Fleet and 'Leet - The Digital Candidate
Note: "leet" is a written argot used primarily on the Internet.
In 1968, Andy Warhol said "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."
Given developments on the Internet, that comment might better have said "infamous for 15 weeks."
The current campaign for president has demonstrated an interplay of forces forever altered by the availability of information, the potential for its distortion, and, for the first time, the possibility of non-professional individuals being able to dig down and find the truth.
In the "old days" of conventional media, we saw what "they" wanted us to see. Our view of the world was filtered through the eyes of the press - to a degree that we never realized until recently.
Remember Kennedy? By all accounts, he had multiple affairs during his presidency, many of them aided and abetted by his aides at the White House. This couldn't have escaped the notice of the press men covering him, but for a variety of reasons it was not considered "news," and was therefore not reported. Not so for Bill Clinton.
Blame it on an increasingly politically polarized press, perhaps. Today, reporters don't consider it bad form to display decided and obvious political leanings in their reporting.
But it's more than that. It's also the fact that the availability of information via the internet and electronic communications has made information a commodity - something we all have access to in unprecedented ways. We no longer need the conventional press to feed us the stories that frame our lives. In fact, we can, and do, create the news, and more importantly, the buzz.
The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates showed America that from that point on, candidates would have to give good television. The Obama-Clinton square-off is demonstrating that you're going to have to do a lot more than that. You're going to have to control, or brilliantly spin, every small detail of your existence, in order to handle the scrutiny of a wired public.
Matt Drudge, an odd character with a computer and curiosity, by breaking the Monica Lewinsky story, turned one of those Wild Mouse corners in history - the Wild Mouse is a form of roller coaster ride in which the cart you ride in is on pivots. When the cart turns a sharp corner, it keeps going in the original direction for a few moments, while the wheels are headed in a new one. Suddenly, the cart whips around to the new direction, creating an exciting sense of disorientation in the riders.
That is how it must have felt to the traditional press when The Drudge Report came on the radar with the Clinton scandal story. While we'd had signs of the diminishment of the press before, never was it so obvious as with Drudge's gleeful breaking of the Lewinsky scandal.
From a single non-professional website publisher shaking up the traditional press, to thousands of bloggers and unpaid news-hounds blogging the stories not fit to print is a simple step in the digital world.
And this is the crux of the matter. The Internet has made everyone his own news reporter, editor, and commentator. True, most of us don't take the time and energy to do the reporting part, but the fact remains that much of the source material to learn "the facts" is now available electronically - making it possible for someone without press credentials, time, and a budget, to do some digging.
Curious about the reality of global warming? You can view Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, online. You can get a transcript of it online. You can fact check what he says in it online - and you can read opinions on it, endless opinions. But the point is, in the old days, if a film like that was made available, it would be nearly impossible for the average person to view it, and then test its facts and conclusions. Now, I never hear anything or read anything that I don't test. Because I can. Easily.
But the Internet and electronic media have not only enabled all of us to find and examine and question information. They have also given us the tools to distort information, and pass that information along to an unsuspecting public.
To run for president in this post-media world (I invented that term - think it will go viral?), you have to be telegenic as was John Kennedy (and Nixon was not), charismatic, and never give them a sound bite that can come back to bite you. Because that bite will be played over and over and over on YouTube and Google Video. It will be mashed up, set to music, looped, and recut to create a funny movie - and it will all be posted online for the world to see.
What do we know about the three remaining candidates in this regard? Barrack is brilliant, Hillary makes awful faces, and John McCain hasn't got much sex appeal (though so far he has not been made to look foolish, as has Hillary). Hillary had a moment of promise with her tearing up ploy, but overall, it is Obama who truly understands the fact that it is the Internet that soon will elect a candidate, or destroy him.
Long ago, a candidate had to appear serious, be able to deliver a well-written speech, and have that speech translate well into print. With the Kennedy-Nixon debates, the ante was upped to looking good on television, and being able to speak well off the cuff. Later, as reportage became more political, you had be appealing to the press corps - a buddy on the campaign bus. In the Drudge era, you had to have a perfectly clean record, or be prepared to explain (via alcoholism, mistakes in judgement, and juvenile lapses) why what you did was then and this is now.
Now, you have to be prepared to not say or do anything that cannot stand the scrutiny of being played over and over and over, not only on television, but also on YouTube and other video outlets on the net.
Now, you have to be prepared to deal with not only what you have said and done, but also what your family, friends, ministers, financial advisors, business associates, and pretty much anyone else that you've ever had contact with has said or done. It can be, and more importantly, will be dug up - because all that information is relatively easy to access thanks to the Internet.
And of course the element of the internet that is so powerful is its "viral" nature: if I, Nancy, in Syracuse, New York, find an interesting tidbit about a candidate out there somewhere, or a video that has been posted on YouTube, I send it to ten of my friends, who each send it to ten of their friends, and one of those people knows somebody as MSNBC - or, I simply go to the MSNBC site and send an email to my favorite reporter (can you imagine in 1960 phoning a reporter with an interesting insight? Neither can I. But email is totally different...) who then mentions the website or video on television and in his blog. Now it's everywhere. Now the candidate has to deal with it.
Still, the interesting twist the current presidential campaign has demonstrated is that the forces of editorial control have not yet ceded the field to us regulars. They've just become much more wiley - and have found ways to use our own weapons against us.
Just as John Kennedy proved that after him, all candidates would have to be TV masters, so this election cycle proves that hereinafter, all candidates will have to be masters of the Internet.
Take a look at all three websites, and you will see that there really isn't much difference in their offerings - in fact, they look spookily alike, from the colors, to the content, down to the placement of material on a page. Most campaigns have mastered the traditional Internet (the website)pretty thoroughly. Still, Obama's is the more sleek, elegant, and pared down of the three, rather like the candidate himself.
But there's a lot more to it than that these days.
Take a look at this article: (http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2008/3/19/94156/5029). It is a superb analysis of Obama's recent speech dealing with the damning viral videos of his long-time pastor and spiritual advisor, Jeremiah Wright. Says writer ThatBritGuy: "The consensus is that Obama's speech yesterday was about race. He certainly talked about race a lot, but I'm not quite convinced that race was the main message, or necessarily the main intent. Let's pick apart the themes and see how this is an election winning speech which will do more to eliminate both Hillary and McCain than any number of primary wins." The article points out how nothing this man does is free-form - his appearance, his positioning, his words are all perfectly orchestrated. Not just for the first round - the actual speech - but for round 2-infinity which will follow as the speech is endlessly picked apart, analyzed, and watched again and again on YouTube.
The most demanding thing the Internet has asked of candidates today is instant reaction. Obama's light-footed performance in potentially mine-strewn territory has pointed out with humiliating clarity just how clod-hopperish (for purposes of the digital world) the other two candidates are by comparison.
But more importantly, the whole play of issues has demonstrated where our politics is headed in the future: into a wired arena. Anyone thinking about running for office had better prepare now. The race will be to the digital master.
In 1968, Andy Warhol said "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."
Given developments on the Internet, that comment might better have said "infamous for 15 weeks."
The current campaign for president has demonstrated an interplay of forces forever altered by the availability of information, the potential for its distortion, and, for the first time, the possibility of non-professional individuals being able to dig down and find the truth.
In the "old days" of conventional media, we saw what "they" wanted us to see. Our view of the world was filtered through the eyes of the press - to a degree that we never realized until recently.
Remember Kennedy? By all accounts, he had multiple affairs during his presidency, many of them aided and abetted by his aides at the White House. This couldn't have escaped the notice of the press men covering him, but for a variety of reasons it was not considered "news," and was therefore not reported. Not so for Bill Clinton.
Blame it on an increasingly politically polarized press, perhaps. Today, reporters don't consider it bad form to display decided and obvious political leanings in their reporting.
But it's more than that. It's also the fact that the availability of information via the internet and electronic communications has made information a commodity - something we all have access to in unprecedented ways. We no longer need the conventional press to feed us the stories that frame our lives. In fact, we can, and do, create the news, and more importantly, the buzz.
The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates showed America that from that point on, candidates would have to give good television. The Obama-Clinton square-off is demonstrating that you're going to have to do a lot more than that. You're going to have to control, or brilliantly spin, every small detail of your existence, in order to handle the scrutiny of a wired public.
Matt Drudge, an odd character with a computer and curiosity, by breaking the Monica Lewinsky story, turned one of those Wild Mouse corners in history - the Wild Mouse is a form of roller coaster ride in which the cart you ride in is on pivots. When the cart turns a sharp corner, it keeps going in the original direction for a few moments, while the wheels are headed in a new one. Suddenly, the cart whips around to the new direction, creating an exciting sense of disorientation in the riders.
That is how it must have felt to the traditional press when The Drudge Report came on the radar with the Clinton scandal story. While we'd had signs of the diminishment of the press before, never was it so obvious as with Drudge's gleeful breaking of the Lewinsky scandal.
From a single non-professional website publisher shaking up the traditional press, to thousands of bloggers and unpaid news-hounds blogging the stories not fit to print is a simple step in the digital world.
And this is the crux of the matter. The Internet has made everyone his own news reporter, editor, and commentator. True, most of us don't take the time and energy to do the reporting part, but the fact remains that much of the source material to learn "the facts" is now available electronically - making it possible for someone without press credentials, time, and a budget, to do some digging.
Curious about the reality of global warming? You can view Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, online. You can get a transcript of it online. You can fact check what he says in it online - and you can read opinions on it, endless opinions. But the point is, in the old days, if a film like that was made available, it would be nearly impossible for the average person to view it, and then test its facts and conclusions. Now, I never hear anything or read anything that I don't test. Because I can. Easily.
But the Internet and electronic media have not only enabled all of us to find and examine and question information. They have also given us the tools to distort information, and pass that information along to an unsuspecting public.
To run for president in this post-media world (I invented that term - think it will go viral?), you have to be telegenic as was John Kennedy (and Nixon was not), charismatic, and never give them a sound bite that can come back to bite you. Because that bite will be played over and over and over on YouTube and Google Video. It will be mashed up, set to music, looped, and recut to create a funny movie - and it will all be posted online for the world to see.
What do we know about the three remaining candidates in this regard? Barrack is brilliant, Hillary makes awful faces, and John McCain hasn't got much sex appeal (though so far he has not been made to look foolish, as has Hillary). Hillary had a moment of promise with her tearing up ploy, but overall, it is Obama who truly understands the fact that it is the Internet that soon will elect a candidate, or destroy him.
Long ago, a candidate had to appear serious, be able to deliver a well-written speech, and have that speech translate well into print. With the Kennedy-Nixon debates, the ante was upped to looking good on television, and being able to speak well off the cuff. Later, as reportage became more political, you had be appealing to the press corps - a buddy on the campaign bus. In the Drudge era, you had to have a perfectly clean record, or be prepared to explain (via alcoholism, mistakes in judgement, and juvenile lapses) why what you did was then and this is now.
Now, you have to be prepared to not say or do anything that cannot stand the scrutiny of being played over and over and over, not only on television, but also on YouTube and other video outlets on the net.
Now, you have to be prepared to deal with not only what you have said and done, but also what your family, friends, ministers, financial advisors, business associates, and pretty much anyone else that you've ever had contact with has said or done. It can be, and more importantly, will be dug up - because all that information is relatively easy to access thanks to the Internet.
And of course the element of the internet that is so powerful is its "viral" nature: if I, Nancy, in Syracuse, New York, find an interesting tidbit about a candidate out there somewhere, or a video that has been posted on YouTube, I send it to ten of my friends, who each send it to ten of their friends, and one of those people knows somebody as MSNBC - or, I simply go to the MSNBC site and send an email to my favorite reporter (can you imagine in 1960 phoning a reporter with an interesting insight? Neither can I. But email is totally different...) who then mentions the website or video on television and in his blog. Now it's everywhere. Now the candidate has to deal with it.
Still, the interesting twist the current presidential campaign has demonstrated is that the forces of editorial control have not yet ceded the field to us regulars. They've just become much more wiley - and have found ways to use our own weapons against us.
Just as John Kennedy proved that after him, all candidates would have to be TV masters, so this election cycle proves that hereinafter, all candidates will have to be masters of the Internet.
Take a look at all three websites, and you will see that there really isn't much difference in their offerings - in fact, they look spookily alike, from the colors, to the content, down to the placement of material on a page. Most campaigns have mastered the traditional Internet (the website)pretty thoroughly. Still, Obama's is the more sleek, elegant, and pared down of the three, rather like the candidate himself.
But there's a lot more to it than that these days.
Take a look at this article: (http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2008/3/19/94156/5029). It is a superb analysis of Obama's recent speech dealing with the damning viral videos of his long-time pastor and spiritual advisor, Jeremiah Wright. Says writer ThatBritGuy: "The consensus is that Obama's speech yesterday was about race. He certainly talked about race a lot, but I'm not quite convinced that race was the main message, or necessarily the main intent. Let's pick apart the themes and see how this is an election winning speech which will do more to eliminate both Hillary and McCain than any number of primary wins." The article points out how nothing this man does is free-form - his appearance, his positioning, his words are all perfectly orchestrated. Not just for the first round - the actual speech - but for round 2-infinity which will follow as the speech is endlessly picked apart, analyzed, and watched again and again on YouTube.
The most demanding thing the Internet has asked of candidates today is instant reaction. Obama's light-footed performance in potentially mine-strewn territory has pointed out with humiliating clarity just how clod-hopperish (for purposes of the digital world) the other two candidates are by comparison.
But more importantly, the whole play of issues has demonstrated where our politics is headed in the future: into a wired arena. Anyone thinking about running for office had better prepare now. The race will be to the digital master.
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