On Susan Blackmore's site about memes in an interview for Nextmodern she states, "I think language was once a meme-parasite that co-evolved to become symbiotic with us, and that culture is a vast system that is parasitic on human beings."
Could be the best description yet for the machinations of the political blogosphere.
The curent state of political blogdom seems wild, unruly , unpredictable, and to use Colin's metaphor of a new frontier: lawless. That's why it's so potentially disruptive. The Time magazine article on Netroots just seems to me to be another example of missing the significance of a new technology. Think of Bill Gates' greatly disputed late to the importance of the Internet legacy ( I'm not disputing Microsoft's bundled Internet Explorer contribution to the rapid uptake of the Internet) or of the portal CEO who infamously passed on funding Google stating that "search wasn't that important to our customers".
Someone said ( will amend this post when I remember who) the present administration in the white house is not so much a political organization as a media organization. Yet the republican party in general tends to use old school techniques on a new medium. For example they seem to have built a pretty impressive database early on to augment their get out the vote activities. Yet it doesn't seem they imagined a space for political social networking in their online strategy in the same way that Daily Kos or Huffington Post or others had.
It's ironic that the party's most infamous "killer app" use of the Internet is as Tony Snow calls them "naughty emails".
1 comment:
I wonder if the reluctance on the part of the republicans in fully exploiting this new medium is that they can't control its content as easily. They will use it to control data but not for its other, communication uses.
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