Joe Trippi’s book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, forced me to rethink the way television is used in political campaigns. Toward the start of Trippi’s book, he explains why television is so dangerous for voters and the viral laziness that it can induce. He says that every hour someone spends watching television subtracts from that person’s civic involvement, and contrasts TV’s power to control viewers with that of the Internet, which allows users to control it:
“A television ad reaches voters passively. You just sit there and the box tells you what to think, or what you want — unlike the Internet, where you open a search engine or eBay or Amazon.com and tell the box what you want. And then, after you order the book, or bid on the baseball cards, the box asks you what you thought of the book and if you were happy with the auction. This is bottom-up, interactive communication. Television has a top-down, one-to-many structure, and it works by making an impression so that the next time you’re in the grocery store and you walk by the Listerine, an image flashes in your mind of two actors so taken with each other’s minty breath that they begin making out. It’s not different with political advertising on TV: You sit there and the ad washes over you. If it’s done well, some images stick, possibly even some ideas — although in a 30-second spot, there is usually only time for one or two visceral reactions to stick. (Page
It’s hard not to think about the 30-second spots that have stuck with me from both the Obama and McCain campaigns, good and bad. Images of George W. Bush hugging and whispering to John McCain seem seared on my brain, and the Obama campaign likely intended it to be that way. The democratic nominee’s campaign hopes that voters will enter the voting booth, close their eyes to think about the two candidates, and conjure up that exact image of the McCain/Bush relationship — an image that invokes fears of McCain repeating the same mistakes made by Bush in the last eight years.
Another interesting spot in Trippi’s book came toward the end, when he discusses the value of the Internet’s power to connect people with one another, a kind of throwback to the old days when folks actually talked to one another instead of IMing, texting, emailing, or posting on one another’s blogs or Facebook pages.
“During the campaign, Neil Ambercrombie, the Hawaii congressman, came up to me after attending a Meetup in New York and told me that it had dawned on him how, for all the futuristic buzz around the Dean campaign, what we were actually up to was as old as the country itself. ‘I don’t know if you realize what you’re doing,’ he said, ‘but the community you’ve built is really about having faith in strangers again.’“
It’s obvious that Trippi’s hope — for strangers to come together — has been met with Barack Obama’s successful Web-dependent campaign, and that Obama has indicated a starkly different way of using the Web, both in fundraising through online donations and with community organizing via MyBarrackObama.com. The chances of Obama using the Internet to actually improve the way we can govern seem overwhelmingly more likely thanks to McCain’s personal lack of tech savvy and his campaign’s poor use of technology.
I also think that Trippi’s description of Gary Hart’s method –dropping pebbles in the water– applies to the Obama campaign, and has helped it to grow. Little by little, using word-of-mouth and small time donations averaging less than $100 each from people who never donated to political campaigns before, this theme is recognized. Trippi says that Hart called it, “…the politics of concentric circles — the idea of waves spreading out from a single stone thrown into the water.”
In two weeks, we’ll see if these ripples can cause a wave — one that will likely use the Internet more intelligently and comfortably than any administration.
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