The protests in Madison have demonstrated forcefully the power of an alternative to the opinion poll, an embodied voice of the people.  During the past week, policymakers, news commentators, and citizens alike have looked to the protests as a sign of public sentiment.  And the protests are having a positive effect!  I remember first hearing about the planned protests this past Monday.  I was depressed about Walker’s proposals, and had resigned myself to the bill’s passage.  I had planned on attending the protests out of a sense of moral obligation, but I didn’t expect any change in the outcome.

Five days later, the bill still may pass, but the possibility of its defeat has gone from non-existent to a chance—a chance that tens of thousands of Wisconsinites are fighting for.  And they’re fighting by showing up at the Capitol to march, carry signs, chant, and register their dissent.

The people’s voice, resonating loudly from the halls of the Capitol and the streets outside, is inspiring their representatives to act.  As readers of this blog may know, the fourteen Democratic senators who left the state Thursday to deny the Senate a quorum did so spontaneously as they gathered on the lawn of the Capitol that morning.  One senator was quoted as saying that seeing so many Wisconsinites out in protests for several days convinced him that he could not abide by business as usual.  In subsequent interviews, other members of the fourteen have called the protesters heroes, and they clearly seem to draw considerable energy from the people.  What if no one was outside the Capitol?  Or just a few hundred?  What if the senators had commissioned an overnight poll showing that state workers opposed Walker’s plan, but state workers and others didn’t show up to make their dissent known?  Would the senators have been inspired to such dramatic action?  I don’t think so.

In my view, the reason that the bill wasn’t passed on Friday as originally expected is because tens of thousands of Wisconsinites embodied their dissent in the capital city.  And their representatives followed their lead (hat tip to Sue Robinson for calling this point to my attention).  By leaving the state, the Democratic senators spoke with an embodied voice that would not have been possible in their chamber.  I’m a scholar of deliberation and true-believer in its transformative power.  But, on this occasion, no matter what arguments the Democrats would have put forward, they likely would have been defeated on a party-line vote.  Physically relocating their bodies enabled the Senators to express their opinions and to prevent a vote.  And they did so, as several of them have suggested, so that their colleagues could hear the voice of the people.

To be sure, the situation bringing about these protests in Madison is depressing, since Walker’s bill seems to be designed more to inflict pain than save money.  But the protests are inspiring, heartening, motivating.  They are a tremendously eloquent statement about the power of democracy.  Behold the voice of the people!

Rarely has there been a reality contestant as polarizing as Palin, whose lineage has created both fervent fandom and intense ridicule during her surprisingly long tenure on Dancing with the Stars. On tonight’s finale she was labeled as “the shy girl next door who has transformed into a dancer and become a surprise contender,” but in truth she’s a weak dancer who beat out stronger competitors thanks to substantial voter support. That support have been broadly labeled a right-wing conspiracy (without much “real” data available to justify this), while her detractors have taken to shooting their televisions in protest.

However, this sort of controversy is a regular occurrence on shows like Dancing with the Stars or American Idol. In fact, the very first season of Dancing with the Stars in 2005 created a similar controversy when Kelly Monaco, an ABC soap star, defeated John O’Hurley despite many viewers feeling he was the superior dancer (as would be natural in any close vote). ABC, of course, capitalized on this fairly innocuous controversy by airing a special “Dance-Off” for charity, which O’Hurley won. American Idol, meanwhile, has had numerous contestants who “went home too early,” including eventual Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson and eventual multi-platinum recording artist Chris Daughtry.

These controversies are natural, I would argue, considering reality television’s tenuous relationship with the basic principles of democracy. Ryan Seacrest refers to the winner of American Idol as “Your American Idol” to suggest a sense of ownership, while So You Think You Can Dance? crowns “America’s Favorite Dancer,” as opposed to its best dancer, in each of its seasons. Both shows suggest that they are turning over a life-altering decision to the American public, as agency over the future of a young singer or dancer is transferred to the voters’ telephones (and their parent’s texting plan).

And yet this agency is seen as problematic when mixed with larger questions of credibility. If the process of voting has viewers exercising their democratic rights, then the existence of judges is meant to introduce some level of meritocratic consideration of talent. While shows like American Idol wholly turn the vote over to the people, shows like So You Think You Can Dance and Dancing with the Stars give judges considerable power over the outcomes – in the case of Dancing with the Stars, 50% of the power – because dancing is considered to be technical enough to require an expert’s opinion (whereas singing is something we all think we can judge, even when we are actually tone deaf).

This all seems particularly silly for Dancing with the Stars, as we’re talking about democratic engagement and legitimacy in a series about C-List (at best) celebrities competing to win the mirrorball trophy (which is exactly what it sounds like). However, we can’t deny that this particular season became a legitimate national media event, with Palin’s supporters emphasizing their democratic right to support their candidate while her detractors argued that her inability to actually dance makes her continued presence a detriment to the series’ “integrity.”

Of course, this is no different from the original concerns over Monaco’s victory on some level, but the political overtones are exaggerating this controversy. It is the overlaying of real democracy over fake democracy, a microcosm of national political tensions within a dancing competition featuring a daughter of a politician (Palin), an actress (Jennifer Grey) best known for a movie released over twenty years ago (however timeless it may be), and an actor (Kyle Massey) best known for his stint on That’s So Raven who the media has completely forgotten about (or, more likely, didn’t notice in the first place).

The stakes for tonight’s results show were non-existent, in reality: the series has too little legitimacy for an “undeserved” Bristol Palin victory to substantially alter its future prospects, and a Bristol Palin victory is not going to be a sudden turn in the tide of popular opinion surrounding her mother (or have any real democratic meaning, as James Poniewozik argues).

But the show, already a bizarre mix of hyper-seriousness and campy excess, was forced to address allegations of voter fraud and attacks on its legitimacy; the show even opened with an explanation of how the voting process worked, explaining the 50/50 model as if they were 24-hour newscasters discussing why Florida meant everything in 2000. For two long hours filled with novelty dance routines and advertising disguised as musical performance, the audience’s faith in democracy depended on the envelope in the hands of Tom Bergeron.

And then, in a single moment, it all fell away. Bristol was revealed to be the competition’s Ralph Nader, a spoiler rather than a contender, finishing in third place and denying ABC the final moments of tension which would have divided the nation along partisan lines. Instead, Jennifer Grey steps out of the corner to take the mirrorball trophy, a victory for dancing and for the series’ own twisted meritocratic democracy.

Bristol, meanwhile, steps back from the political edge: while she told the camera early in the episode that her victory would be a middle finger to those who hate her mother, her loss becomes a personal tale of the shy girl next door coming out of her shell. Like many politicians, she weathered apparent death threats and substantial critics to prove to the world that anyone can run for office or, in this case, put on colorful costumes and compete for a shiny disco ball on a stick.

And isn’t that what democracy is all about?

In “Riders on the Storm,” his recent column in the New York Times, well-known pundit David Brooks thundered into the fray with his own network-fueled assessment. Arguing that the “Internet is actually more ideologically integrated than old-fashioned forms of face-to-face association,” Brooks writes: “The Internet will not produce a cocooned public square, but a free-wheeling multilayered Mad Max public square.”

Holding up the post-apocalyptic gladiators of the classic action films as his ideal, Brooks is missing something important about everyday communication online. It’s not so much that individuals don’t engage different ideas, it’s that those engagements can be guided by values far more singular than the diversity they encounter. A bit like Mad Max’s 1973 Ford Falcon XB GT “Pursuit Special”, individuals navigating the Web driven by a high-octane ideology may be really good at one thing in particular: moving in a straight line.

To be fair, Brooks is actually basing his argument on new research coming out of the Business School at the University of Chicago. There, researchers Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro are presenting findings that partially contradict less optimistic assessments like that of Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Cass Sunstein. In his famous book, Republic.com 2.0, Sunstein found that individuals “filter” themselves into ideological enclaves online. Gentzkow and Shapiro’s research, on the other hand, has found that individuals do not avoid the blogs, forum posts, or video clips that contradict their ideological leanings. Instead, individuals both left and right of the political center look across the continuum at those with whom they disagree. These contradictory findings reveal, at the very least, that our understanding of the changes wrought by the Internet is more complex than the issue of who is accessing what. In fact, examples from my own research suggest that it is far more about how new ideas are understood and assessed than it is about which ideas are consumed.

Take for example, the case of fundamentalist Christians discussing their belief in the approaching Second Coming of Christ. While these individuals use the Internet to access a staggering amount of media, they do so with the primary purpose of finding information that suggests how soon (Not if!) the End Times will begin. Creating an enclave of individuals with whom they share a very a specific belief, they look toward outside news sources to provide the raw material for their internally directed ideological discussions.

Of course, you might say: “Yes! But these are just a few crackpots, and not everyday people!” In the research I present in my forthcoming book, Digital Jesus, I harness hundreds of examples that demonstrate that this could not be further from the truth. These individuals are by and large highly educated, upper-middle class, and deeply compassionate individuals who use the Internet to expand the diversity of their belief that the End is near even as they go about their otherwise quite average daily lives. The surprisingly mundane nature of these beliefs makes a bigger point.

To better understand how the Internet contributes to the personal values and political positions of real individuals out there in the world, researchers must get beyond mapping the links between blogs or tracking individual Web surfing habits. While new research challenges our simple notions of how to assess the relationship between what people think and what they do online, it also challenges us to engage in more qualitative and sustained ethnographic research with specific groups of individuals. It’s really only through such fully articulated examples that we can begin to develop a more realistic understanding not only of the diversity of ideas online, but of the diversity of ways individuals find, share, and assess ideas online. To get those examples,we have to get out of the research spaces of our own academic Thunderdomes and talk to people as they go about the daily routines that construct their virtual public squares.