The Next Big Thing
Posted by
Kevin
Atrios links to this very good advice to Obama — and, really, any candidate — by Zack Exley. The post is long, but worth the read. The most important part, I think, though, is right up front:
Everyone knows the story about the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debate. Nixon showed up at the debate pale, with a terrible 5:00 shadow, and his shirt didn’t fit. He refused to wear makeup to improve his appearance on TV, fearing embarrassment in the press. Even though his performance was comparable to Kennedy’s, he lost the debate in the voter’s minds because he just looked awful.
It was a matter of failing to understand the new medium of television—of failing to understand it personally, at the highest level of the campaign, at the level of the candidate, campaign manger and senior aides. They knew how important television was—but they still thought of it as some new fangled thing external to politics. Sure, they had media consultants, but they weren’t around when he was putting on his shirt that night, and when he was being asked whether or not he wanted makeup. It wasn’t enough to have TV consultants, Nixon and is inner circle of two or three top aides needed to understand the medium themselves.
The power of the internet is that, right now, in politics, it is something completely new. And since it is something completely new, no one has really figured out how to use to its full potential. Dean’s campaign showed the outlines of what that might look like, but even they weren’t able to use the Internet the same way that the Kennedy campaign used television. Television transformed politics by breaking the existing centers of power. The decline of the back room and the party boss was, if not started by television, certainly accelrated by its appearance. Television allowed a candidate to go around the then existing power structures and even create new centers of power. Kennedy’s and, even more so, Reagan’s understadnign of how different television was gave them an enormous advantage over their opponents.
The internet can do the same thing now. A smart candidate can use the internet to work around the established power centers of big money donors and media consultants. But it will take a candidate that really gets how people use the internet, that understands the various cultural norms of the internet and is willing to make the use of the internet one of the central pillars of their campaign. I the same way that modern campaigns craft almost all of their events, appearances, and media strategy around how they will work on television, the modern campaign must do the same thing with the internet. They must immerse their campaign in it the same way past campaigns immersed themselves in the ethos and aesthetic of television. It will be a lot of hard work –the interactivity of the internet requires more thought and honesty than the sound bite of the television screen. But then, the internet does not limit candidates to the sound bite. Whoever figures out how to use the internet to inspire, to spread news, to build community, to work around the limitation of the current media environment, to new centers of political power, is going to have an enormous advantage over their rivals.
the internet, like most other tools of mass communication, really will change everything. Eventually. Whoever does the work to get to “eventually” first will be well rewarded.
