Hynes2012
This section is for blog posts related to my 2012 run for State Representative in the 114th Assembly District of Connecticut.
Social Media and Swinging Votes
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 08/22/2012 - 12:11Recently, a friend shared an Op-Ed on Mashable entitled, Why Social Media Can’t Win Swing Votes. The title caught my attention, so I clicked on the link to see what the author had to say. Unfortunately, the title seems misleading and a better title might be, "Why Facebook Ads won't are unlikely to swing enough votes in the Presidential Election to make a difference".
It seems as if the Op-Ed makes a few significant mistakes. First, it seems to confuse social media with Facebook advertising. Social media is really about engaging people in conversations. An ad on Facebook might draw someone into the conversation, but most likely it won't. Some of the people who are starting to turn away from Facebook ads are probably people who haven't grasped the importance of engagement yet and are disappointed that their ads have been ineffective.
This continues on with the Op-Ed's discussion about numbers of followers. This isn't an especially compelling metric either. The bigger question is, how much are links to articles, videos or other content being retweeted.
The other big failure of the article is that it focuses on the Presidential race. Just about everyone knows who Obama and Romney are. There are a lot of people in my district that don't know who i am, or who my incumbent opponent is.
The article also seems to focus on elections as an either-or type decision. Either a person votes for one candidate or another. That is perhaps the biggest problem with electoral politics today, and a place where social media has the biggest potential to make a difference. As a nation, we need to move away from either-or thinking. We need to move away from thinking that electoral politics is just about which candidate you select in the voting booth.
Social Media is about conversations, and politics should be as well. How do you get people to think a little more deeply about the issues we as a people face? It is about moving people along a spectrum of involvement; getting the unregistered registered, getting the registered to vote, getting voters to become more involved in campaigns as volunteers or donors, and getting people who have been active in others campaigns to consider running for office themselves.
Social media, meeting people where they are, has a great ability to help with that. Or, it can simply be another advertising platform in a beauty contest of brands. In that role, the author of the Op-Ed is right. Let's not get stuck with that sort of social media.
Woodbridge 2012 U.S. Senate Primary Results
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/17/2012 - 06:24On Tuesday, 380 Republicans and 491 Democrats voted in Woodbridge. On the Republican side, Linda McMahon beat Chris Shays 231 to 149 votes. On the Democratic side, Chris Murphy defeated Susan Bysiewicz with 395 votes to her 96 votes. If the story ended there, it would be a very short blog post. However, there are little tidbits here and there that make the story more interesting.
I put up signs for Chris Murphy and spoke with voters early in the morning before work, and in the evening after work. I also had a good discussion with Republicans that were supporting Chris Shays. We shared a common concern about the low turnout, but had different views about how best to address it. One Republican even suggested that perhaps too many people had the right to vote, noting that the founding fathers limited voting to male land owners. He noted that black men received the right to vote before women did.
We can increase the percentage of voters turning out to vote different ways. One is to increase the numerator, another is to decrease the denominator. I would rather see more people vote.
One item of interest to me was the details on the wall about voting turnout. Every hour, the poll workers in Woodbridge would update sheets on the wall about how many people voted. From this, you could find out interesting information, like that 37% of the voters came in the last three hours.
Since I am running for State Representative in the 114th Assembly District which includes all of Woodbridge, as well as parts of Derby and Orange, I headed over to the other polling places in the district to see what was going on as I think about poll standing in November. I looked for a similar list of how many voters had shown up by hour in these other locations. No such list was available.
In Derby, people asked why I would want such information and only reluctantly gave me details. In Orange, one of the poll workers casually provided me an approximate number. It was disappointing and perhaps contributed to the poor showings in Orange and Derby.
More municipalities should follow the example of Woodbridge and make voter turnout information throughout the day much more available.
Digital Identity Formation: Cyborgs, Triberr and Empire Avenue
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 08/13/2012 - 06:21Recently, I watched the YouTube video, We are all cyborgs now
It is a thought provoking video which I highly recommend. On Facebook, I asked what this means for the political process. Perhaps I'll write a blog post exploring this a bit later. Today, I want to explore the idea of digital identity. All of our actions online live a digital footprint, they paint a digital picture of who we are. This picture may, or may not, correspond nicely with our analog identity. We may be less inhibited online and post things that we wouldn't normally say or do in our analog lives. We may re-post things for different reasons, which at times may be hard to fathom.
A couple sites that encourage this sort of behavior are Triberr and Empire Avenue. With Triberr, you join tribes of like minded people, promoting their blog posts with the expectation that they will promote your blog posts. If you look throughout my twitter stream, you'll see links to various blog posts that I've shared. They are fairly easy to identify, the title of the blog post, a link, and then a reference to the twitter handle of the person I got the post from on Triberr. Many of the triberr posts are about social media, although some are health care related. It is a reflection of the tribes I'm part of. It is also a reflection of which posts I find most interesting or think my followers on Twitter will find most interesting.
Empire Avenue is a bit different. This is a game, where you essentially score points for social media activity. You can get extra points for doing specific social media actions, called missions. These missions may be to share someone's blog post, retweet something, like a lot of posts on someone's Facebook, recommend them on Klout, or similar tasks. I do a handful of these tasks, but I've not done a lot of them because the value of the points usually isn't worth the impact on my digital identity and I'm not sure how interested my friends, fans, followers, or other social media connections would be in the results of these various tasks.
There is a lot more to think about from the video about the impact of being cyborgs now. Hopefully, I'll find moments away from campaigning to explore more of these, especially as they relate to the intersection of being a cyborg and a candidate.
"What Kind of Country Do We Want to Be?"
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 08/11/2012 - 10:57This morning, as I did my weekly dump run, I listened to the car radio to hear Congressman Paul Ryan accept Mitt Romney's invitation to be his running mate. In his acceptance speech, Congressman Ryan asked, what sort of country do we want to be? I think that is the core question, and one that I've been thinking a lot about recently.
A couple weeks ago, I spent a weekend camping out at a folk music festival. I spent several days focusing on beauty and compassion for those around me. I listened to people sing about the struggles of living a meaningful life.
The following week back in Connecticut, after the festival, I learned that two friends had lost their parents. One friend's father died, another friend's mother died. I spent time reflecting on life, death, and listening to music of remembrance. This was music streaming over the computer, a bit different from the Falcon Ridge experience, but with some commonality.
I've written blog posts in the past remembering friends and family that have died, and I thought, "how do I want to be remembered?" I thought about eulogies I've listened to. The eulogies have not been about how much money a person made, how successful they were, or how many businesses they created. They have been about how much compassion the person showed; how much kindness.
At work, in the community garden next to my office, a young mother put up a memorial for her two year old son who recently died of cancer. Her grief is heart wrenching and I wove some of my experiences into a work blog post. Those who can afford to spend $50 million dollars running for U.S. Senate, can also afford the best health care in the world, but for too many of us, quality health care in an inaccessible luxury. Did the young boy that just died get the best health care in the world? Does his mother have access to the best health care as she deals with her grief? Our country, and all of us, have a responsibility to those less fortunate than ourselves. That is the kind of country we should be wanting to be.
At the end of that week, I went to BlogHer in New York City. The Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Nwando Olayiwola, at the health center where I work is a spokesperson for Text4Baby, a wonderful program helping expectant mothers through their pregnancies. It is a simple and inexpensive program bringing better health outcomes. Joining Dr. Nwando was the head of Save the Children and a few other notable speakers. The panel, "The state of the world’s mothers: working together to save & improve lives", was sponsored by Johnson & Johnson. Just as we as a nation have social responsibilities, so do corporations, and it was good to see Johnson & Johnson taking up some of their social responsibility.
This week has been National Health Center Week, and Wednesday was National Healthcare for the Homeless day. Our health center sponsored a screening of "Give Me a Shot of Anything". It is a powerful film about an organization in Boston that provides medical care for the homeless. The movie painted a picture of the homeless; veterans, college graduates struck down by bad luck, people really not that different than you or I. As the old saying goes, there but for the grace of God go I.
At one point in the movie, a homeless man looks at the camera and points at the doctor who has been out on the streets with the homeless. He says, "He cares." Simple. Heartfelt. As I watched this I thought, how many politicians would people say that about with the same sort of conviction. Few, if any, I imagine.
I can understand some of that. I've been busy trying to raise money for my campaign and get signatures to appear on a second line on the ballot. I've been busy filling out questionnaires in an effort to get endorsements. I haven't gotten as much time as I'd like to just be with people, finding out what they need, and if there are ways I can help them.
Now some of my conservative friends may find this objectionable. They may say, we shouldn't be teaching people to rely on others. That, I believe is the fundamental issue. Are we all in this together? Should we be helping one another out, or do we want a dog eat dog world where people are more interested in the size of a person's bank account when they die, than in the good that they have done?
What Kind of Country Do We Want to Be?
Dealing with Fear and Anger
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 08/05/2012 - 21:03There is something seriously wrong with country, with our world. This thought may come to people's minds when they read about unemployment, as they ponder the latest heat wave, or, today, think about a shooting in Wisconsin. Our emotions get further stirred up as we watch the news on TV, read the news online, or see what our friends are posting in social media. It is amplified when it touches close to home like when a friend struggles because of poor health or unemployment.
I'm sitting in my living room as a storm front rolls through. I've been reading various material online about the shooting in Wisconsin. Some people try to explain it in terms of people who don't know the difference between a Sikh and a Sheikh, as if shooting one and not the other is okay. The words of John Donne come back to me:
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
It doesn't matter if the person who died is Sikh, Sheikh, father or son, each man's death diminishes me.
People will argue about gun control, better access to mental health, politicizing tragedies, and a million other topics, but it feels like these really miss the point.
We all get angry. We all get frustrated. We all try to find ways to deal with these feelings. Some of us may post mean comments on blogs. Some of us my flip off a driver who cuts us off, or we may be the ones cutting off other people.
We may look at people as different from ourselves, as 'other'. We may place our fears and angers in others and, to use the words of some of my psychologist friends, try to 'kill off' those whom we've placed our fears and angers in. In horrible cases, this desire to kill off our fears and angers moves from a psychological analogy to a physical tragedy.
Meanwhile, those of us abhorred by the shootings view the shooters as the others. We may want them killed off with the death penalty and we try to ignore any ways in which we might have similar fears, angers, or other things in common with the shooters.
Yes, there are some things seriously wrong with our country and our world, but they are not so bad that we must take up arms. Today, while someone was shooting up a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin, I was going door to door in Woodbridge, introducing myself to my neighbors in the hope of getting them to support my bid to become their State Representative. It was hot and muggy as the sweat poured down my back. There were times that I was hopeful as I spoke with neighbors and other times I was disappointed. I came home, exhausted.
There are still three months until the election. I don't know if I will get elected. However, if I just get a few more people to deal constructively with their political fears and angers, if I just get a few people to not lash out at others, even if it is something as simple as getting people to treat other drivers with respect, I will have made a difference, and if I can bring a little respect and dignity to politics in Hartford, well, that could be huge.
