First John Edwards’ Second Life campaign HQ was smeared with e-excrement. Then there was the whole Hillary 1984 thing on YouTube. It’s been a rough few weeks for those in that very, very long jog to the White House. What’s glaringly apparent in all this is just how far we’ve come since the last election when Dean was heralded as the first candidate of the Internet just for using Meetup. Barack Obama has his own social network. Edwards has his own Twitter page (and a huge cleaning bill to pay in Linden dollars). Every candidate is trying to harness the power (TM), but the web is a tiger you mostly cling to loosely by the tail. These people, trained to operate within a system of government designed to guard against the volatility of public opinion, need to ask whether they are ready to weather the web’s unique, unfiltered, and often very brutal version of democracy. And we should ask whether we really want the person who comes out on top.
First John Edwards’ Second Life campaign HQ was smeared with e-excrement. Then there was the whole Hillary 1984 thing on YouTube. It’s been a rough few weeks for those in that very, very long jog to the White House. What’s glaringly apparent in all this is just how far we’ve come since the last election when Dean was heralded as the first candidate of the Internet just for using Meetup. Barack Obama has his own social network. Edwards has his own Twitter page (and a huge cleaning bill to pay in Linden dollars). Every candidate is trying to harness the power (TM), but the web is a tiger you mostly cling to loosely by the tail. These people, trained to operate within a system of government designed to guard against the volatility of public opinion, need to ask whether they are ready to weather the web’s unique, unfiltered, and often very brutal version of democracy. And we should ask whether we really want the person who comes out on top.