Social Mode

Boy is it hard to avoid political rants lately.  At this point, the major campaigns are all rant. The blogs and news outlets are mostly all rant.

There is very little INFORMATION, POLICY and ARGUMENT for citizens to evaluate.

We can make simple suggestions as to why this is the political process but the real causes and effects are far from simple.  Our media ecology needs ratings to get advertisers.  Ad agencies need fancy media lacking overt controversy.  Politicians need to avoid making a mistake.  Campaign managers need to raise millions (billions?) of dolalrs.  Citizens need time (money) to evaluate the issues.  The two major parties have to appease voters, their donors, their organizers and their lobbyists.  Everyone involve contributes to the struggle for time, money, air time and power. and so on….

The DNC was impressive.  The RNC is impressive for fighting through the competiting media events (hurricanes, “scandal”, start of NFL season, start of prime time TV season).

This election is a crazy media frenzy created by interesting candidates and all sorts of new communication technologies.

Consider the candidates.  You have candidates with all sorts of sordid and interesting pasts… we’ve got old white guys, vets, african americans, women, lawyers, hunters, moms, dads, single moms, single dads, parents of soldiers, drug problems, teen pregnancy, rich guys, poor guys, small town, big town…. it’s finally not an election of Southerners vs. Upper East Coast Politicians.

Consider the technology.  HD tv.  Have you seen these broadcasts on the news channels?  There is so much information.  Sometimes we see 8 screens at once with scrolling facts, news tid bits, full histories, interactive maps… and all of it is connected to a network of blogs, videos, social networks, real live polls.  You can get full voting records, all transcripts of past speeches, historical overviews, and pretty much anything else within seconds for any candidate or major aid. but, the rants still dominate as we learn how to bring all this information together in meaningful ways.

How much of the public is paying attention to this technology?  Well enough that Obama has raised millions from over 2 million donors.  That said, there are probably 50-65% of the eventual voters that are not using all this technology for this election cycle.  I imagine by 2012 that will be 30-40%.

So will we ever get past the rants?  Not as long as TV (and broadcast) is the leading media vehicle.  Perhaps in 4 years the Internet will become the dominate medium.  At worst its 20 years because by then the On Demand generation will be the prime wage earners, and they don’t do broadcast.

The rant dies as soon as the medium doesn’t reinforce it.  Rants are good for Live events and for things that won’t be read and parsed over and over.  Rants get boring quickly and their power dies after a first experience.

or maybe I’m wrong and you can rant about it in the comments.