Alex Kellner

Note to my many avid readers: So, clearly I haven’t been very good about posting regularly since my launch. My new resolution is to post at least a few times a week. Sorry for the lack of posting and hopefully I will be able keep a consistent stream of material here.

[cross posted at www.ipdi.org/blog]

Last week, Nate Wilcox of the Webstrong Group spoke to one of my graduate classes. Wilcox’s lecture entitled “Confessions of an Internet Hack,” overviewed the history of politics and the Internet. While much of the lecture wasn’t news to me as an avid follower of Internet politics, Wilcox said one thing that really struck me. Throughout the lecture he “named” each of the elections, and his title for the current election cycle was perhaps the best metaphor to describe the state of the current political Internet that I have come across.

Wilcox’s metaphor began by talking about the 2006 election. He discussed the innovations in mobilizing, messaging and fundraising online that were made in the election cycle. He compared these innovations to rock and roll bands in the late 1960s and early 1970s like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd. Moving on to the 2008 election cycle Wilcox said that The Beatles are to 2006 as Foghat is to 2008. In other words, no one would suggest that Foghat revolutionized the music scene or was even particularly innovative, but, regardless of that fact, they sold out gigantic arenas throughout the mid to late 1970s. The metaphor carries over to Internet politics because while very little innovation has happened online this election cycle (with perhaps the exception of the use of social networks), the effects of old innovations have had made a larger splash because the people are online in larger numbers (just as people were hooked on the rock and roll scene for Foghat).

I think when you look at the oft-pointed to evidence for why 2008 is “the first real Internet election” it backs Wilcox’s characterization. Ron Paul’s money bomb, Obama and Clinton’s online fundraising prowess, Obama’s offline movement with online roots and the campaign’s webpages themselves are all just extensions of developments that occurred in the 2006 election cycle. These events were more pronounced in 2008 because they involved more people and because they received more coverage in the press. This is not necessarily because the campaigns were doing anything drastically different; rather, there are more people comfortable with “new technology”, more people connected to the Internet and the press has become increasingly more likely to cover “Internet” stories in the mainstream press.

Now, I’m not sure that this means that we actually have reached the “first Internet election.” As a child of the millennial generation, The Beatles and Foghat were both before my time, but I have 12 hours of one of the bands and 0 minutes of the other on my iPod. The Beatles are still relevant in today’s music scene, even to someone born almost 20 years after Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released, and Foghat is largely forgotten. Perhaps this is carrying Wilcox’s metaphor slightly too far, but I predict that in 20 years, 2006 will be considered far more important year for the development of online politics than 2008. Whether or not it is “the first Internet election” is going to depend on how 2010, 2012 and beyond carry out as the Internet continues to evolve.