On John Perry Barlow's blog this evening, a series of thoughts about online media and the Dean presidential campaign:
[T]hey may have eliminated the candidate most likely to defeat George Bush, whose adventures at home and abroad are likely to make for another four years of riveting television. Or have they? Howard Dean has hardly retired from the race, even though he will be running uphill from here. And it may be that the traditional media have done us a favor by beating some of the smug snot-nose out of us. One of problems with the groups that form on the Internet (…) is that they often end up being self-reifying fields of ideological homogeneity. We create our own ideological ghettos which seem much larger to us than they are.
Moreover, while many of us are convinced that the Internet is a powerful environment for organizing belief, it is also a great cacophony against which even the diminished voice of broadcast retains a kind of clarity. I believe I have just seen demonstrated the power of that signal. Can we create one of our own that is heard as clearly by the public in general? That remains to be seen. Now, at least, we know what we're up against.
Of course, there remains the possibility that the big media didn't beat Howard Dean in Iowa and New Hampshire at all. It may simply be that the new media failed to win it. We may have been too glued to our monitors to remember that while elections get won by money – 12 out of 13 races in the last Congressional elections were won by the candidate who spent the most – they are also won by people on the ground. Regardless of who wins the Democratic nomination, we will have to work very hard, in dreary, traditional ways, to get him elected.
