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.

Over the past year, various Web 2.0 technology platforms have begun to provide its users with the ability to connect content they have created with a location, thus enabling not only keyword searches but location-based searches.   This experience has been further enhanced through geoRSS feeds and geotags which integrate technologies such as Twitter and Flickr with online mapping sites such as Google and Yahoo Maps.

Never before have citizen cartographers had such easy-to-use tools at their disposal to create meaningful maps that reflect not only the way they perceive their environments. Additionally, citizen cartographers are now able to share with others both inside and outside of their communities a much more nuanced view of their world through sight and sound.  In short, the map is in the hands of the masses and the opportunities for gaining new insight into place and space have never been more exciting. Further, the ever growing Web 2.0 technologies situated around online maps have  enabled people to develop online communities based on a share interested in geography and have brought to the forefront of the importance of understanding geography.

Citizen cartographers have used these new technologies to become empowered in times of crisis,  banding together to use online mapping tools and associated Web 2.0 content as a portal to organizing vast amounts of information from otherwise isolated areas. The 2007 California wildfires saw citizen cartographers taking their on-the-ground experience with the fires and sharing it virtually through Twitter, photo-sharing, and Youtube to the outside world as well as those isolated by the fires in their own communities. The 2008 Floods in the Midwest have seen the power of the map in a time of crisis, with organizations like the Red Cross using these Web 2.0 and mapping tools to send and receive information in the flood affected areas.

This growing movement shows the power of grassroots mapping to provide both a micro and macro experience of a vast crisis that assists not only neighbors but increases the knowledge base of those responding to the natural disaster.It is this grassroots effort coupled with technologies that hold promise for developing new and meaningful ways to respond to large scale crisis. It also serves to refocus the lenses of the discipline of geography and provides a unique opportunity to learn from and critically engage this exploding technology.

Geographers have much to offer in this new space of citizen cartography. As these technologies grow and becomes more and more ubiquitous there are substantial questions we must ask.

While we have seen an explosion of citizen cartographers actively contributing to grassroots mapping there is also a different map that is emerging that we must engage and critique. As web technologies enable and encourage location-based tagging and location-based searches,  we must begin to question and understand the long-term consequences of the electronic footprint being created by and about individuals, both intentional and unintentional.

How is the online electronic footprint becoming the unintentional electronic map, especially as  the roll-out of technologies that take advantage of GPS-enabled mobile phones  make tagging location seamless and more and more invisible to the user? How will governments and industry seek to use these electronic maps in the future? What are the ultimate implications for the growing level of transparency both intentional and unintentional?

Finally, an important tenet of web 2.0 is user-generated content which requires a level of computer literacy and technology access that vast sections of the population still lack. Will the those citizen cartographers who map and describe their own communities bring attention and resources their way for simply placing it on the map? Will communities forfeit resources and lose even more visibility in an online world because they lack the resources necessary to reestablish their communities on the virtual map? These are questions are where geographers have much to offer citizen cartographers.

Caroline Guigar
Temple University
June 30, 2008

ITSRG's Executive Director Dr. Masucci will present the lessons learned  from running a summer intensive and after-school program for Philadelphia area high school students called BITS, funded by the National Science Foundation.

During the past four years the Information Technology and Society Research Group of Temple University has the implemented an NSF-ITEST program called BITS. BITS aims to raise information and communication technologies (ICT) skills among high school students enrolled in the School District of Philadelphia.

The program provided a context for social action research that critically interrogated basic assumptions about the ways in which information and communication technologies (ICT) intersect with people's agency in constructing the geographies of daily life. One of the persistent issues encountered in the implementation of BITS is the highly prevalent concern among participants related to safety and the difficulties of managing transportation logistics in daily life. These challenges were interconnected with virtually every theme students found of interest, including health, nutrition, access to grocery stores, access to employment opportunities, and perceptions of local environmental quality.

We considered how student construction of place understanding was related to concerns raised about health and safety. As a result we invested heavily in using web 2.0 tools to enhance their interactive understanding of other geographic locales (including virtual places), communication skills and social organizing strategies for connecting people and places. This paper considers the implications of web 2.0 is shaping as well as reinforcing place experience among this group of students. It also considers the implications of social action research methods as a central component in shaping place experience among the students. Originally Posted on 4/15/08.

Caroline Guigar
Temple University