Daily Kos Research Paper

“The Great Orange Satan”and Collective Norms:

An ethnographic study of the Daily Kos diarist community Evan HallDaily Kos:http://dailykos.com/Digital Hub:http://evanhallj676.blogspot.com/1. Delicious bookmarks page2. Blog posts and virtual tour3. Selected audio and video sidebar

Introduction

In the midst of his Internet-fueled 2004 presidential primary campaign, Democrat Howard Dean madethe prescient assertion that, "This party's strength does not come from consultants down. It comes from thegrassroots up." Though his bid for the nomination collapsed shortly thereafter, Dean’s meteoric rise neverthelessheralded a breakthrough in online politics and the growing power of the netroots that would later propel him tothe Democratic National Committee Chair in 2005. The netroots fused grassroots activism with web-baseddemocratic communities committed to organizing party machinery for electoral victory. Furthermore, thesupport of this new online populist movement encouraged candidates to diverge from the Democratic Party line,promoting a progressive ideology and a shift toward the left in the national debate.

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Perhaps more than any other site at the time, the collaborative blog Daily Kos set the mark as an early trailblazer in web-style democracy, and continues to be upheld as an example of how a political community canassemble online as a united coalition. The site championed Dean and continued to carry on his opposition to theIraq war when he dropped out of the race. Moreover, Daily Kos established itself as a prominent gathering placefor disenchanted Democrats during the Bush era to debate policy positions, raise money for promising politicians or recruit volunteers, and develop strategies for defeating Republican candidates.

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Markos “Kos” Moulitsas Zuniga started Daily Kos in 2002 as an experimental online collective withpolitical aims. In the years since, his blog became enormously popular and spawned numerous imitators, liberalor otherwise. Moulitsas explains in the site’s “About” page that he conceived Daily Kos during “those dark days when an oppressive and war-crazed administration suppressed all dissent as unpatriotic and treasonous.” A veteran of the U.S. Army, Moulitsas “was offended that the freedoms he pledged his life for were so carelessly being tossed aside by the reckless and destructive Republican administration.”

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This desire for openness andinformed opposition led to Daily Kos’ architecture, which allows anyone with a valid e-mail address to registerand post “diaries”—daily blog entries—as well as comment on other users’ posts and responses. As it emerged from its infancy, Daily Kos became increasingly involved in a watchdog role: drawing attention to and holding accountable commentators and reporters displaying conservative bias, as well asbreaking stories overlooked by the mainstream media. For example, when the Washington Post, in order to

remain “objective,” continually reported the Republican Party’s claim that infamous lobbyist Jack Abramoff made donations to Democrats in addition to the GOP, Kos members collected data and organized a responsethat proved Abramoff had worked primarily for Republicans.

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The site remains influential among Democrats;politicians like Barack Obama and former President Jimmy Carter have posted diary entries on the site, and itsmembers hold an annual convention that attracts party elite. Kos was also an early mobilizing force behindObama’s 2008 campaign; some alleged overenthusiastic in its sniping at Hillary Clinton during the primaries.

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Whether Daily Kos’ clout in the liberal blogosphere and the solidarity it built around electing PresidentObama will continue to hold with an opposition weakened and disoriented by heavy losses in the 2008 Electionremains to be seen. Already, however, there are signs that the dwindling momentum may be starting to splinterthe community. Site traffic, which spiked to several million daily visitors in the months leading up to the 2008Presidential Election, has slackened considerably following President Obama’s inauguration in January.Currently, visits to the site hover around 800,000 per day. More popular mainstream blogs like The HuffingtonPost have surpassed Daily Kos, but the site still boasts more than 100,000 registered users (about 1,000 of whomare active participants), and over 4 to 6 million weekly page views.

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Given these threats to the political efficacy and legitimacy of the Daily Kos community, it’s illuminating to observe how the site is working to preserve its grassroots activism and influence over the Democratic Party through informal community norms and majority control—and whether it can sustain this consensus without aclearly defined enemy. Although Daily Kos frames itself as a bottom-up, netroots community, the site possessesan embedded hierarchy that privileges certain users over others. In addition, the site’s technological structure isbased on a very democratic, social control as an open-invite group blog, but there are several layers of formal andinformal filtering, both by users and a handful of contributing editors, with Moulitsas having the final say.Daily Kos’ overarching goal seems to be to provide a forum for partisans of similar disposition to gainpolitically advantageous information, analysis, and debate. Thus, I was interested in studying how norms, modesof control, and filtering work to maintain unity of party and message in this activist community. My ethnographic research was primarily conducted through observation and textual analysis of members’ diary entries, comments, and general trends and events that have shed light on Daily Kos’ standards and mechanisms