Progressive Identity Project - #1 (Sunday, May 25th)

Welcome to the first installment of my regular diary series, Progressive Identity Project. My name is Mike Plugh and I'm a Masters candidate at Fordham University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a Democrat Abroad Japan.

Some of you may have read my first diary this week, introducing this project and its relationship to my thesis. I welcome those of you who missed that entry to read it at your leisure. To make a long story short, my thesis is tentatively titled "Comparative Analysis: Social Networking Structures and Progressive Political Identity," and aims at uncovering the ways that DailyKos and other web-based social networks contribute to the formation and growth of progressive political identity. You participation in this diary series will help me to conclude my research. It's an informal give and take based on a series of questions and statements I hope to explore with you in the comments section. Follow me after the fold:

This series will be scheduled for posting every Sunday and Wednesday morning at 9am EST/6am PST. Of course the diary will be open all day for you to participate. Your help with this project is invaluable and I hope you'll check in regularly via subscription and consider joining my e-mail distribution list for updates, scheduling reminders, and interview requests. You can leave me your information at:

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This series will follow two distinct lines of conversation, the first being a conversation about progressivism, and the second a conversation about the web-based social network medium. To launch this project, I will begin by addressing progressivism with you via a collection of statements and questions. The conversation in today's comments section should be free form and I leave it up to you to discuss your take on what you read here.

Harper's magazine contributing editor and NYU graduate professor Thomas De Zengotita writes in his 2005 work Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It:

In fact, progressives have no such vision, none that is shared, none that links issues together reasonably, given some philosophy of human nature and analysis of history, none that implicates policies designed to advance that vision as a whole – nothing like classical liberalism, articulated and modified over centuries from Locke to Smith to Mill, or Marxism, spawning descendents in Bolshevism, anarcho-syndicalism, democratic socialism...

I think this assertion will be debated by the people here at DailyKos, as members of this community have worked hard to establish a particular set of values and visions for progressivism via communication in the diaries and comments sections posted daily. In light of this statement, Question #1 in two parts is:

How would you describe the shared vision of progressives as expressed at DailyKos? What are progressive issues and how does this shared vision connect them?

That is enough to chew on for our first session together. In addition to our conversation here, I humbly request that you "rec" this diary and share it with other members of this community. The greater the input of our good friends and patriots here, the more we might all begin to understand our own progressive identity and the way we take part in shaping it via the DailyKos network. We will continue this discussion on Wednesday with additional statements and questions about progressivism, and any interesting follow ups that you contribute via your comments.

A special thanks to plf515 for his inclusion of this diary series in his ongoing Daily Kos University project. Make sure you stop by and look over the collection of scholarship going on on that virtual campus.

Have at it!! I leave you with some links to prominent contributors to the Media Ecology philosophy. Cheers, Mike.

Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Neil Postman, George Herbert Mead, James W. Carey, Edward T. Hall, Gregory Bateson, Paul Watzlawick, Alfred Korzybski, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Norbert Weiner, Ervin Laszlo, Niklas Luhmann, Walter Benjamin, Edmund Burke, N. Katherine Hayles, Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, Jeremy Campbell, Wendell Johnson, Edmund Carpenter, Erving Goffman, Susanne K. Langer, Roland Barthes, Joshua Meyrowitz, Lance Strate, Paul Levinson, and many many more.