game itself is made to convey the complexity of making political decisions. If it succeeds in that way, I'd say it's hardly a "gimmick."
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Galloway argues that though one cannot oppose protocol (just as one cannot oppose gravity), political action is indeed possible in spaces of protocological control, and he presents possibilities for acting within networks, such as hacking, tactical media, and Internet art.
This brings to mind Burke (referencing Malinowski, p. 65 of "A Rhetoric of Motives"), and the idea of a bureaucratic rhetoric.
This author's reading of Galloway seems to indicate that a protocol (or, perhaps, more broadly, a bureaucracy) sets some immobile boundaries on the kind of communication that can take place in a space.
It seems like this is distinct from what was previously described as procedural rhetoric, in that protocol pre-exists procedure.
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This is very similar to the way Roundtree's understanding of a simulation's message works (particularly as outlined on page 11). The way a process is described prescribes the sorts of things one can do with that process. Clearly, this builds on the way a process was originally discovered, defined, and passed on to others.
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