Posted 18:06 by Mark Federman permanent link
Take No Prisoners

Gianluca pointed us to the Information Clearing House website, and a provocative clip from CNN, together with many comments, called Take No Prisoners. Not only the act, but the responses from military personnel and others give one pause. What is the message - the effect - of such acts, of such attitudes, of such depictions, of such comments? I am profoundly saddened by it all.
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Posted 10:50 by Mark Federman permanent link
Are You an Educator, Education Researcher or Seriously Interested in Learning?

If so, please help Senior McLuhan Fellow Jason Nolan by taking this survey. Jason and Joel Weiss are working on a plan for an Encyclopedia of Learning with Kluwer Academic Publishers, and Kluwer has put together a survey to get some general information from folks interested in Learning.
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Posted 10:33 by Mark Federman permanent link
Today is Grey Tuesday

"Tuesday, February 24 will be a day of coordinated civil disobedience: websites will post Danger Mouse's Grey Album on their site for 24 hours in protest of EMI's attempts to censor this work.

DJ Danger Mouse created a remix of Jay-Z's the Black Album and the Beatles White Album, and called it the Grey Album. Jay-Z's record label, Roc-A-Fella, released an a capella version of his Black Album specifically to encourage remixes like this one. But despite praise from music fans and major media outlets like Rolling Stone ("an ingenious hip-hop record that sounds oddly ahead of its time") and the Boston Globe (which called it the "most creatively captivating" album of the year), EMI has sent cease and desist letters demanding that stores destroy their copies of the album and websites remove them from their site. EMI claims copyright control of the Beatles 1968 White Album.

Danger Mouse’s album is one of the most "respectful" and undeniably positive examples of sampling; it honors both the Beatles and Jay-Z. Yet the lawyers and bureaucrats at EMI have shown zero flexibility and not a glimmer of interest in the artistic significance of this work. And without a clearly defined right to sample (e.g. compulsory licensing), the five major record labels will continue to use copyright in a reactionary and narrowly self-interested manner that limits and erodes creativity. Their actions are also self-defeating: good new music is being created that people want to buy, but the major labels are so obsessed with hoarding their copyrights that they are literally turning customers away.

This first-of-its-kind protest signals a refusal to let major label lawyers control what musicians can create and what the public can hear. The Grey Album is only one of the thousands of legitimate and valuable efforts that have been stifled by the record industry-- not to mention the ones that were never even attempted because of the current legal climate. We cannot allow these corporations to continue censoring art; we need common-sense reforms to copyright law that can make sampling legal and practical for artists.

The Grey Tuesday protest is being organized by Downhill Battle."
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Posted 00:32 by Mark Federman permanent link
Language as Metaphor? President as Magician?

One of the capital-B Big Principles of McLuhan thinking is to understand the transformational properties of media - how a medium transforms one set of dynamics into another. Language as a medium is particularly transformative, changing my experiences into your experiences as I tell you about them, for instance. Transforming one thing into another is a sort of magic. And it turns out, when it comes to language, President Bush and his magical economic elves rank right up there with Harry Houdini!

The New York Times has this unbelievable article that reports on "the new Economic Report of the President, a thick annual compendium of observations and statistics on the health of the United States economy. The latest edition, sent to Congress last week, questions whether fast-food restaurants should continue to be counted as part of the service sector or should be reclassified as manufacturers. ... In a speech to Washington economists Tuesday, N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, said that properly classifying such workers was "an important consideration" in setting economic policy."

Apparently, according to all the President's men, "assembling the inputs" of the parts of a hamburger into a final product is close enough to assembling an automobile on an assembly line, and thus should be classifed as a manufacturing, as opposed to service sector job. The fact that such a reclassification would do wonders for the nominal job creation statistics in an election year is, well, magical! Abracadabra! Presto chango! Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

The Center for American Progress has this biting cartoon commenting on this bit of economic legerdemain.
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Posted 13:06 by Mark Federman permanent link
What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message?

We use Sitemeter to track the comings and goings (mostly comings, actually) of people to the weblog. Over time, one of the most frequent searches that lands someone here has to do with the meaning of McLuhan's enigmatic paradox, "the medium is the message." So today, I've posted a brief essay in an attempt to provide an answer: What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message?
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Posted 15:43 by Mark Federman permanent link
Review of "The Corporation"

I finally went to see The Corporation last week, after the hundredth person asked me, "Have you seen The Corporation yet?" (my response to which had been, "No, but from what I've heard...") The exceptionally well-made documentary seems to provoke one of two diametrically-opposed reactions in most people: Either they love it as a long-needed exposé of evil corporations, or they hate it as a biased, leftist screed from the anti-globalization NoLogo crowd. Both positions suffer from being mesmerized by the obvious, and being manipulated by the same sort of persuasive techniques that the film, in part, excoriates.

First, let me say that the film is worth seeing for a lot of reasons. The research underlying the film is detailed and deep. The cases cited are interesting in their own right, and provide a number of mini-dramas ranging from a confrontation among individuals during an afternoon, to David-and-Goliath battles that span years. While I wouldn't call the reportage exactly balanced - this is a film promoting a definite point of view - it isn't all Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky all the time either. In particular, the testimony by Ray Anderson, Chairman of Interface, Inc., one of the world's largest carpet manufacturers, clearly demonstrates the good that corporations can do, and provides part of the answer to the problem proposed by the film's premise.

The widely-publicized set piece is the "diagnosis" of an archetypal corporation as a psychopath. "Considering the odd legal fiction that deems a corporation a "person" in the eyes of the law, the feature documentary employs a checklist, based on actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and DSM IV, the standard tool of psychiatrists and psychologists." But the examples are clearly selected to prove the point, essentially begging the question. What struck me as ironic was how the film decried corporations for using manipulative advertising and marketing techniques to attract customers, while simultaneously using the same methods to make its own points, especially the incriminating diagnosis. And this itself is the clue to solving the problem, or to use the metaphor of the movie, curing the patient.

The case is made that today's corporations have tremendous power, scope and capability. Global reach has grown from the incredible infrastructures that have evolved in the modern corporation, not to mention their ability to raise and generate enormous amounts of capital and command vast armies of workers. Arguably, their power transcends that of nation-states - witness the case of Bechtel privatizing all the water in a Bolivian town, including the rainwater (until the people revolted and repatriated it.) Thus, the only institutions we have that can undo the perceived ill wrought by corporations are the corporations themselves. They are the only social structure that exists today that has the power, scope and capability - infrastructure, capital, workers and relative freedom of action - to turn around many of the destructive and unhealthy practices that now exist in our world. Ray Anderson makes this clear: "I have challenged the people of Interface to make our company the first industrial company in the whole world to attain environmental sustainability, and then to become restorative. To me, being restorative means to put back more than we take, and to do good to the Earth, not just no harm."

Ray Anderson had what he called an "environmental epiphany" - "I had a revelation about what industry is doing to our planet. I stood convicted as a plunderer of the earth...In the future, people like me will go to jail." For other corporate CEOs, the encouragement may have to be less spiritual. Part of the legal requirement of the modern corporation is to do well relative to the "money as scorecard" metaphor. But what if the rules of the game change? What if the scorecard is modified so that "bonus points" are awarded for companies that follow the philosophy espoused by Ray Anderson and others like him? After all, the calculation of net profit - and all the other "generally accepted accounting principles" that go into its calculation - are all made up. They are a medium like any other, and their message - their effects - can be managed if we are both aware and willing to do so. Is there a powerful, trans-national mechanism to effect such changes in this seemingly universal scorecard? Certainly there is, and therein lies the evolutionary reversal of none other than the anti-globalization movement's favourite enemy, The WTO.

That was my epiphany as I left the movie theatre. The Corporation, the movie, was anything but anti-corporate. Filmmakers Mark Achbar, Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbot created the strongest case possible for the role of corporations and trans-national organizations like the WTO in curing the collective psychoses that ail our world.

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Posted 12:01 by Mark Federman permanent link
Be Careful What You Wish For

Theworldvotes.org has the results of its latest poll on the foreign policy positions of the various candidates for U.S. President. The results are a bit surprising.

On foreign policy, Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich appears to have a decided edge over the other candidates, including presidential hopeful John Kerry. His two statements received 35% of the vote. Kucinich’ message “The U.S. can repair its position in the world community through cooperation, not through confrontation” proved to be very popular with a world audience.

President Bush’ statement “America has no empire to extend or utopia to establish. We wish for others only what we wish for ourselves - safety from violence, the rewards of liberty, and the hope for a better life” was approved by 21% of the participants.

Remarkably, foreign policy statements made by former front-runner Howard Dean proved to be least popular with the global electorate, followed by statements made by John Edwards.

What's really remarkable is that more people surveyed from around the world agree with George Bush's statements than agree with Howard Dean and John Kerry combined! (The individual responses are available for downloading and analysis.)

Survey respondents, over a thousand in total, were presented with a two sets of publicly-made foreign policy statements about the U.S.'s role in the world. For each, the respondent was asked to select the one that most closely matched his or her own viewpoint. Here's a quick rundown:

Candidate	% Agreeing with Statement 1	% Agreeing with Statement 2
Bush	21%	12%
Kucinich	43%	26%
Sharpton	8%	23%
Edwards	6%	11%
Kerry	12%	8%
Dean	6%	1%
None	5%	19%

Have you registered to vote?
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Posted 11:09 by Mark Federman permanent link
She's, like, "Some of my brightest students use it."

The Toronto Star has a story today in which University of Toronto linguist Sali Tagliamonte describes the evolution of the English language thanks to teenagers' extended use of the word, "like."

" In a recent study of 1,240 quotations by Toronto teens, 60 per cent used the word "like" to indicate a quote, up from 13 per cent in a similar study Tagliamonte conducted in 1995 in Ottawa. "It's unprecedented to find a feature of language increasing in frequency this rapidly," she said yesterday. "It used to take millennia for language to change, but timelines have telescoped with the advent of mass media."

According to the article, linguists can't agree on the explosive growth in the popularity of the usage. But I think mass media - in an entirely non-obvious way - is indeed the key driver here.

When we used to relate an incident or a conversation, we related it directly. We quoted what someone actually said, or described what something actually was, as opposed to what it was "like." In substituting the simile for the verb (and yes, I realize that the usage in this case is not strictly the comparative, but, like, bear with me...) we are subconsciously creating a simulacrum of the experience for our listener, rather than treating the experience as a true first-person account. We have become so conditioned by mass-media - and especially television - to show us simulacra of the world (think so-called Reality TV) that we adopt the same stance, even without a camera. Interestingly, this is a reversal from the perception in McLuhan's day, that TV brought the world in to our homes. Now, it is a fabrication of the world, a surrogate world, made by producers. Not the world, but what the world is like.

In our world of instantaneous communications, as McLuhan quotes Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, "My Consumers, Are They Not My Producers?" We are all producers of our own TV-like reality, something that has become integral to the subconscious ground of our culture. And that's, like, the way it is.
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Posted 15:44 by Mark Federman permanent link
The Very, Very Personal Is the Political

The New York Times Magazine has this interesting article about the cross between modern database marketing and political campaigns. While most people might respond with a bored "so what else is new..." the extent to which modern marketing's slicing and dicing techniques are being used to deliver the voter to the candidate - as opposed to delivering the candidate to the voter - sheds a bunch of new light.

On its face, the article is both informative and profoundly worrying in revealing the potential threat to our common conception of democracy.

"Peter Swire, a privacy expert who worked at the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton administration, told me. ''In the nightmare, every voter will get a tailored message based on detailed information about the voter. The candidate would know what schools the voter went to, any public records that showed they supported some cause, any court case they've been involved in. There might even be several different messages sent by a candidate to the same home -- one for the wife, one for the husband and one for the 23-year-old kid.'' The nightmare vision, Swire added, means that the public debates lack content and the real election happens in the privacy of these mailings. The candidate knows everything about the voter, but the media and the public know nothing about what the candidate really believes. It is, in effect, a nearly perfect perversion of the political process."

The article also gives us a new way of looking at the experience of the Howard Dean Campaign, and the ground effects of the Internet on politics. We shouldn't forget that enabling the type of grass-roots, highly participatory and sometimes reflexive campaign that Joe Trippi ran for Howard Dean reflects only one of the Internet's ground effects. The 'net also enables the proliferation of our digiSelves - emergent replicas of our physical incarnations formed by the proximity and interconnection of our various digital personae strewn among dozens of databases, and our own publicy. The article describes the lesser publicized aspects of the Internet's effects, those being the ability of third parties to reconstruct a multi-dimensional projection of us that is more real to those concerned than our physical self.

Over forty years of modern marketing have taught us how to elicit consumer effects quite precisely, even in those matters that are not obviously consumer-oriented, as Marshall McLuhan illustrated in Culture is Our Business (scheduled for reprinting by Gingko Press in late 2005). When applied to politics, political consumers are no different than buyers of laundry detergent, fast food or soft drinks (which is why I disagree fundamentally with Clay Shirky's comprehensive analysis of the obvious.) The path on which we are headed is one in which the actual election is as consequential as the Superbowl or the selection of the next American Idol; polling, demographic analysis and data mining will decide the victor for us based on scientific statistical analysis. "Still, as computing power and money combine in increasingly complex and arcane ways, it's reasonable to ask how a well-financed candidate might use the new techniques for manipulation instead of communication. ... ''No one is watching the debates, no one is reading Wes Clark's book,'' one former D.N.C. official told me just before Christmas, and the new data-mining technology presents a way for a campaign to break through the noise of modern life. In a hectic world, this official added, that may be its best chance to get your attention, to see what you truly care about, to get inside your head. And to enlist you, of course, in the attempt to carve out that slender but decisive political margin."
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Posted 09:31 by Mark Federman permanent link
The Teat Offensive

Thanks to the brilliant team at John Stewart's The Daily Show for the wonderful probe of "Nipplegate." Of course, when we subjected this example to analysis using the Laws of Media at last evening's class, none of the participants made the connection with the Tet Offensive. Ah, these kids... But the clip from Stewart's monologue highlighted a subtlety that may escape many observers: The moral outrage and extreme indignation over Jackson's and Timberlake's "flash dance" at the Superbowl was so overwhelmingly "in your face" throughout the United States that the "ubiquity suggests obsolescence" rule of the Laws of Media cannot help but come to mind. The notion that moral outrage, and morality in general in America is in obsolescence is an interesting idea. Obsolescence, as you may remember, does not mean that the medium is eliminated, but rather that it is losing its potency (sorry) as the driving or dominant force in society and culture. Given the hyper-sexuality of pop culture in America, this should not be a surprising observation. But because the United States is struggling to retain it foundation as a Christian theocracy, the flash of skin must be met with the full force of hellfire, damnation and Congressional hearings. But as McLuhan said,

"The mere moralistic expression of approval or disapproval, preference or detestation, is currently being used in our world as a substitute for observation and a substitute for study. People hope that if they scream loudly enough about "values" then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming?" (McLuhan Hot & Cool, 285-286)

Dana, one of my students, pointed out the coincidence among the increased - and favourable - press coverage of John Kerry's campaign for the Democratic nomination, the news-media probes into Bush's National Guard service and the dismal job creation record of his administration, and the distracting hoop-la of the Jackson media circus. As Father Guido Sarducci used to say, "Coincidenza?"
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Posted 11:05 by Mark Federman permanent link
Howard Dean is not a soap bar

Great title for an insightful piece by Dave Winer. Dave is a little more explicit about the threat posed to broadcast politics (and broadcasters' revenues) by Internet politics than I was here, and suggests that the Howard Dean Campaign pointed the way for real engagement in democracy that is now the stuff of platitudes. Broadcast media companies will as much allow a true Internet candidate to succeed as the RIAA will allow downloaders their music. In future, watch for the big media companies to co-opt truly Internet-enabled political campaigns in the same way the RIAA has co-opted the music downloaders. And while we're on the topic, have a look at this, too.
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Posted 11:43 by Mark Federman permanent link
The Effect of Technology on Language

Ben Hammersley makes a really cool observation about the evolution of language and the reversal of words when accelerated by electronic technologies.

Cosmic then, takes on a new and culturally-ironic pseudo-hip stance as an adjective of choice amidst friends of mine in London. Apparently. I dunno. But, here’s the thing: cosmic, when entered into a t9 capable mobile phone, for the SMSing thereof, is not the first word to come out of the t9 dictionary. No: the first word you get when pressing 267642 isn’t cosmic at all, but bosnia. If you’re not looking, you won’t select cosmic: you’ll get bosnia and skip onto the next word.

A couple of puzzling sentences later, and with little effort and no explanation whatsoever, it seems to have caught on. People, including my wife, continuously, oh-dear-lord-make-it-stop, are using the word 'bosnia' as a synonym for excellent.

This interesting and technologically-driven substitution is an instance of cliché-sharpening that retrieves Cockney rhyming slang.
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Posted 12:53 by Mark Federman permanent link
Lessons from the Dean

Yes, I do mean Howard Dean, not Dean Brian Cantwell Smith, the new Dean of the Faculty of Information Studies, of which the McLuhan Program is a part. (That being said, Dean BCS is a remarkably cool guy! This augurs well.)

1. The ground effects of the Internet are real and potent. Harnessing them (among both cyber- and physical-space) brings tremendous power.


2. "The media tycoons have a huge stake in old media by which they monopolize the new media." (Marshall McLuhan, Culture is our Business, 104)


3. The media temperature of the candidate must match the media temperature of the medium being used to campaign. Mismatches are deadly. Ask Nixon.


4. While it's important to win over those who do regularly vote, it's even more important to win over those who don't.

More to come as I think of 'em, or as you suggest 'em.

By the way, here's my $0.02 worth (and they're Canadian cents, so they're not worth as much as those south of the border) regarding what Howard Dean should consider doing next: Dean would do the world a great service if he announces his withdrawal from the race to seek the Democratic nomination - even before the next round of primaries - and throw his support behind John Kerry, taking a key position in his campaign, and potentially his White House. It will pre-empt the negative effects of losing the next round of primaries, and harness the amazing power of his organization and fans. This will allow the Democrats to come out swinging strongly against Bush, even before the starting bell is rung.
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Posted 12:42 by Mark Federman permanent link
Granddaddy Ed's Blog

When I blogged about the explosion of Howard Dean, and the end of the Howard Dean Campaign (and the birth of the Broadcast Dean Campaign that might be exceedingly short-lived), Derrick de Kerckhove asked me in an email, "Can anything be done to rescue this poor man?" My response was more or less as follows:

Rescue Dean? I don't think so - he lost faith with the "new politics" and cast his lot with broadcast politics. Today's news is that he is backing away from next week's primaries to regroup. It's probably not a bad strategic move as he (1) has already spent a lot of money, and the rate of donations will likely decrease soon; (2) can be excused for not winning any of next week's contests, as opposed to being labelled a continual loser; (3) can campaign heavily in his next contested caucus (Michigan, I think) with a chance of winning, and thus demonstrating that he can "come back."

We'll just have to wait for a cooler candidate, I suppose. What would be really fun is to focus a cool campaign for the federal NDP in the next election here, and have them displace the new Conservative party as the opposition. My hunch is that the remade Jack Layton will probably do well next time around, and the new Conservative party under (I'm guessing here) Stephen Harper won't be attractive at all. (Belinda would be an even more devastating choice for the party, turning the Conservatives into a laughing stock - worse than Kim Campbell redux.) A cool HDC-style campaign to mobilize non-regular-voters to support NDP as an "alternative" to Martin (after Progressive Reformers have proven entirely ineffective against the liberals in the last parliament) might do the trick.

Well, it's happened, and it is being done by the party's granddaddy, Ed Broadbent, the NDP candidate for Ottawa Centre. The Broadbent Blog was launched late in January, and has the same folksy, share-the-experience-as-it-happens feel to it that is needed for a cool campaign. (The last entry about the frozen truck is a hoot.) Hopefully, it won't devolve into the highly polished press-release pseudo-blog that Prime Minister Paul Martin was purported to keep back in the fall (last update: October 19, 2003.) A link on that site poses the now rhetorical question, "Why does Paul blog?" A better question would be, "Why DOESN'T Paul blog?" And come to think of it, Why doesn't NDP leader Jack Layton blog?
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Posted 08:49 by Mark Federman permanent link
Shards O'Glass Freeze Pops

This is a very cool ad campaign - both in the conventional sense and in the McLuhan media temperature sense. Make sure you see their TV commercial.
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Posted 17:40 by Mark Federman permanent link
Roger Clarke's 'Little Black Books' - Do Privacy Laws Apply to Publicy?

Roger Clarke, who first gave us the notion of "digital persona," from which my formulation of DigiSelf evolves, has an interesting examination of the application of privacy laws (and the potential limitation of current privacy legislation) on the data collection practices of social networks. Little Black Books focuses on one such service and concludes that, "Individuals who store data in a private capacity, however, are exempt from virtually all data protection laws. It would have seemed extreme and unnecessary to regulate people's collection, storage, use and disclosure of data about other people. Technology has undermined many assumptions inherent in FIPs-based [Fair Information Practices] data protection law; and the problems identified in this paper show that it has also undermined the assumption that the data collections of individuals can be exempted. In general, people would be well-advised firstly to stay well clear of all address-book and 'social networking systems', and secondly to prevail upon their friends, colleagues and acquaintances that they should avoid making any data about them available to service-operators like Plaxo."

Interesting, and possibly prudent, advice to the Social Network crowd - advice that will probably go unheeded. Why do I say unheeded? After all, aren't we all concerned about our individual privacy? To a great extent, we are, but primarily in a ground that is based in literate culture and dominance. Once we psychologically make the move to the global village world of new orality, there is, if not no privacy, (not no? Sorry about that...) then certainly the apathy towards revelations made under conditions of publicy, a condition which these social networks enable. The missing link in all this is an examination of the flow of trust and reputation that existed in the physical village, and has yet to pervade the global village in any potent fashion. Cory Doctorow's idea "whuffie" was certainly one example of the idea. But try to wrap your head around the notion of Cluetrain-style conversations that involve the dynamics of reputation/trust quanta exchange, in an analogous fashion to the Internet enabling new types of loosely coupled, distributed conversations among people. And now imagine managing that in a coherent way in a trans-corporate / trans-national network.

As you might guess, fair information practices are significantly obsolesced with the emergence of publicy.
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Posted 15:18 by Mark Federman permanent link
What Happened at WSIS?

Come meet academics and members of the civil society groups who attended the recent The World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva (WSIS-SMSI), either in person or on the 'net. The panel will be moderated by Dr Liss Jeffrey, the McLuhan Program’s Chief Knowledge Media Design Scholar and director of the eCommons/agora project, and senior researcher KMDI (Citizen engagement in e-governance). Dr Jeffrey will report on Geneva, the civil society debriefing in Ottawa, and plans for the Geneva to Tunis (2005) phase of WSIS. Professors Andrew Clement (FIS) and Leslie Chan (UTSC) have been invited, and all Geneva participants and observers are welcome to participate in the panel. Join us in person on Thursday, Feb. 5, from 15:30 to 17:00 EST, in Room BA1200 [1st floor] Bahen Centre for Information Technology, 40 St. George St. in Toronto, or online at the post-WSIS web site, which will feature further information, and host the live Netcast, including your online comments and questions.
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Posted 22:08 by Mark Federman permanent link
Catching the Ear of American Folks

Antonia Zerbasias, the media columnist from the Toronto Star, came to Peter Deitz's talk about the Voices Without Votes 2004 project, and wrote a great article about it in today's paper. "Love or hate U.S. President George W. Bush, most of us have opinions about him. And because what he does affects the entire planet, plus the moon and Mars, it's easy to see why Canadians, and all other earthlings for that matter, would want a say in next November's election. Enter Voices Without Votes. This ambitious project, which "seeks to foster a presidential debate unlike most others," is the brainchild of Peter Deitz, a research fellow at the University of Toronto's McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology. Thursday, at a public meeting, he discussed the idea — and "ideal" — of "representative representative democracy," in which non-citizens of a nation can convey their concerns to citizens of that nation on matters of international import, perhaps influencing the outcome. Noting that, in this digital world where borders have been smashed and citizenship now delineates countries, Deitz hopes this is "the starting point for some future form of government." Think government of the global village by the global villagers for the global village. In other words, to get the masses to engage with each other, bypassing their leaders, media filters and other elites, and connecting equal to equal in an effort to make Americans see that how they vote in Topeka affects humans in Timbuktu, Tehran and Toronto."

If you haven't got a vote in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election, come write a letter to a potential representative - voter - in the U.S. If you have got a vote, come read some letters, write to your fellow Americans, and perhaps respond to the world at large.
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