Interesting little tidbit from Nevada: a group calling itself the Patriot Majority is running ads against Sharron Angle on conservative websites, describing her as “‘Nevada’s WORST legislator!’ and a ‘professional politician’ who is in the pocket of Wall Street.” Who are they? Democrats, of course — and their goal is to push back against the Tea Party crowd.
In the Nevada case, they’re trying to help Harry Reid break up Republican Angle’s support among the fringe Right, in part by pointing out the fact that this “political newcomer” has been in the Nevada Legislature since the late ’90s and (I assume) has taken campaign donations from financial services firms. Will it work? The Tea Partiers are a purist and fractious bunch, liable to split along ideological and personal fault lines at the drop of a hat, so perhaps there’s some chance that it might. But conservatives were quick to catch on, and the advertising could backfire in the end.
Regardless, it’s a great example of how the internet can deliver targeted messages to people deemed likely to respond to them; whether they do or not is a different question. And the Patriot Majority’s overall outreach campaign (over 3000 fans on Facebook) once again reminds us that we should ALWAYS ask who’s behind an online campaign — the internet can lift high the small and silent, but it can also provide a grassroots facade for someone else’s money.
– cpd
June 16th, 2010
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Fun thought question from Michael Clements, moderator of yesterday’s Digital Capital Week/Future of Media panel: if the world was once flat, then round, then flat again (at least according to Thomas Friedman), what shape will it be in five years? The audience fired back several good answers, but the idea that popped into my head and stuck there was “lumpy.”
What do I mean by that? Imagine the media world as a physical object resembling a 20-sided D&D die, but with many more points, each of them a publishing outlet. Some points will poke out more (the New York Times), others much less (some random dude’s Twitter feed), but each of them projects some distance above the surface and demands our attention. As you get closer to the surface, you’d see more and more outlets, but they’ll follow the same pattern over and over: you’ll always see a handful of prominent voices accompanied by many smaller ones, which in turn are surrounded by smaller ones, which in turn are surrounded by…(you guessed it) smaller ones.
In this model, in other words, the arrangement of points would be fractal (a term also tossed out as an answer to the shape-of-the-world question), meaning that the distribution is the same whether you’re talking about the macro level (the top online publishers) or the micro level (the handful of blogs and Twitter feeds about some obscure film genre). Dude, whoa.
Another description from the audience was “ethereal,” which captures the cloud-like (and constantly shifting) web of connections among online voices, something that my model could incorporate if the points could move around relative to one another (imagine Brownian motion-style vibration, but with more vigor). Fun stuff! And if this model is accurate, let’s hope that our own points keep rising — like mountains driven up by clashing tectonic plates, only more quickly.
– cpd
June 16th, 2010
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