People weren’t communicating by carrier pigeons and smoke signals before the Internet was invented. There was television, newspapers, mail, fax machines, telephones with answering machines and news wire services.
This election cycle the popular catch phrase is, “the Internet changes everything”. In fact, during the last several Presidential elections, the pundits have had similar catch phrases, “things are different this time” or, “there is a new paradigm in place”. This logic is a trap and a really good way to fall into the same trap others have fallen into is to assume the same things they did.
Maybe, just maybe, things aren’t any different in this election cycle. Could it be that when the election is over - and the postmortem is being conducted - the commentators will marvel at how, regardless of the Internet, the ebb and flow of the election happened at just about the same pace and with exactly the same tempo as in years gone by and that the losing campaigns will wish they had relied more on the tried and true and less on the new and electronic?
Most of the so-called changes for which the Internet is supposed to be responsible, are really just different ways of communicating – not better ways of communicating and not faster ways of communicating, just different ways.
The fax machine became widely popular in the late 1980s and made it possible to send a text message across the country at the speed of light. So, email just eliminates the cost of the phone call and hasn’t changed the speed at which it is possible to send a message. Just because an email message can be sent for free doesn’t make the message being sent any more likely to be welcomed.
Further, the campaigns might not be taking into consideration improvements in email filtering on the receiver’s software since the 2000 and 2004 campaign. Sure, a candidate can send a voter free messages, but that doesn’t mean the voter hasn’t grown tired of the candidate’s emails. If the voter uses the “Mark as Spam” button on the candidate’s email address, all further emails from the candidate will go into the trash and any opportunity to communicate with that voter will be lost. If enough voters mark the candidate’s email as spam, the mail server’s heuristics might consider all the candidate’s email spam for all of its users and send it into everyone’s trash. The forty-one cents it would have taken to mail the same message via first class postage might not have been such a bad investment after all.
Now, what is changing is the election calendar and calendars are five thousand year old technology –more on that tomorrow.
Think Like A Native.
