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Is The Net About to Transform Politics?
It's not going to happen. Washington is the last holdout against the wall-busting power of the Net. They'll go kicking and screaming, but not next year.
The pundits are already hyping the 2000 Presidential election as the year in which the Net transforms mainstream politics.
The Internet, USA Today reported last week, "is a new wave in politics, one that could rival or surpass the impact of TV's."
Gushes Newsweek in a cover report on how the Internet is changing America: "E-campaigning has been upgraded from novelty to necessity in the blink of an eye. Candidates must now compete in the wilds of the Web, a world with its own rules, politics and governing may never be the same."
It sounds breathtakingly significant.
But don't buy it.
The pundits are wrong, especially when it comes to the 2000 election.
They ought to be right. Everything - the people, the technology, the timing - is in place for that Net tidal wave, except for one seminal ingredient: politicians.
Savvy political figures from Kennedy to Reagan to Clinton have always understood that technologies like television, radio and the Net are a powerful new way to communicate their philosophies. Reagan's "Morning In America" campaign was perhaps the best recent use of TV to evoke a successful political ideology.
Reagan, a professional actor, didn't really need to understand the details of politics or government, and never did. What he did understand was TV, which enabled him to reach a vast audience with a powerful philosophy.
In order for the Net to do the same thing, a national politician would have to emerge who really understands the Net in the way Reagan grasped visual imagery. There is no such person running for President of the United States.
Here, George W. Bush's decision to put his list of campaign contributors online is considered a monumental hi-tech political step, sending the Washington pols and their co-dependent reporters into a frenzy. But the information, which was already available to the public, doesn't alter the political system.
Al Gore would like to be Father of the Net, but he's had as much trouble capturing the imagination of the wired world as the other one. Elizabeth Dole is too busy campaigning against pornography on the Internet to notice she's by-passing the biggest untapped political constituency of our time.
John McCain has a savvier grasp of telecommunications issues than most other national politicians, but he's hardly an interactive political figure. Steve Forbes campaign promised to conduct the "first Internet-based campaign" in American history. But vast databases aren't a transforming digital political idea, and Forbes himself has hardly set American imaginations aflame, online or off.
Gore, Steve Forbes, McCain, Dan Quayle and others have already held moderated chats on outside sites such as washingtonpost.com and CNN. Dole's campaign, says she plans on participating in online chats starting this fall. None of these "chats" have made any news, sparked any political discussions, or had any impact on politics or individual campaigns. In the fact, the very notion of a single politician "chatting" with the tens of millions of people online manages to trivialize both the Net and the political system at the same time.
There's probably never been a meaningful live political chat in the history of the Internet. The very form makes the idea ridiculous.
Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura used his pioneering website jesse.net to raise money and round up volunteers, making a successful end-run around well-funded opponents. But Ventura isn't likely to leap to higher office, with or without the Net.
Some people are experimenting with political uses of the Net. Last year, Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, husband-and-wife software developers in Silicon Valley, threw up a website - moveon.org -- to protest the Clinton impeachment. Within days generated a half-million electronic petititon signatures that threatened to clog the servers on Capitol Hill. But they didn't slow or stop the impeachment process.
The Democracy Online Project studied 161 Congressional and gubernatorial campaigns last year and found that 84 per cent of employed some form of online politicking. Seventy-six percent used websites to recruit volunteers, and 63 per cent were at least somewhat effective in persuading visitors to vote for the candidates.
Most of these campaigns raised some money online. Given the growth of computers, drooling political consultants believe the 2000 election will see the first significant contributions through computer links. John Phillips, president of the political fund-raising software company Aristotle, estimates that more than $25 million will be raised via the Internet by Election Day. But even if that occurs, it's a drop in the anticipated $600 million Election Year 2000 bucket.
As of September, Democratic contender Bill Bradley had raised only $330,000 of his $12 million presidential war chest online, and most of Bush's and Gore's campaign cash has come through the usual fund-raisers, committees and distinctly low-tech checks.
It makes sense that more and more money would be donated digitally, since more and more voters are going online. But transferring money on the Net isn't the same thing as transforming politics.
Some political and journalistic seers believe the first demonstration of Net power will erupt spontaneously: somebody will give a dazzling speech or perform brilliantly in a debate; voters, increasingly at ease rushing using their browsers for online financial transactions, will donate tens of millions of dollars through political websites overnight, and wake up snoozing Washington.
My own notion is that this may happen outside the context of a formal or traditional campaign, as with Ventura. The first Net candidate will almost certainly be young, someone who's grown up using computers and browsing the Web.
Most Washington politicians and the reporters who cover them are too mired in their incestuous talk show-dinner party, spin-the-news atmosphere to get what the Net is about or figure out how to use it politically.
Some of this is institutional constipation. All during the Monica Lewinsky drama, the U.S. Congress revealed itself as a remote, antideluvian institution unable to read the mood of the American public or respond rationally to it.
Part is journalism's continuing struggle to come to terms with the Digital Age. For many political writers, the Net is a nightmare, since it will inevitably erode their monopoly on communicating directly with politicians, and presenting politics to the rest of the country.
It's no accident that Ventura came from about as far outside Washington as you can get - Midwestern local government and pro wrestling.
Washington's political and journalistic elites are so disconnected from most Americans that any politician who goes online - even an ex-wrestler with a confusing political agenda - automatically becomes a charismatic populist.
But when some future Net-savvy politician does figure out how to use the World Wide Web, he or she will come nose-to-nose with the powerful ethos of interactivity -- and politics will finally be reborn. The most likely time for this to happen: the 2002 congressional elections, well away from Washington, national political reporters, or political conventions and primaries.
American-style democracy dates to an era when most voters never got to lay eyes on their elected officials, let alone participate in civic information-gathering and decision-making. Washington was constructed to do the talking and voting on behalf of constituents unable to join. Technology, especially computer technology, has completely transformed that reality as Wall Street, among others, is rapidly learning.
Voters can connect instantly with their government representatives, gather information, register opinions. Just as wired Americans are re-shaping financial markets, the music industry and retailing, they will inevitably get around to beating down the walls around Washington with their keyboards, and ASDL lines.
Washington may well be the last holdout. The music industry, banking, education, science, medicine and entertainment are all reeling - and changing -- as Internet-driven interactivity threatens their primacy and their profit margins.
How would a pol take advantage of the Internet?
Politicians need to understand the particular characteristics of the young, educated, technologically-centered people working, playing and communicating through networked computers.
In l997, Wired magazine and Merrill Lynch jointly conducted a Digital Citizen survey to discover distinct political values emerging from the online world.
The survey found that wired Americans - people who use computers to access the Net and the Web regularly -- were different from the non-Wired, often in ways that contradicted conventional wisdom.
They tend, for instance, to be enthusiastic and optimistic about democracy. Perhaps because they benefit from it, they love the free market system. They resist labels like "Republican" and "Democrat" or "liberal" and "conservative;" they regard issues one by one, rather than invoking ideological affiliation.
Smart and intensely communicative, they share pop culture as a common passion - they love movies, technology, TV and music in particular -- and are more likely to be talking about the weekend box office grosses at the water cooler on Monday than about anything they saw on "Meet The Press." But they're suspicious of conventional media, with little patience for the self-righteous moral policing or politics-as-wrestling presented on Washington talk shows.
A Net-savvy politician would trumpet the Net as a boon to research, a liberator of information, a spur to community building and new forms of communications.
He or she would bang the drums about preserving freedom online, jump into the ferocious battle over encryption, confront the growing power of the megacorporations flooding the Net, and advocate a competitive business environment where entrepeneurs can also flourish. He might embrace the techno-idealism of online political movements like open source and free software.
He might push for some national discussion of issues raised by supercomputing, genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, technologically driven advances with enormous social and cultural implications, good and bad.
The Net pol might favor the equitable distribution of technology, so that America won't split (as it already has) into techno-haves and have nots.
A Net pol would leave moral posturing to preachers, parents and individual families. Enough of laws forbidding indecent language, unworkable and chaotic ratings systems, or copies of the Ten Commandments posted in schools as solutions to complex social programs. The Net is in its second generation, and it would be nice if politicians were as mature.
A Net campaigner needs some smart geeks high up in his campaign as well as slick pollsters. And this is important: he would have to be interactive, rather than pretending to be. Bush made a lot of noise in September by announcing that he'd list every campaign contribution received on his new website (www.georgebush.com), but he's about as interactive as a concrete piling.
Interactivity is a political, not a technological idea. It means sharing, not giving up, power. The Net candidate would not simply go on live "chats" but engage in some running online conversations, browsing the Web, e-mailing voters, downloading files, trawling through ICQ chat message boards where harried homemakers post messages while the kids nap, and teens go looking for MP3's.
Over time, this kind of interaction is transformative, to journalists as well as politicians. Different points-of-view seep into one's consciousness. Isolation and disconnection are tough to maintain. An interactive politician would have known from the first the public wasn't going to go for Bill Clinton's impeachment, no matter what Kenneth Starr found or did.
The candidate of the Net would re-engineer the political website -- from a static advertising and fund-raising vehicle peddling buttons and stickers to a genuinely democratic forum that uses digital technologies to amass continuously - updated information on what citizens want their leaders to address.
Entertainment and business currently top the list of sought-after content on the Net, according to Cyber Dialogue. Politicis isn't even on the list, a sharp commentary on the world's leading democracy.
At the heart of the Internet culture are the programmers, investment capitalists, designers, developers, entrepeneurs and users who comprise the core of the networked computing industry. The first politician who wins their allegiance will have enlisted the country's most powerfully-connected constituencies -and one of its most affluent and civic-minded.
Netizens believe in democracy. They believe in the future, perhaps because they are part of it. They see themselves as agents of change. They embrace the idea of using technology to identify problems and solutions.
They don't want a political system in which politicians and pundits lecture them on morality; they want a different one, marked by straight talk, an exchange of information an rationality in place of posturing, dogma, confrontation, hype and spin.
Does this sound like anyone you see popping up in primary states on the evening news?
Instead of clucking about how dangerous movies and pop culture are (Bob Dole), the Net candidate will go see them. Instead of viewing the Net warily from afar (George W.Bush), he'll be on it every day. Instead of claiming to be its founder (Al Gore), the ideal Net candidate will periodically trounce computer companies for their arrogance and greed.
Instead of spouting Millenial techno-blabber about the future (Bill Clinton), the Net candidate will be looking for concrete ways to get computers into the hands of every American kid, assuring not only equality of opportunity, but continued American dominance of the global economic boom.
This may be inevitable, but, strangely, it isn't imminent.
This article is slanted to display the hideous bias of the author, which can be interpreted as common sence, or sheer ignorance depending on your own personal politcal stance.
They only managed to get two issues out untainted. The first being that washington politco's are horridly disconnected. This is true, whatever side of the 2.0+-.1 party system fence you sit on, strattle, or stare at.
I think he's right that there won't be a huge impact anytime soon. Polititions and their machines will most likely avoid the interactive part of the Net, because it's uncontrollable, at least in the conventional sence.
Personally, other than immedeate and continuing information distribution, and maybe public forums, i really don't WANT the net to have that big an impact on politics.
what? hunh?
Ok, almost the entire world would readily agree that the american public on the whole is rather knee-jerky and ignorant. The passing of law, regardless of the feelings of the public, is a process that needs to be spread over a period of time, so that both the governed and the governors can examine it in it's detail, and it what it's consequences mean.
For example, one thing i never ever want to see, is on-line voting. Let's assume it won't be abusing such a system to vote multiple times. I'll use a rather exaggurated example here of why we don't want a stream-line some of these processes. Some guys walking down the street. A watermelon falls from a 10th story window and hits him. a thousand news sites pick it up, as the guy was on his way to save someone from cancer and suppored a family of 20 by working 4 jobs etc. Big tragidy. Some polition instantly puts up a speech about the horrors and evil of watermelons and they must be banned. Instantly, touched voters hit they're little submit buttons and viola! water melons are banned. Thousands of watermelon distribution channels close. Watermelon farmers are out of buisness, perhaps even jailed for continuing to grow their products. And noone has a juicy delicios fruit to eat in the summer time. A bout a month later, anouther man is killed when a pineapple falls from a 10th story window on his head. Only this time it's discoverd that it was thrown from that window by a serial fruit killer... who also killed the first guy by throwing the watermelon at him...
It's several orders of magnitude more difficult to repeal a law than to get one passed in the first place, and even with a stream-lined kneejerk voting process, that is very hard to change. Bingo, you've ruined 100's of peoples lives for lack of facts, facts that indead may not have been able to be discovered quickly enough to support good voting in an instant process. Lets not even talk about the metal processes of the voters (long known to be rather retarded)
Thats a rather extreme example, but apply it to something more mundane and think it through and the ugly consequences flow forth. If you think i'm pessimistic, think on this; One bad law, historically, ALWAYS causes more harm than the good done by 6 good laws.
For a more indepth fictional look at what can happen to us if we alter our law-making and polition electing processes to quickly, to irresponsibly, read Tracy Hickman's book _Immortals_.
-Tilde
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