It’s not just that so many denizens of the Net are barking loonies; that’s equally true of the general population. But too many Netters are still a demographically narrow slice of the electorate. They’re too young to vote, too broke to contribute to campaign funds, and too busy downloading pornography to care much about upholding democracy. Worse yet, the medium itself doesn’t encourage reasoned argument or the kinds of people who engage in it. —Crawford Kilian —A Forecast from 1994: Net Propaganda (Writing for the Web)
A very interesting set of predictions, now 10 years old, about how the Internet might shape politics. Particularly noteable are the comments about dirty tricks: “e-mail bombings” and viruses.
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I'm definitely going to spend time on the election during "Writing for the Internet" next fall, and I we did spend some time tracking the rise of the Dean campaign in "Practice of Journalism" last term, but I hadn't planned to work politics into the courses I'm teaching this year. Well, we read some Plato and have been talking about propaganda and power in "Media Aesthetics"...
But yes, Dean lived by the web and (thanks to audio remixes of the "I Have a Scream" speech) may have died by the web.
Kilian was writing at a time when really only geeks were online. I don't think that's really the case anymore, but it's also true that many of my students who are webloggers are mostly using their blogs to socialize or occasionally comment on each other's posted creative work or musings about required texts.
Only a few students regularly use their blogs as a vehicle to express their opinion on current events or politics... for the moment I'm trying to watch what the students are doing and learn from their lead, so that when I start asking them to blog more critically, my request won't suddenly turn blogging into "homework".
Interesting material, Dennis. Are you using this in class? It seems custom made for this campaign year. I wonder if the Dean campaign made itself seem bigger because of its web presence? That doesn't mean the web is a political dead end. I'm sure the Dean campaign offers some insight to future pols hoping to leverage a web presence into voter appeal.