Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Son of the Web   [Peter Suderman]

I’ve written a couple of pieces recently on social networking sites, the prototypical “Web 2.0” apps. The Democrats are indeed trouncing the Republicans in their use of these tools, and while I obviously don’t think it’s something to ignore entirely, I’m not sure it’s quite as big a problem as has been suggested. Right now, Obama is extremely popular (with some amusing results), on Facebook and MySpace. But what does that really tell us? Not much more, I think, than that he plays well to the Get Involved youth activist types that are clearly going to go for candidates like Obama anyway. It’s a pretty small subset of the population.

Now, I do think that campaigning will migrate online more and more as the current generation, which pretty much expects everything to be done online, grows up and becomes a greater part of the national political establishment. But I also think that Republicans won't have all that much trouble with the move. As young conservatives move up the various ladders of politics, they’ll be comfortable with the web technologies of the time and won’t really have trouble adapting. That’s the way it goes. When technology shifts again, and we all start uploading our consciousnesses to machines, I’m sure that the libertarians will seem to have an advantage in the beginning, but that everyone else will catch up as it becomes completely normal to exit the meatspace.

04/24 04:15 PMShare