He's on C-SPAN's Washington Journal this morning and that got me to look up this article.
Most anyone who follows the news about the campaigns knows the story:
- Republicans have been slow and resistant to adapting to the Internet. Many still see it as a slick mailer without the postage cost. A one-way information transfer, rather than creating the illusion of exchange or shared control.
- We're starting to see a divergence between what the networks report and what people actually choose to view. A timely example of this is after Obama's A More Perfect Union speech. While the networks were still obsessed with replaying soundbites from Reverend Wright's Greatest Hits, the 37-minute speech video was burning up the tubes.
- The Internet can't turn water into wine. While Ron Paul exceeded anyone's wildest imagination in terms of funds raised and votes cast, it still could not catapult him into an actual lead. While Obama is a highly-successful candidate all-around, one has to resist the temptation to attribute all of his success to his finesse on the Internet.
Check it out if you're interested.
1 comment:
I think the Internet definitely plays an increasingly important role in campaigns, much more so than it did in the Howard Dean days, but is still far from being what I would consider the king of all media. The wonkish depths of the Internet are still very much the domain of nerdy Web 2.0 geeks like us, and I think it's very easy for wired people to convince themselves that the general public is seeing the same thing. But I think the mainstream for us is still very much the underground in middle America. But that is definitely becoming less the case as time passes. Heck, even my mother-in-law is all over the Web now.
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