The International Political Multiplier

[koganbot]

A thought about current political messages:

Owing to the Internet, information and misinformation propagates much more quickly than it previously had, which is how lies that are easily refutable such as Obama being Muslim nonetheless can gain traction and get wide play. However, what it also means is that messages that are tailored to a particular target audience can quickly find their way to other audiences. In times past if you ran an ad in Nebraska that you expected would appeal to swing voters in Nebraska but would alienate swing voters in New York, the ad was likely to stay in Nebraska. Now it might be on YouTube or in the blogosphere within the hour. If a McCain official in southwest Virginia writes a racist column about Obama, it can be internationally known in no time.

Of course, that doesn't mean everything will get propagated. Only a small amount of what gets said achieves critical mass and gets heard by more than a few. But it means that what happens in southwest Virginia doesn't necessarily stay in southwest Virginia.

Comments

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

I was watching a documentary about Lee Attwater last night though, and he had all this stuff going on in the late 80s way before there was widespread internets. is this really much different?

[koganbot]

Had what stuff going on? He had attack ads, right? But what I'm saying is that you used to be able to tailor hit pieces to specific audiences without worrying too much how it would affect other audiences since the other audiences wouldn't know about it. But now other nontarget audiences might well get exposed to it, and a racist hit piece that goes over with undecideds in Appalachia might backfire if it alienates undecideds in Colorado. (Hope I'm not overestimating undecideds in Colorado.)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

there is a general tranformation in the dynamic between what's private conversation, what's public, what's fair game for exposure -- as well as a strange and possibly radical muss-up about what counts as local* and what counts as global

interesting to see the degree to which the american right's cohesion -- which fused round the direct-mail projects of the 70s and 80s -- has been rendered turbulent and less effective by the arrival of email and the general digital link-up (speed and connectedness functioning as a kind of check-and-balance to the intensity and isolation of the earlier medium...)

*internet "neighbourhoods" work by elective affinity rather than politico-geographical cultural allegiance

[koganbot]

I have a friend who gets together with a group of people to talk about what needs to be done to reform politics, and he says one of their ideas is to replace representation by geographic locale with representation by something else, say profession (this way you get to limit the number of lawyers in Congress). I don't see how the latter could possibly work, however. Who gets to represent the unemployed and the disabled? Who gets to define your occupation? I don't really see what any viable alternative to geographic locale would be, or how you can force occupational, class, cultural diversity on the electoral system, even though I can see why one might want to.

Way back in WMS #1 or #2 (before I had an inkling about the 'Net, but was noticing what was happening with fanzines and cable etc.), I suggested that music would get more "local" but by affinity not by geography.