Astroturf Online
At cjr.org, Renee Feltz, citing research by John Kelly, pinpoints a key difference between the Obama and McCain campaigns' use of the Internet. Turns out there really is a difference in spirit--between a lateral, interactive approach and a top-down one. Guess which is which.
You guessed it:
Barack Obama's campaign reaches out to activist bloggers in order to communicate with and mobilize campaign volunteers and feed them into its online social networking site, MyBarackObama.com. In contrast, John McCain's campaign takes a top-down approach, using blogs--many of which it helped incubate--as an echo chamber for channeling mostly anti-Obama attacks into the mainstream media, in order to create an impression of grassroots online support.
"Out of the nearly 500 blogs in [pro-McCain, anti-Obama] isolated clusters, at least 125 were seeded by a group of volunteers led by long time Republican Brad Marston," Feltz writes. According to Kelly, the Harvard Berkman Center research affiliate who conducted the research and otherwise maps the political blogosphere through Morningside Analytics, which I wrote about the other day, the right-wing sites have concentrated on Bill Ayers and ACORN. If you do a Google search for Obama, these posts rise to the surface.
Heh, not too surprising. This is exactly the mentality myself and others were fighting in the early days of the 'net. The reaction of big companies and "old school thinking" was that they just had another media outlet. Another place to disseminate their views. Go to coke.com or pepsi.com and you'll still see this view of the net running rampant. They look more like commercials than websites.
Therefore it is absolutely no surprise to me that a 71 year old running for an office would see things in the same way.
When all the "web 2.0" hype came out, I thought we were seeing the end of that outdated mentality. People were realizing that participation was what the internet was all about. Obama and his team totally understand this, McCain does not.
What's really odd to me though is how McCain's campaign also seems to live and die by what is said on left wing blogs. I've seen it time and again, something I post or agree with on the liberal havens is immediately attacked by the McCain campaign, or they immediately change their tactics. It makes them look foolish.
November 3, 2008 4:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
They are foolish.
-- ARG
November 3, 2008 6:23 PM | Reply | Permalink