Political Campaigns in the age of Blog
Matt Stoller’s politics make me cringe; but his analysis of the shifts in poltical campaigning as the internet overwhelms MSM are always worth reading. The US is miles ahead of Canada in the use of the internet in campaigns but the points Stoller makes in his recent post will be here in no more than half a decade. Here are the bullets:
- But why will blogs become so important? Well, because other tools are cruder, and will lose influence as their ability to reach people declines. Take TV. This is a crude medium…
- TIVO’s going to make it more difficult to buy viewer attention, since viewers will simply be able to choose to not watch ads. This is also happening to radio, since everyone will soon be listening to podcasts after all those are superhip! (more likely is satelite radio I suspect but the effect is somewhat similar).
- The same is true of robocalls and phone banks. In this case it’s not TIVO but cell phones that are the culprit.
- What does it mean, politically speaking? I would say two important things. Money is going to be much much less important in politics, because you won’t have to buy TV time to talk to voters, though field will matter. Parties will gain in power, since a party will contain the social infrastructure to spread a candidate’s message.
Stoller sees this as heralding a return to the politics of the 1880’s and 90’s where political parties at the local and net levels really matter and where individual voices, without a lot of money, will matter if they are able to gather influence.
He sees this as positive and so do I.
Written by jay on November 14th, 2005 with
2 comments.
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Matt Stoller
#1. November 14th, 2005, at 8:58 PM.
It looks to me like all Stoller is saying is that blogs will replace tv ads and robocalls. That’s not exactly something to be proud about.
What most of the navel gazers like Stoller don’t realize is that blogs are just a further watering down of the audience. Which means that either more money has to be spent to reach the same number of people or else less ads are directed at the same number of people.
What they also don’t realize is that it’s now much harder for a party to avoid serious faux-pas on the election trail. With so many armchair strategists spewing their gibberish onto the net, it makes it virtually guaranteed that someone will say something stupid enough to cause the party leaders to have to defend or distance themselves from it or risk taking damage. This will be particularly troublsome for Harper this election season. He’s managed to muzzle the nutters in the party caucus, but not the supporters.