Michael Rovito's up close and personal encounter with the new media has been eye opening to say the least for those of us who know him well as a friend, co-worker, researcher, scholar, and mentor to high school students.  We have kidded him all week long that among the most unlikely bits of the stories surrounding his brief exchange with Sarah Palin last weekend was the fact that he was identified as a student because he was wearing a Temple University T-shirt due to having attended the Temple-Western Michigan homecoming game at the Link with his family. His reflections on the experiences of the past week are shared in a Huffington Post interview with Brett Ashley McKenzie that was published earlier today.

Governor Palin's choice to address the question he lobbed to her at Tony Luke's has provoked a series of issues for us to reflect upon as well. As a community of scholars, we at ITSRG seek to critically analyze the relationships among web 2.0 and geographic information technologies and digital inclusion and civic engagement concerns. The 15 second sound bite caught on camera has been the proverbial stone in the pond to cast a thousand ripples of impact across the various social, political and public networks of all of the stakeholders captured in the clip, not the least of which is the voting public itself in this election season.

Palin's sphere of impacts stems directly from her status as the number two person on the McCain presidential campaign ticket. Most of the mainstream media attention has focused on examining the content of her answer against prior policy statements of McCain himself. We know this because media attention has made public McCain's responses to reiterated versions of Rovito's original questions.

We perceive that the public at large is paying attention due to the voluminous blogosphere reactions expressed as posts, comments to posts, links, and views of Youtube videos related to the exchange.  We also have a perspective that reactions on the ground at Temple are ones of support and pride because one of our own had the temerity to question a candidate and agree to go on the record with his motivations for doing so. We are intrigued about what is happening between those two spheres; however, we are simply having difficulty assessing it because of our social proximity to the actual event.

Smaller ripple effects relate to the content of Rovito's questions as opposed to Palin's responses.  Michael Dorn has pointed out in his comments to our prior post that one of the least examined issues related to the Palin-Rovito exchange is how difficult it is for academic geographers, much less the voting public, to learn facts and access discourse about what is happening on the ground in Wasiristan.

Philadelphians are also trying to make sense of this moment in the recent political spotlight at the unlikely setting of Tony Luke's precisely because it is one of the few geographic locales where Palin has been relatively unguarded in her dealings with the public. At ITSRG, we have taken note of the curious geographic scale jumping involved in both the prior circumstances and aftermath of the 15 second interaction.

We have encountered cynical commentary suggesting that Palin's handlers may have assessed that South Philly would be a pocket of the city where residents sympathetic to her viewpoints as well as life story could be found. If that was the case, a quick glance at the Huffington Post election campaign donations map might have provoked a different conclusion, since the City of Philadelphia as a whole and its small South Philadelphia contingency of campaign donating "Joe Sixpacks" reads mostly blue.

Maybe the idea was to visit an "authentic" Philadelphia establishment in order to connect with the local culture. Tony Luke's is one of a multitude of must-go-to Philly destinations for visitors and tourists. Its geographic proximity to the stadiums makes it a particular favorite for event attendees.

The role that new media is playing in connecting - as well as disconnecting - local and national geographies is not yet well understood or theorized. Perhaps because of this, the degree to which the decentralization of information flows can reshape the dynamics of political discourse at the aggregate scale was unanticipated as well by the campaign.
 
Whatever the geographic thinking was or was not in the choice to stump at Tony Luke's last weekend, one thing has emerged since then. The word "gotcha" has become inextricably linked to the campaign rhetoric. Along with this has been an effort to delegitimize information entered into public discourse through so called gotcha journalism and journalists, gotcha questions and questioners,  gotcha voters and gotcha  derived content including gotcha geography.

Michele Masucci
Director, ITSRG
Temple University
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Update 10/06/2008

Michael's new blog is called Rovito Review - it can be found here.

Update 10/05/2008

Rumproast comments on Rovito Huffpo interview; plans podcast interview on Wednesday, 10/8/09. Read more here.

On Saturday, 10/04/2008, the California Democratic Party implemented an Ask Sarah Palin action, in which a live, streaming billboard fed Twitter and text messages in real time at a Palin campaign rally in Los Angeles. Messages were fed live throughout the event; a prerecorded video of the action can be found here. The action was reported by ireport here.