POLITICS AND THE INTERNET IN ITS TEENS: A MANIFESTO

I’ve had this thread stirring in my head for a while. I’m still not sure it is entirely ripe yet, but I felt I should put this out there and see what the world thinks. I think there is a real article in here somewhere, and I fully expect to see articles in the press along these lines in the coming months, but I haven’t seen any good commentary on this issue recently. If you stumble across any recent articles on this general theme, please link them here. I’ll do the same, but until then this will just be a repository for some of my scattered thoughts.

The inspiration for this manifesto started with the Al Gore interview on The Daily Show a few weeks ago. The interview ended with a discussion of the internet, which Gore called “the single greatest source of hope that we will be able to fix what ails the conversation of democracy.” But Gore followed that up with something that really intrigued me:

If the internet had been as strong 6 years ago as it is now, maybe there would have been a lot more attention paid to the real facts and we would not have our troops stuck over there in a civil war.

Before we get into a debate over whether Gore’s alternate history is accurate, it is worth taking a few things into account. Six years ago is right at the tail end of the dot com bubble. Google was still the search engine for the nerdy elite and was just beginning the early stages of setting up an advertising model. Wikipedia ran MySQL on a single server. People said “www”, and seeing a web address in a commercial was still something of a novelty. In other words, the internet was a backwater wasteland with lots of capital but very little economic influence and far less political influence. I’m sure everyone here remembers the internet back in 2001. What most people seem to forget, however, is that a mere 8 years before that the internet was virtually nonexistent. WWW was opened to the public back in 93, and it wasn’t until 96 that AOL stopped charging hourly connection fees and started charging flat rates.

The point of this history lesson, if you will indulge a bit of anthropomorphization, is that the internet is currently a young teenager, just starting to mature and come in to its own. But even at this stage of its development, Gore might be right. After all, the internet has almost doubled its age since 2001, and has received lots of credit recently for instigating some rather important political movements, most notably TPM’s spearheading of the attorney firing scandal. And CNN can’t go 20 minutes without checking in on the blogosphere as a substitute, or at least pretense, for direct two-way communication with its audience. Of course, CNN’s treatment of the blogosphere still feels to me like an awkward attempt to be hip, the same way video game themed game shows like Nick Arcade felt in the early 90s. I also get a somewhat conflicting impression that CNN treats blogs the same way cult members treat their oracle, as a kind of mysterious, other worldly force that occasionally provides cryptic insights into the world.

In any case, one of the hallmarks of adolescence is a stubborn struggle for independence and a rebellion against authority, and this political season has provided an especially interesting case of the Internet attempting to assert its independence. Specifically, I am thinking about the radically different conversations taking place about the 2008 presidential candidates on the internet versus other media outlets. I get most of my political discussions from D&D, and this forum provides a particularly striking example of this phenomenon, but I don’t think D&D is an exception. It has been noted several times in many different threads that D&D’s politics is not representative of the general population, and surely that is right. But from my experience, D&D is fairly representative of the politics of the internet. And a casual glance at D&D shows that the internet’s candidates of choice are Obama on the left, and Paul on the right. Of course, most of the candidates on both sides have their representative defenders, but as far as sheer supporter enthusiasm, Obama and Paul are head and shoulders above everyone else. And this enthusiasm is visible everywhere on the net, from MySpace and Facebook to CNN polls and so on. I’ve been reading D&D since it was CE way back in 2001, and I’ve never seen anything like the kind of aggressive support for a political candidate like we see in both the Obama and the Paul megathreads. The amount of money raised for Obama in his megathread is simply astounding given the jaded, sarcastic community from which he is drawing this support. Even Dean, the archetypical internet candidate, didn’t muster anything close to the kind of enthusiasm across the net that we see in this election cycle.

And yet the contrast with mainstream media outlets couldn’t be more striking. A casual glace at just about any other news source reveals Clinton as the clear favorite on the left, and though the right is quite a bit more fragmented, Paul is nowhere to be seen. To be clear, there have been lots of complaints, especially from the Paul side, that their candidate is being over looked or deliberately denied equal media access. Whether or not these complaints are valid, they are not my complaints. I am not particularly attached to any candidate yet, so this is not about ‘my guy’. Rather, what I am concerned with is the apparent discrepancy between the way politics are handled on the net and they way they are handled on from other media sources.

After the 2004 elections almost every columnist discussing the internet came to the conclusion that the net was not yet important enough to seriously influence, much less decide, the outcome of the election. The internet clearly gained some influence in the 2006 elections, most notably through the use of YouTube to expose some particularly embarrassing campaign moments, but none of this accounts for the vast discrepancy between the two conversations. I’m trying hard not to turn this into a tired “Divided America!!” rant, but it is hard to see it any other way.

Conventional wisdom says that the internet has not yet reached its peak of influence and probably won’t reach that peak before Nov. 2008, but maybe the during the cycle after that we will start to see the internet come into its own as the central medium for political discussion. Extending the anthropomorphization, by then the Internet will be of voting age, and will be mature and responsible enough to handle the political discourse with the sophistication and nuance of other, established outlets. However, on this conventional model the internet merely takes over and replaces existing media outlets. While this replacement will undoubtedly change the tools available for political campaigning, no one seems to think that the political discussions themselves will change to any significant degree, Al Gore notwithstanding. On this model, the discrepancy between the internet and other media sources are accounted for with the claim that most people don’t use the internet as a source for political news, so the net disproportionately represents a vocal and ideologically motivated minority that does not reflect the general population. The fact that Obama and Paul are the internet’s candidates of choice certainly goes some way towards confirming the conventional wisdom. As the internet matures, however, the idea is that the political discussions of the net will also move towards the mainstream, and the internet will eventually serve as Cable News 2.0. In other words, the conventional wisdom carries with it an implicit assumption: If the internet were as popular and widely used today as television news, then the issues, opinions, and discussions we would see on the internet would closely approximate the discussions we see on TV with relatively minor cosmetic changes in the format.

However, I think the conventional wisdom is dead wrong. After the 2004 election, Pew released a survey claiming that a full 75 million Americans (61% of “online Americans”) used the internet as an essential source of political information and discussion, and 52% of news consumers generally said that the internet was an important factor in shaping their voting decisions. That was 3 years ago, nearly a quarter of the internet’s lifetime. Pew didn’t do any hard studies in 2006, but did note that on a typical day in August around 26 million people were using the internet for political news, roughly 13% of all voting age Americans. (Pew did draw a few interesting conclusions from this data, which you can find here). To put these numbers in context, voter turnout in 2004 was around 123.5 million, and in 2006 was around 85 million. So although relatively few people used the internet as their primary source of information (18% in 2004 by Pew’s survey), the internet is nevertheless used by a significant majority of people for political news and discussion.

Furthermore, while is it obviously true that the internet gives a voice to an otherwise underrepresented and ideologically driven minority, it would be much too hasty to infer that the mainstream media does a better job at representing the general public by not representing these voices. Part of the reason the traditional media is in crisis is on account of their top down (or ‘push’) model, where editors, journalists, and pundits set the agenda, and their success at representing the public is judged by how many viewers they attract. Nearly everyone is in agreement that this entertainment-based model is entirely inadequate for sustaining the complexity of discourse necessary for a democracy, especially given the proliferation of information made available by the internet. And the fact that certain voices appear to be over represented on the internet is partly a product of the top-down model of other media sources. At the very least, and I think uncontroversially, it is simply inappropriate to appeal to the discrepancies between political discussions on the internet and other media sources as evidence that the internet is out of touch with the general population.

The above is by no means conclusive, but I hope it at least goes part way towards calling into question the conventional wisdom, that the internet is “not ready for primetime” or is somehow disconnected from the general public. If we abandon the conventional model, however, we are left puzzled by the discrepancy between the candidates of choice on the net versus the candidates of choice in the news media.

The alternative explanation is to recognize that the internet is not a stable alternative to established media sources, and that the internet will never take over and replace cable news. Rather, the internet is a dynamic entity in a continuous and rapid state of growth, and will therefore inevitably fail to settle into an equilibrium that approximates cable news. This isn’t particularly surprising, even from the conventional perspective. What is new and surprising, and I don’t think has been talking about enough, is the fact that right now, this growth is taking the form of a struggle for independence from the traditional media outlets. The real issue in politics right now is not between a group of democrats and a group of republicans each vying for their respective nominations. It is between the internet on the one hand and the mainstream media on the other, each vying for the political influence to set the tone and topics for the national debate.

I think it is important that we recognize that this is a debate happening right now, and is going to be absolutely essential in settling this coming election. This isn’t some far off future fantasy that might happen 6 or more years from now– the disconnect and conflict is already obvious to anyone paying attention. And once you realize that this is one of the core issues of this election, lots of things start to fall into place. Since people still accept the conventional wisdom about the relative impotence of the internet, the current crop of political candidates think they are obligated to play ball with the mainstream media, and are willing to subject themselves to humiliating and embarrassing exercises like the last few debates on CNN. Some have realized that they can turn down these public spectacles, as many did to the Fox debate invite, but they ought to realize that they can just as easily turn down the rest of them too, and with equally minor political blowback. CNN is just barely competent enough to run the debate, from both a technical and a moderator angle, and the candidates and parties can do a much better job organizing these debates on their own. Why concede any power to the cable news networks at all? If Clinton or Giuliani started aggressively calling out the mainstream media today on their barely competent handling of the democratic process, they would get tons of media attention, the respect of plenty of voters, and do significant work towards shifting the balance of power towards the internet. And under no circumstance would this result in less TV air time; the 24 hour networks are desperate enough as it is for content.

The ironic thing is that the media has all but admitted that it is obsolete, as evidenced by its pathetic attempts to exploit the internet by reporting its discussions as news. The internet must stop making excuses for its perceived impotence and realize that the conditions are already in place for a dramatic shift in the balance of power. If Gore is even halfway right about the power of the internet today, then there is simply no excuse for maintaining the status quo. The internet does not have to wait to replace the established media; we can simply undermine it, and to a large extent we already have. Nearly every candidate on both sides of the isle have tried to appeal to a nation tired of the political games perpetuated by an obsolete media framework. I believe the public is sympathetic to these appeals and are ready for an alternative framework. This framework is already largely in motion on the internet. This doesn’t mean that suddenly everyone will turn off their TVs and get on their computers. CNN will continue reporting the news just like it always has, and people will still turn in to watch it. All it means is that the mainstream media will return to its rightful place as subservient to the needs, interests, and attitudes of We the People.