Politics & Communication with Joshua Gee

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Pretty much as soon as I decided to start blogging again I decided that this would be a good first post. Last week I spoke to the BU chapter of the Public Relations Students Society of America. Acting against type, I put a bunch of effort into the presentation, which you can see embedded below.

It is a pretty good picture of what I did on the campaign and gives some hints as to where I think New Media is going. Parts of it are hard to understand without context, so just imagine a guy in glasses pacing back in forth in front of it, waving his hands around, and talking too fast.

Though no one ever said anything, I felt it best to avoid blogging while actually working on the campaign. I still tumbled and tweeted plenty, but not in the same why I (attempt to) blog. My tumblr isn’t as overtly political and I used Twitter partly for fun and partly in a semi-official campaign capacity.

I avoided blogging for two reasons. The first is that, while I think we are at the point where political staff are allowed to express their own opinions online (though generally it is good to avoid discussing the campaign they are on), I didn’t have any thoughts that are outside the campaign microcosm. So, while working as the New Media Director of the Deval Patrick Campaign, I had lots of thoughts about Politics and Communication, but very few of them could be expressed in terms that didn’t relate to the campaign or to Massachusetts politics. I doubt anyone was “spying” on me, nor that anything they would read on this blog would give an edge, it was probably better to avoid the situation entirely.

The second reason I didn’t blog was a lot more practical: I just didn’t have time. In fact, you could probably ignore that BS-sounding first reason entirely. Campaigns just don’t give you the time for anything like that.

But I find myself with more time and the desire to write a bit more, so here we are. No idea how often I will write, but I am going to try to do a post per day and one of those del.icio.us autoposty thingies for other links once per day (if I can get it hooked up). We will see how it goes once I use up all the ideas I saved up over the course of the campaign.