Blog #3

HOW the INTERNET is CHANGING EVERYTHING (or isn't)

So it goes without saying that without the Internet and legions of what my aunt refers to as "You damned college kids (who) don't know what you're getting us into," Barack Obama would not be President, he'd just be a senator from Illinois with a funny name and big ears.

But here in AMERICA 2.0^TM Obama is President and he owes no small debt to two things that helped put him into office.

1. George W. Bush
2. The internet.

Obama's campaign team used the Internet to take "grassroots" to its ultimate extreme: One person with a keyboard can argue for him. If one person gets three of his friends to take up the cause, and they get three of their friends, and so on and so forth, the movement grows exponentially.

No number of Grandmother-forwarded chain letters (BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA DOESN'T SAY THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE PRAY FOR OUR SOLDIERS THERE ARE ANGELS EVERYWHERE) can stand up to an exponential, one-at-a-time approach.

This is because people actually listen to their friends. Nobody really reads Grandma's emails.

Not to make this all about Obama. Let's bring George Stephanopoulos in on the party. Stephanopoulos (who is, incidentially, of Greek descent; I know! I was shocked too. His name in Greek: Γεώργιος Στεφανόπουλος) recently interviewed John McCain via Twitter.

Here's ABC News talking about it.:

"It's fun. It's the latest rage," [McCain staffer Brooke] Buchanan said, referring to Twitter.

That's right. John McCain's staff thinks the Internet is like Velcro shoes.

Anyway. The Greek.

"Oh yeah! Twitterview! We're breaking new ground here people, we're beyond the looking-glass, this is going to be the first step into a BRAVE NEW WORLD that sees the news media fully embrace a new technology that early adopters have already abandonded as passe and it's just going to be the best thing ever, there's no way that this can be seen by anybody as anything other than a giant leap forwar--



...


Yeah. Once again, a note for media dinosaurs and elderly presidential candidates alike: If you do not understand the Internet, hire someone who does.

THE POINT OF ALL THIS is that the Internet is not a fad that's going to blow over or a storm to be ridden out. The Internet is The Way The World Is Now. If you can harness it, you have a fighting chance. If you can't, you will fail. And if you decide to ignore it and hope it'll just go away, you really, really need a new job.

BLOG^2

So I'm reading this article from the Guardian, which says:

A Nielsen Online report says two thirds of us now use what it calls "Member Communities," which includes both social networks and blogs. MCs now make up "the fourth most popular category online – ahead of personal email," says Nielsen Online.

The thing about this that I find striking is that email is a personal, one-on-one sort of thing. What social networking sites do is open your communication to any number of people.

You can look at this two ways:

First of all, you can say, "Well, this is good if people need to get their information to many people at once."

The second way of looking at it (and the one I follow) is to say, "Well, that's what the cc: and bcc: fields are for."

What the social networking revolution has done is allow people to be their own personal information dissemination machine.

ANT IS EATING LUNCH. ANT CAN'T SHAKE THIS COLD. ANT IS WATCHING THE MARLINS LOSE. And so on. It feeds into the personal need of wanting to be interesting, wanting to be wanted.

The benefit of this incessent twittering and facebook status changing (both activities I am unashamedly guilty of) is that unlike an email, social networking is easy to ignore. You don't recieve a thing that you have to open, read, and delete. You can just sort of skim your feeds:

PAIGE IS GOING TO THE FESTIVAL!!! "Who cares?" *scroll scroll scroll*
MATT IS WATCHING HOW IT'S MADE, IT RULES "Yeah it does!" *scroll scroll scroll*

What this means is:

a. Information has to become more succinct. Enforced brevity means that whatever you have to say better be interesting, or at the very least witty, for people to take notice of it

b. Whatever people have to say becomes less in-depth. There's no room to actually say anything of real substance. All you get is "what I'm up to at this moment in 149 characters or fewer."

As opposed to a blog, where you can go in depth into issues. Nobody does, but the option's there.


Social networking, not surprisingly, is also affecting the way real-life networking works.

It's not just the internet but the media as a whole that affects the way people interact in the real world. Ours is a generation that communicates by quoting movies and tv-shows at one another. Back in the day this sort of thing was reserved for Monty Python fans. Now everybody does it.

Same thing with the internet. Last week I changed my Facebook status to:

ANT IS ON A BOAT (F. T-PAIN)

Inside of, like, 45 minutes I had responses:

- I got my flippy-floppies!!
- This is old
- OMG I LOVE THIS SONG HA HA HA
- I fucked a mermaid!

and so on.

And what do you think happened the first time I saw the people who commented on this? We started talking about the "I'm On A Boat" song. Unreal. It's no longer "How's the weather?" or "You going to that thing tomorrow?" that we use as icebreakers, it's "WHY DIDN'T YOU POKE ME BACK :( :( :(" before the actual conversations start.
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