Reverse the Media

Lee Felsenstein 4-3-2025

This document is written as an explanation to protest organizers of a way to “reverse the media” and collect responses from people attending the rallies in which they are participating.

“Get the Message Out!” seems to have been the prime directive of grassroots political organizers for the last century or so. During that century the technology of communications has advanced significantly and new possibilities have come into existence. Getting the message OUT is now no longer so important compared with the possibility of gathering IN identities, preferences, and motivations of the people to whom the Message was addressed.

I call this process “reversing the media” – where mass media empowers one person to project their message to ever larger audiences, digital media now can empower the individuals in those audiences to respond as individuals and be counted and dealt with as individuals.

The technologies are all available – website URLs and QR bar codes, along with smart phones with cameras.

Here’s how it will work:

Your group will be participating in a rally or demonstration where a crowd will be addressed. You will need a web page dedicated to your particular political interests (we can help you set up such a page).

The web page will be a questionnaire for people who respond to your message, which most likely will be on a leaflet you distribute (unless you are really lucky and the whole rally will be by and for your group).

The leaflet will most likely include a QR code – a small, square patch of dots with three larger black squares around the edges. These codes convey the URL for the web page and can be printed out as graphic files (.jpg, .png, .pdf, etc.) from ordinary office programs.

Once you have access to the office program (a good one is Libre Office, a free and open source program available for download on the Web), you can type the URL in and it will produce a graphic file that can be printed on your leaflets as well as on business-cards.

These business cards have been found to survive longer and remain more available to individuals than leaflets. They should have a one- or two-sentence explanation printed on them to remind the individual of who you are, and they can be printed up through the office programs as a standard print format.

We can help you make a layout for business cards as long as you can come up with the explanatory text.

The QR code can also be printed up as a full-page graphic and posted in visible areas where your rally will take place. The same two sentence explanation should be included with the URL graphic so people will know who they are connecting with and why.

When people scan the QR codes with their smart phone cameras they will be presented with the decoded URL which they will be able to click to reach the web page.

Once they reach the web page they should be asked for their basic information – name, email address, phone number (which can be used for text messages) – we can help with the necessary formatting of this data so that it will be available to you as a spreadsheet, but this work can also be done by someone familiar with the office software.

After that point you can have as many questions as you wish on the web page or (we suggest) on another page which the first one points to. These questions would, we hope, allow you to select the kinds of people who could work best with you, and/or those who will be more passive.

What do we get out of this? Our goal is to spread this approach as far as we can as fast as we can, since it’s badly needed right now in the political moment. If we can get funding for it – great, if not then we may have to charge a reasonable amount for our assistance.

A significant note – the QR code method has vulnerabilities but is the quickest to get into operation. The codes can be “spoofed” by bad actors intending to divert inquiries to their own websites.

Also, there are many “free” QR code generation programs that will work OK, but will also divert the user’s clicks to their own websites as well, We are working on another method that will be much less vulnerable to spoofing and diversion.