It seems that America’s political life is on exodus to the Internet. A recent PEW/Internet study of the 2006 midterm elections found that the number of Americans researching candidates and issues online doubled from the last midterm election, and rivaled the usage figures for the 2004 Presidential election (a marvel, considering that many Americans completely ignore those “off-years”). All told, 31% of Americans (45% of internet users) used the Internet in some form during the election season; however, 35% of broadband users under age 36 said that the Internet was their main resource during the campaign, while only 18% of that demographic relied primarily on televised news. If these trends continue, as they almost certainly will, success on the Internet will increasingly determine the outcome of elections.
The Spartan Internet Political Performance (SIPP) Index rates Barack Obama nearly twice as successful in Internet campaigning (based on his Google page rank, presence in online news outlets, and popularity on social networking sites, blogs, and YouTube) as any other candidate. In exactly what does Senator Obama’s popularity consist? What kind of political discourse—an explicit or implicit dialogue among politicians and citizens—does such a campaign engender?
As a case study, consider a thoughtful, 20 year-old college student in Manhattan. Concerned about the upcoming election, he pulls out his laptop, and goes online to do some research, navigating to Google, the most popular Internet search engine. Say he searches for “Obama” (which will yield nearly 44,000,000 hits, four times the total for “Romney”)—what will he find? The third hit yielded in the search (after the campaign website, and a Google Books listing) is the Wikipedia article under the Senator’s name, which, according to Jose Antonio Vargas of the Washington Post, is frequently vandalized—anonymous editors insert false information, epithets, and even change “Obama” to “Osama.” After some popular news sites, Google’s sixth and seventh offerings are Senator Obama’s Myspace (the web’s most popular social networking site) profile, and a collection of YouTube videos attached to his name. The eighth hit is an advertisement for Obama t-shirts and yard signs.
Now, suppose this student navigates to the Barack TV page on YouTube, which houses over 252 videos, each generally under three minutes long, with anywhere between 5,000, and 20,000 views. The exceptions to this rule are videos such as his appearance on Saturday Night Live, “Vote Different,” a satire on a popular 1984 Apple advertisement mocking Hillary Clinton (produced independently by a web designer who works for Obama), and “I got a crush on Obama” (produced by BarelyPolitical.com, and inserting a swaying, R&B-singing teenage girl into Obama’s campaign speeches) —YouTube lists these videos with 650,000, 3.8 million, and 4.2 million views, respectively. Thus, the videos that aspire to serious political engagement tend to be sound bytes, two-minute long clips that cannot hope to offer a thorough treatment of an issue; but even these are largely ignored in comparison with the wild popularity of comedic pieces.
Of course, while Obama is most popular online thus far, his Internet presence is typical of the pool as a whole. Three of the top eight hits in the Google search for “2008 presidential candidates” are Wikipedia articles. Three of the first eight hits in a Google search for “Hillary Clinton” are a Wikipedia article, a YouTube video, and a Myspace page. The ninth hit in a Google search for “Rudy Giuliani” is a YouTube video of the Mayor in drag, flirting with Donald Trump (479,000 views). The popular “Five Brothers’ Blog,” created by Romney’s five sons, exposes the mundane details of life on the campaign trail—the most recent post includes pictures of Craig Romney feeding a hippo. Hillary Clinton has a “campaign headquarters” on the virtual reality network “Second Life,” which hosts frequent (virtual) political rallies and debates. Though managed by unpaid devotees, the virtual headquarters remain in close contact with the real world campaign.
Now, some might scoff that this only proves that Obama’s—and others’—popularity on the Internet is not really political, at all—real politics, they will insist, consists in candidates’ themselves engaging social issues (or at least carrying out ad hominem attacks under the guise of debate). They might also note that many citizens do use the Internet in service of traditional politics, pointing to findings in the 2006 election PEW/Internet study which show that Internet users who rely primarily on the Internet for research are actually better informed on a range of issues than those who focus on television and print media, or even to the CNN/YouTube debates, which allow individuals engage one-to-one with candidates by submitting questions online. Indeed, they potentially have a powerful argument: the Internet has brought nearly every aspect of human knowledge, from the dialogues of Plato to the population of Dubai, to the fingertips of anyone with a connection, free except for the cost of signing on. If politicians and politically minded citizens could focus the Internet’s role to that of an information disseminator and harvester, America might witness a Golden Age of civic wisdom and engagement.
Sadly, this argument fails because it fundamentally misunderstands this new medium—the Internet does not merely offer new tools to carry out politics, but redefines the discussion altogether. In his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman traces the epistemological changes wrought by the invention of the telegraph, prior to which, he insists, political exchange was reasoned and sophisticated to a degree unimaginable today, such that, “The Gettysburg Address would have been largely incomprehensible to a [modern] audience.” He cites the Lincoln-Douglas debates, in which “complex rhetorical devices—sarcasm, irony, paradox, elaborated metaphors, fine distinctions, and the exposure of contradiction”—so abounded that they compared to “expository prose lifted whole from the page.” The telegraph changed all that, flooding the minds of Americans with a torrent of disconnected facts: everything from the weather in Wyoming to the marriages of European nobility became daily currency. Communicating with this new medium, which grinded every thought into glimmering fragments amid a tornado of data, could only result in disorientation and confusion. In turning information into a commodity product, the telegraph cheapened all knowledge, and buried noble thought in a haystack of ignominy. On the Internet, where pornography, Wikipedia articles, and Myspace profiles vastly outnumber works of antiquity and scholarship, one finds this devaluing principle of telegraphic discourse taken to its fullest extent.
For a candidate to stand out amid the Internet’s welter and waste, where every voice is lost in cacophony, and every image hidden by a thousand competitors, he must shout the loudest, and shine the brightest. He no longer even has the hope of a passive audience for his thirty-second television advertisements: on the Internet, users must largely come find the candidate. They must click on the brightly flashing ad, watch the amusing YouTube video, or befriend him on Facebook. The candidate will only succeed online by appealing to his audience; and appealing to the Internet culture of frivolity may mean becoming frivolous oneself.
A recent online ad for the CNN/YouTube debate summarizes the issue nicely:
“What will you ask them? Healthcare? Iraq? Instant replay for baseball?”
Funny, yes, but it illustrates an important point—a society in which anyone has immediate access to the highest levels of political debate cannot avoid the cheapening of its political life. Reading the Republic, or following a five-hour lecture requires intense study, and thoughtful meditation. Needing nothing more to engage the future President than a laptop and a broadband connection leaves open the option of engaging him with trivial, inane thoughts. When technology makes it possible to communicate anything at practically no cost, can the end result be other than a society of students mindlessly browsing through Facebook profiles during class, blissfully unconcerned that Aristotle (or a detailed analysis of the 2008 campaign) lies just a few keystrokes away? The Internet demands a trivial political discourse precisely because it engulfs meaning in a flood of triviality, which will always command the attention of average man. Philosophy is such hard work; Myspace offers the comfort of mental-immobility.
A final illustration may point to the apocalyptic judgment awaiting the Internet culture. A Facebook group promoting the fictional candidacy of comedian Stephen Colbert for President (“1,000,000 Strong for Stephen Colbert”) grew to over 1,000,000 members within a week, making it the most popular political group on the site, far more so than a similar group for Senator Obama. Colbert has enjoyed such success online because he specializes in the sort of frivolity that flourishes on the Internet; the serious political candidates have only managed half-hearted attempts at engaging this burgeoning culture. This is the truly successful Internet campaigner, and, possibly, a model for successful Presidential candidates in the generations to come.
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