Politics: Will Text Messages Replace the Internet?

20 May 2006 |permalink | email article

Three years ago Joe Trippi, the pioneering manager of Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential bid, brought blogging to politics. In a provocative Newsweek web exclusive (5.19), the strategist, who I first met in L.A. during Walter Mondale’s ill-fated 1984 campaign, discusses the cell phone as the next next thing in campaign technology.
He opines that there are a lot more social-networking tools now than were available in the pioneering Dean campaign. Raising money on the Internet “is the easy part.” The real issue, Trippi says, is how do you translate it into persuasion and organizing and social networking? Social activities became part of the glue” that held the candidate’s meetings together.

Trippi regards the text-messaging cell phone as the next frontier in campaign technology and credits it with having a lot more to do with organizing the recent massive immigration protests than the Internet - the $20 cell phone, not a $2,000 laptop. It may help explain the turnouts.

He cited text-message or instant-message as a way to manipulate media coverage. His example was the Dean campaign which used the tool to notify hundreds of thousands of his supporters that the candidate would be a guest of host Tim Russert on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “All of a sudden, (Russert’s) producers figure out pretty damn fast that they have a 50 percent higher viewershp when they have on Howard Dean.”

Have blogs become too much of a rumor mill?

“We’ve always had accuracy problems. “When Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were running against each other, John Adams had to figure out: how do you go negative on a guy who wrote the Declaration of Independence? They got a bunch of guys up on horses…and they ran around screaming at the top of their lungs: ‘Jefferson is dead.’ So Jefferson had to get a bunch of guys on horses screaming: Jefferson lives.’”

How to separate inaccurate bloggers from the rest? “If a blog lies to you repeatedly, you’ll eventually stop listening.” Better yet, stop reading and delete the bookmark.

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