Chris Anderson...told me in an interview last year that "change does not happen at the pace of technology...Change happens at the pace of generations."

I hope his analysis doesn't apply in the case of presidential politics because I don't think this country can afford to wait.

My N&R column is about my frustration with the pace of internets-driven change in the realm of politics.

Waiting for the revolution

by Edward Cone
News & Record
5-27-07

I was sitting in a packed auditorium in downtown Manhattan last weekend, listening to a panel of senior staffers from just about every front-running presidential campaign talk about how important the Internet has become to modern politics, and I was bored out of my skull.

Can we get this revolution started already?

The event was called the Personal Democracy Forum, but that session didn't feel especially personal or democratic or forum-like. It felt like the same old same old: a few people sitting on a stage, telling a passive audience whatever they wanted to tell us (which wasn't really very much) about the use of technology in their campaigns, each of which seemed much like the campaigns we've seen for decades.

The Net is bringing all kinds of tactical changes to presidential politics, but big changes at a structural level are slower to occur. We can send the campaigns our money more efficiently than ever before over the Internet, but they don't want us to send them our ideas. Campaigns can get their messages out to more people, as if the point of the Internet was to create a more powerful broadcast medium, and the messages (and the candidates) sound pretty familiar.

The Internet is supposed to put power in the hands of the people, but I don't remember choosing any of these folks to run for the White House -- do you? The same power centers that anointed previous generations of candidates produced this crop, which, for all its increased diversity in terms of gender and race and religion, looks pretty traditional in political terms. The premium still seems to be on hair and teeth -- marketing guru Seth Godin said at the conference that we need to elect an ugly president -- and staying on script. The most interesting presence in the race might be Al Gore, and he keeps saying he won't run.

It may even be the case that new technology is in some ways limiting change. Fear of stumbling into a "macaca moment" like the one that helped sink George Allen, and having it loop endlessly on YouTube, could make candidates less spontaneous and more gaffe-phobic than ever.

Meanwhile, some attempts to flatten the campaign organization get flattened by the campaign organization: After a volunteer named Joe Anthony built a formidable presence for Barack Obama at the MySpace social network, the Obama organization steamrolled him into handing over the domain and seemed to go out of its way to try and make him look like a jerk in the process.

If presidential politics seem stuck in the 20th century, real changes are occurring across the surrounding political landscape; as novelist William Gibson observed, the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

The main stage at Personal Democracy Forum represented the old school: New York Times columnist Tom Friedman lobbing softball questions at a paid sponsor, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, and then reading -- how interactive! -- familiar tales to a restless audience. But in the hallways and breakout sessions, people were talking about sites like Congresspedia, a collaborative Web site that makes the legislative process more transparent; software that facilitates greater diversity online by recognizing multiple languages; and journalism projects that track federal programs at the local level.

Maybe this is the way it works now, with this networked technology, in small steps taken by individuals and groups. No mass-audience moment, no celebrated tipping point like the televised Nixon-Kennedy debates, but a million loosely linked events and projects distributed across the country and the Net, with big changes coming from the bottom up.

Or maybe a generation spoiled by the concept of accelerated "Internet time" expects too much, too soon when it comes to something so large and essentially conservative as a national political campaign. Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine and author of "The Long Tail," an influential book about markets in the age of the Internet, told me in an interview last year that "change does not happen at the pace of technology. ... Change happens at the pace of generations."

I hope his analysis doesn't apply in the case of presidential politics because I don't think this country can afford to wait.

© News & Record 2007 

Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, [email protected]) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.

Comments

[coturnix]

I've been waiting for three years so far. Glad to hear about Congressopedia - that sounds like a move in the right direction.