Earlier this week we wrote a comment on the new White House e-mail system. Essentially, the Bush administration has made it much more difficult to communicate with the President by forcing comment through a contorted trail of web pages (you can no longer send e-mail to president @whitehouse.gov). Designed to pre-filter comments into pro/con and further into selected categories, the new system appears to be an attempt to dump comment into convenient buckets.
While White House staffers may find it easier to tabulate e-mail on various subjects (perhaps for the purpose of providing quick polling numbers) they forgot that the medium is the message... or more precisely perhaps, they never understood the Internet in the first place. In fact, the White House servers were hit with an unintentional denial of service (DOS) attack as the curious rushed to see the new system.
While the White House is trying to understand the chaos, Howard Dean, the ex-Vermont Govenor/democtatic presidential candidate is embracing it. Dean's various web-based outlets have been responsible for over 70,000 contributions and 60,000 volunteers. His strategy is playing to an Internet savvy (read Gen-X) audience who understand the essential viral power (read, web logs).
Ken Camp (a boomer BTW), in his blog Digital Common Sense writes, "What I note is a candidate who's used the Internet to leverage incredible grassroots support from a very net savvy community. It's groundbreaking. It's innovative. He's using the Internet to a better advantage than it has ever been used in the political process in America. He's reaching thousands of people and engaging them in conversations that have been far too long absent in our political process. He's motivating people to get involved in talking to each other."
"What I don't see is his stand on the technological issues and their ramifications, the very tools he's using to gain this groundswell of support. Sure he keeps a blog and posts when he has time. Sure he has now guested on Lessig's blog. These are great for visibility and selllng (sic) a candidate. They're high profile. They make news. They are good business, and I don't fault any candidate for doing good business. I do question why the others are so obtuse that they continue to let Governor Dean steal the Internet community right out from under them, but that's their problem." Complete text here>>
Unfortunately in both cases (one of Internet bafoonery and one of Internet manipulation) the issues and more precisely, the candidate's responses to them are lost. More troublesome to us here at a Baby Boomer-based outlet is the disturbing loss of share of voice . Often we are reminded here by our Gen-X brethren that the Internet and its tools and technology belong to them and by sheer volume they are correct.
A previous Presidential candidate cited his appeal to the vast "silent majority". While Boomers have a high profile stake in creating and commenting in mainstream media, we have indeed become the "silent Internet majority". It's not even fair to call us a majority, because being connected to the Internet does not automatically give you a voice.
Dean's Aug. 6 "Meetup" contains an agenda point: "How do we tap into the community that is not internet savy, i.e. senior citizens (who vote) and minority communities?"
The answer (at least in our opinion) is simply, you can't. The essential ingredient to an Internet community is connectivity. You don't necessarily have to be net-savvy to read Internet content, but you do have to have the basic technology to get it. We understand the need to get these groups connected and there are several initiatives to do just that, but with the 2004 election on the horizon, there isn't time.
Baby Boomers are not senior citizens. We represent an enormous connected base yet we have not used it to our advantage. A better question for Dean might be: "how do we get Boomers to turn on their computers and use them for more than checking stock quotes"
In the final analysis, Digital Bush and Digital Dean are headed in opposite directions. Bush's constituency lies largely outside the Internet, so for his purpose, he can afford to ignore, or in the case of the White House e-mail debacle, deconstruct the Internet. Dean's appeal has been largely shaped on the Internet. The advantage goes to Bush because he doesn't have to respond. Dean will be constantly dogged by it because he has to.
Print
