3by9

Technology And The Election

I was having lunch with my parents today and the topic of discussion was politics and the election. Topics ranged from Mike Huckabee’s son killing a dog to Barack Obama on Letterman delivering the Top 10 List, and what’s interesting is that my sources of information are 99% Internet-based. This doesn’t mean that I get all my information from fringe websites with a severe right or left slant, but I don’t read newspapers or watch much TV-based newscasts unless it’s a primary or caucus night.

From what I can tell, the big difference with getting most of your news from Internet sources is that small stories are picked up and have as much visibility as the larger stories. A random comment made by a candidate 5 years ago could spark a blog entry which could spark a dozen blog entries. A YouTube video of a candidate could suck you into viewing 10 more related videos in the same sitting. I decide the importance level of things I read because I can dismiss stories as fluff or I can dig in and investigate. This is evidenced by the Ron Paul following: he may not have the votes but if you decide his message is interesting (and I do) then there are hundreds of blogs you can read, hundreds of YouTube videos to watch.

Getting involved with your candidate on the web is trivial now. You can listen to podcasts, signup on the candidate website, watch videos, friend them on MySpace or Facebook, sign petitions, the list just goes on. This wasn’t around in the last election, but to reach the younger audiences, candidates have to be where the young people are and that’s on the web.

A great example of candidates putting themselves out to reach an audience is when Obama was asked by Google CEO Eric Schmidt the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers and the Senator said that using a bubble sort would be the wrong way to go, which made a million geeks smile. It doesn’t matter if Obama actually knew that or was told to say it, but just the thought that he memorized a random geeky thought in order to reach out to my small audience is great.