The New Media Diva

We’re still discussing critical incidents that prompted a change in our industries in my MA course. This is in preparation for a paper (or podcast, or whatever way we want to present this information) that’s due the first or second week of January.

I. Really. Need. To. Get. That. Date. Straight.

To refresh your memory, and mine, here’s the direction of the paper:

I will specifically look at the failed Democratic presidential primary campaign of former Vermont governor Howard Dean in 2004 and ask if this campaign affected (changed) how the media reported on political campaigns.

Background: In 2002, a little-known governor by the name of Howard Dean started his quest to become the Democratic Party presidential nominee. Using money raised and political support from a large base of internet users, Dean waged his campaign. By the end of 2003, Dean had been deemed by the media the “Democratic frontrunner.” But, interestingly enough, the more the governor inched his cybercampaign into the real world, the mainstream electorate showed they were not as impressed as his internet-based supporters. By February 2004, Dean had suspended his campaign.

In my opinion, members of the media mistakenly looked to Dean’s internet base, and reflected that support on the mainstream population.

For my paper, I will look at the following points:

- Did Dean’s failure change how media examined candidates and weighed their support base?

- The impact of Dean supporters branding themselves citizen journalists on mainstream media. Did these people foment the positive coverage Dean received at the beginning of his campaign? (1)

- The relationship between the public sphere and the internet sphere during campaigns. I’ll also touch on the theory of pluralism.

Last week, I had to identify the critical incidents associated with my subject. Here are the ones I listed:

• The founding of Meetup.com. Meetup is a site that’s used to form offline groups and was founded in 2002. It was the place where Dean’s internet-based supporters first found each other and organized themselves.
• An online vote held at Moveon.org that would determine which Democratic candidate the site, which had 2 million members (Gary Wolf, “How the Internet created Howard Dean,” Wired 12.01), would support. Dean received 44 percent of the vote. According to Wolf, it wasn’t Dean’s policy that made him successful. It was the fact that Dean’s bloggers were networked with bloggers who frequented Moveon.org. This allowed his camp to persuade members of the site to vote for him in the online poll.

To move me along in this one tutor, Joe, asked:

“[C]an you have a go at describing the state of affairs before your critical incidents occurred? i.e. what was it about the political world that was changed?”

So that’s where I am now.

To answer the question, I’d like to pinch from a talk Thomas Power gave at Somesso last month. During the talk (great notes Steph!), he broke down his view of the different “versions” of the Web:

• Web 1.0 = Find me (Using search engines and so on)
• Web 2.0 = Join me (Building a profile, managing people and so on)
• Web 3.0 (which is what he believes we’re in now) = Follow me

I won’t get into the nomenclature argument (Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.0.1) and so on.:-)

Before 2000 (Web 1.0 time according to some), internet users were enamored with searching and finding. But, once they found whatever it was they were looking for, or probably not looking for but happened upon, there was a strong chance that whatever knowledge or information gained online or ties established, stayed online.

Here’s what I mean: Take Yahoogroups/eGroups, for example. EGroups, which eventually became Yahoogroups after being bought by Yahoo, allowed somewhat non-tech-savvy (2) people to “find” each other according to interest and form groups. These interest groups, for the most part, communicated mostly in their online realms. The idea behind these groups and services was “connecting.”

Then the 2000 presidential elections happened. Without question, this was the catalyst that moved groups that had joined together online for whatever cause, offline into action.

Meetup.com helped with this shift. Instead of connecting online and keeping those connections online, Meetup members connected online to meet offline and plan. This is how Dean’s campaign got its start.

So, before the critical incidents connected with Dean’s campaign, online users focused on searching and finding (Web 1.0). Information and contacts gained online stayed online and were used mostly in that realm. The 2000 presidential election pushed users, especially by way of Meetup.com, into using their online space to plan for offline activities.

The problem I’m having with this is that I’m beginning to lose which “change” I want to discuss. The original “change” I wanted to look at was if the media adjusted the way it covered and reported on candidates due to the Dean campaign’s failure. But, because the Dean campaign was such a groundbreaking event, just in terms of how campaign was waged, I keep sliding back into that. What I need to find is real evidence of an adjustment in coverage. And that’s a tall order it seems.

====================

(1) Hmmm. Not sure if I can find solid proof of this. Anyone?

(2) BBS was around was before but mostly known only to those who were in some type of tech field or were computer hobbyists.)