Indeed, my friends, we are on the cusp of a new frontier. In fact, we are wallowing in it as we speak.
The internet revolution, in person. How far will it reach?
Jason Linkins stretches his hand into the future on Huffington Post, and he is unofficially promoting a prototype for an "official White House blog" at OhBoyObama.com. I think we should do a bit of a background check before we embrace that site, although there is one idea in the article that really floats my boat:
Have Obama glue horns and glitter to ponies and call them unicorns.
Help me figure out what an official White House blog would look like after the break. Thanks.
Jason Linkins was right on about the unicorns. If there was such a thing as an official White House blog, they would need to be accounted for. The nature of the internet demands it.
So what then shall we do? Would such a site be able to be protected from the fringes? Would it simply be a matter of massive moderation? Who would set the standards for the discourse?
As Ambinder notes, online governance could potentially foster a renewal of public investment and trust in its transparency. On the downside, it would also give opponents of an Obama administration a forum for pushback.
The Ambinder article is in the June issue of The Atlantic, and it delves much deeper into this (probably inevitable) new branch of White House media relations.
America’s politics have regularly been transformed by sudden changes in the way we communicate. And revolutions in communications technology have always bestowed great gifts on those politicians savvy enough to grasp their full potential. It is still unclear how far Barack Obama’s talent for online campaigning will take him. But it’s worth noting that some of the best-known presidents in U.S. history have stood at the vanguard of past communications revolutions—and that a few have used those revolutions not only to mobilize voters and reach the White House but also to consolidate power and change the direction of politics once they got there.
Changing the direction of politics, yes. Consolidating power? Maybe?
Think about it. An official White House blog would be quoted by every traditional media outlet. It would become a sort of weathervane for the "real mood" of the country. It would become an information battleground unlike anything we have ever seen.
How would you set it up? Who would you deem worthy of moderating it? How huge would it get?
Ambinder again:
Obama clearly intends to use the Web, if he is elected president, to transform governance just as he has transformed campaigning. Notably, he has spoken of conducting "online fireside chats" as president. And when one imagines how Obama’s political army, presumably intact, might be mobilized to lobby for major legislation with just a few keystrokes, it becomes possible, for a moment at least, to imagine that he might change the political culture of Washington simply by overwhelming it.
Online fireside chats! I want to do the graphics for those. Changing the political culture of Washington simply by overwhelming it! We are already doing that.
And here we are on the cusp of a new frontier. Let's wallow in it until we get a good idea of what it might look like.