Blogging couldn’t save Howard Dean. Wired magazine extolled Howard Dean’s use of the internet to connect with his constituency three months before the Iowa caucus. Dean, in interviews to author, explains how he gains feedback from blogs and was able to effectively use social networking tools already available on the internet to give his campaign a grassroots boost. In the article Dean seems to have a particularly rosy outlook concerning the internets potential in politics. Dean says “A lot of the people on the net have given up on traditional politics precisely because it was about television and the ballot box, and they had no way to shout back” (Wolf, 2004). The Dean campaign understood a lot. They understood that a single webpage could not generate the web traffic that they desired so they encouraged social networking that would link websites and build said traffic. A minority of blogs and webpages account for a majority of readers online. They understood the blogging provided interactivity with the public that provided valuable feedback on campaign issues while developing feelings of inclusion and community. Unfortunately despite this innovative and seemingly prescient use of technology in politics, Dean fell victim to a much older medium: television.
During a speech to enthusiastic followers he shouted and screamed into a microphone, possibly to speak over a noisy crowd, which was subsequently broadcast repeatedly on television. As Clay Shirky points out in his blog a small number of major media corporations have a majority of the ratings on the television dial. Furthermore, we are living in a society that is saturated with the images produced for television. More TVs are now present in homes than people who live their. Shirky points out that at the height of network television Gunsmoke was able to reach 45 percent of the audience. Although the rise of cable television has led to a more segmented audience it seems unlikely that a weblog or even a network of weblogs would be able to compete with the media exposure of multiple major television networks. Although Dean did an excellent job of creating a political presence on the net, he was unable to spin the national television news coverage, which was seen by a much larger audience, to his favor.
During a speech to enthusiastic followers he shouted and screamed into a microphone, possibly to speak over a noisy crowd, which was subsequently broadcast repeatedly on television. As Clay Shirky points out in his blog a small number of major media corporations have a majority of the ratings on the television dial. Furthermore, we are living in a society that is saturated with the images produced for television. More TVs are now present in homes than people who live their. Shirky points out that at the height of network television Gunsmoke was able to reach 45 percent of the audience. Although the rise of cable television has led to a more segmented audience it seems unlikely that a weblog or even a network of weblogs would be able to compete with the media exposure of multiple major television networks. Although Dean did an excellent job of creating a political presence on the net, he was unable to spin the national television news coverage, which was seen by a much larger audience, to his favor.
