During the last four years, ITSRG has sponsored the BITS Program, an after school and summer intensive program aimed at increasing information technology skills among students enrolled in local public high schools. The program has involved over 400 high school students and reached out to their families across North Philadelphia to raise community technology skills and improve preparedness of students to pursue their educational aims. We focus particularly on broadening participation among underrepresented youth in science, technology, engineering and math - so called STEM fields of study.

Today, Barack Obama’s campaign held a rally at Progress Plaza, located in North Philadelphia - next door to ITSRG’s location on Temple University’s Main Campus. Our recent opening of the ITSRG Workroom, a community-university computer technology learning space located in University Services Building at the corner of Broad and Oxford Streets, is the culmination of our long effort to situate our community outreach and collaborative programs in a dedicated lab on Temple University’s campus. We have aimed to create a spot where students from the surrounding neighborhoods can join with Temple students and faculty in the exploration of the local community, gain an appreciation of the geographer’s eye for learning about people and places, and build information technology and geographic analysis skills through hands on learning activities that are fun to engage.

Our students have been studying Progress Plaza throughout these past four years. They have examined it in the context of the Charles Blockson-inspired program to demarkate sites of importance in the African American experience throughout Philadelphia. They have examined it in terms of its role in supporting community health because of the dental and chiropractic community services that are located at the shopping center. They have considered the magnitude of the loss of the neighborhood’s only supermarket ten years ago and its long term impacts on community nutritional needs and food security concerns. They have anticipated, along with the whole ITSRG staff, the promise of the return of a new grocery store. They have examined the use of Progress Plaza’s ramps to provide accessibility for wheelchair users to the shops and services and thus fostered an understanding of how built environments can shape social inclusion in the local economy. They have tested the availability of wireless Internet services through Philadelphia’s free wi-fi available through Wireless Philadelphia at Progess Plaza, concluding that the wall along Broad Street is not a bad spot from which to use an Ipod Touch!

As ITSRG begins recruitment for BITS 2008, we observe the dramatic changes that are occuring at this historic hub of local economic development in North Philadelphia. Who could have imagined when we began teaching students from the community how to take digital photos, create blogs, make maps using web applications, and use collaborative technologies to share their work with each other that this spot would be a backdrop in a presidential election of unprecidented historic proportions four years later? The event may be momentary, but the symbolism at this historic site founded by Leon Sullivan forty years ago will resonate in this community’s memories for years to come. Maybe that is why people stood in a half-mile long line beginning at 6:00 am this morning to catch a glimpse and be a part of the moment.

Michele Masucci, Director - ITSRG
Temple University

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.

ITSRG Twitter followers are no doubt aware that we have been tracking the rapidly growing Internet and Mainstream Media (MSM) story of our Graduate Fellow Michael Rovito's exchange with GOP Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin at Tony Luke's in South Philadelphia this past weekend. It seems clear from the video captured of the Rovito-Palin exchange over US strategic interests in and around Pakistan that neither she nor her handlers anticipated that folks in South Philly would have the sophistication to be concerned and conversant about their campaign's foreign policy positions.

The Rovito-Palin exchange, now infamously referred to in the blogosphere as the Cheesesteak Gaffe, is of interest to the information technology and geographic blogging communities. We noticed that the entire exchange was captured and recaptured by others in the crowd on cell phone cameras. The end of the video footage shows Governor Palin helping one of those cell phone users to verify her identity to the conversational partner with whom he was speaking. We have all done it - we see something, someone, some place of great interest and immediately pull out our mobile devices and contact members of our social network to let them in on our mini adventures and encounters through sharing stories, photos, email messages and GPS-derived locations on-the-fly. This epoch decentralization of the technologies used to stay connected with our social networks and to exchange digital information illustrates the importance of understanding not only the viral way in which information is shared, but also the proxy arrangements that are embedded within those information exchanges.

That the actual questions posed to Palin by Rovito were so quintessentially geographic in nature highlights the importance for IT and geographic educators, scholars and policy makers to come to terms with the implications of the hyper-googled earth we live on. This exchange illustrates that at any time, in any place information can be brought to bear on issues and problems in real time. The explosion of news attention to the Cheesesteak Gaffe illustrates further that the speed of traveling information often obliterates the ability to interpret context. 48 hours after the exchange, political analysts like Michael Smerconish are conducting interviews with Michael Rovito  to gain a sense of why he asked those specific questions. That George Stephanopoulos drew from the exchange of a citizen's questions directed towards Palin on This Week to probe McCain further about his policy stance on tracking terrorists between Afghanistan, Waziristan and Pakistan is a breathtaking sea change in not only how journalism is implemented but also in how information is exchanged.

This is a story that started at the grass roots and was promoted via the internet, followed by the release of video footage taken by a CNN reporter. It is precisely because of the cell phones of ordinary people being put into use to share their excitement of a rare sighting and close proximity to Palin with friends and family that the story broke before the video footage was aired. During Michael Rovito's interview with Smerconish he reveals that he did not have time to digest the meaning of her responses until after the entire exchange was concluded. Only then did he fully grasp that he caught her on the record agreeing with Obama's position on Afghanistan. The MSM storm followed the citizen use of IT, which collapsed the geographic scales, boundaries, and protocols that accompany information flows. McCain's response has been to sequester Palin once again as the only answer to controlling the speed and power of information on the ground. His campaign failed to effectively harness social media when it opted out of the use of Twitter during the primaries; and now the strategy to geographically isolate Palin fails to recognize that the electronic footprint has already kicked up crazy amounts digital dust that cannot be contained.

Michele Masucci, Director - ITSRG
Temple University

Update: 9/30/08: Related Blog posts

Last night, Katie Couric interviewed McCain and Palin, questioning them about their reaction to Rovito's questions of Palin; McCain calls Rovito a journalist involved in Gotcha politics. Then Couric reminds him that Rovito is a citizen. Here are reactions; the video of the Couric interview is embedded throughout these posts.

Read Rumproast's review of the Nguyen CNN interview of Rovito, in which she questions him twice about whether or not he engaged in "gotcha" journalism (he did not, he is a graduate student who works as a research fellow of ITSRG), here.

Michael was interviewed by CNN, see report here.

Michael was interviewed by Fox 29, see report here.

The Huffington Post discussed the gotcha comments of McCain and Palin with Couric here.

Rumproast points out that Rovito seemed more knowledgeable about current global politics than Palin. Read more here.

BL Rag also comments on the audacity of blaming a citizen for asking a direct question of a candidate; somewhat ironic given McCain's desire for town hall style debates. Read more here.