The Jester’s Sneer
Cross posted at TechPresident.com
At the risk of losing my head, I will tumble into the fray with a response to the Queen’s Screed presented in the latest issue of the Turner Report. Though the Queen and I have been friends for more than fifteen years, I submit she often looks at political communications through the lens of the Nixon-Kennedy debate, while I see it through the monitor as I sit clicking in a coat I borrowed from Howard Dean. And the ultimate irony, perhaps, is that my doctoral thesis was on presidential use of television to manipulate public opinion. I know televised politics. Televised politics was a friend of mine. And the internet is no televised politics.
So let’s dig into the discussion. To begin with, has the internet made us any sillier than we used to be? To read the Screed and the analysis in William Powers’ National Journal piece “Dancing Horses” it refers to, one would think that the internet, with all of its nonsensical videos and mindless chatter, is distracting the people from serious discussion about serious issues, namely the presidential campaigns. But this phenomenon is hardly new or unique to the internet. Prior to the rise of the internet, Neil Postman eloquently argued that TV was making us silly. He discussed this “And now this…” attitude in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1986), a book I highly recommend.
Perhaps it was the explosion of channels and the launch of twenty-four hour news channels targeted at mainstream America, an audience often looking for distractions from the drudgery of their daily work, which led to the deterioration of serious discussions about important issues of the day. Or perhaps it was television itself, which destroyed the idea that putting something in writing was a way to validate credibility and gave rise to the mass belief seeing it on television made it real. After all, “seeing is believing,” even if we only see what is directly in front of the camera from time A to time B (or time A to time B and time D to time E, etc. with an editor’s touch). As McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.”
Regardless, the point is that the rise of silliness in American public discourse clearly predates the internet. And, I would argue, the rise of the internet has given us the opportunity to rise above the silliness and pursue more deliberative and thoughtful discussions about issues and politics.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of silly dancing horses on the internet, and some silly dancing PixlChix, too (1.2 million views and growing at the time of this writing). But there are also deep and informed political discussions going on, too. Some of it is taking place in the partisan blogging communities of the DailyKos and Townhall, some in non/multi-partisan venues like TechPresident. Other conversations are taking place in email, where friends and families are forwarding each other links to interesting articles and websites they have seen.
And not only are these serious discussions about serious issues and politics extensive online, even if it is not as popular as dancing horses and chix, but they are remarkably extensive this far ahead of the presidential elections. In a world where most voters historically start paying attention to elections a couple months before Election Day and rarely make their decision who to vote for until less than two weeks out, the very thought of having this much serious discussion about the elections more than eight months before what will be the longest primary season even begins is mind blowing.
So rather than level critiques against the internet as if it were an instant savior fallen from grace, let’s look at it with a more realistic perspective. Heed not the temptation to think that everything should be able to be done online immediately, cheaply, and with perfect success. Let’s recognize that the internet is still in its infancy with respect to its impact on politics and that the potential is both great and unpredictable.
Let us also recognize that the internet is a different kind of medium than any we have seen before. Unlike all of the others, it can facilitate all dynamics of communication: one to many, many to one, one to one, and many to many. It is also a medium where people go looking for specific information. This distinguishes it from television in a way that requires a significant change in message strategy. While both media rely on humor to hook people, the internet requires front-loading key elements of your message instead of back-loading them, as we would do on TV.
On TV, a political commercial has to pretend to be something more interesting to avoid people changing the channel or heading off to the kitchen or bathroom. The political message is delivered after the audience is hooked. But this bait and switch strategy does not work as well online.
In order to deliver a video message online, you have about four seconds to convince your audience they want to hear your message and about fifteen seconds to deliver it. Remember, for the most part, people are looking for your message, so bait and switch is not advised. Instead, hook them fast and hard. Then deliver a message that has natural breakpoints every fifteen seconds. This ensures that your message is delivered in complete thoughts even if people leave before the video is over.
This is but one example of what a candidate can do to break though in online; to set themselves apart from the pack. If the Nixon-Kennedy debate was a breakthrough moment in the use of television for political discourse, then the breakthrough moment William Powers is looking for will somehow involve a candidate using the internet as it is meant to be used, not how they want it to be used. Remember, no one knows you aren’t wearing make-up online.
I have long argued that the ultimate use of the internet for politics and advocacy is to build strategic communities of champions and supporters. Get them to internalize the stakes of your campaign and give them the tools to become political organizers on their own. This is how we transcend from political campaigns to political movements. This is how the internet facilitates meaningful change in politics. And it does not require us to forego our desire for entertainment.
So to those who argue that the internet is undermining serious political discourse because we spend more time watching fluff than stuff, I want to issue a word of caution and a modicum of perspective. Look to the absolute amount of serious political discourse online, rather than to its relative amount compared to the fluff. You will see the difference and it is good.