Focusing the Question: Advantages at the Margins versus the Long Term

Since we’re trying to answer the question of whether the Dean Campaign significantly changed the nature of campaigning, we need to look at the nature of change.

TforA describes several forms of technology used in the 2004 elections, including blogs and social networking tools. TforA, as a metric for assessing the impact of these tools, looks at the number of people participating online. Meetup.com, for instance, had 180,000 people meeting up for the Dean Campaign.

While the numbers were certainly impressive for the 2004 election, the more crucial inquiry is not Dean’s immediate advantage gained in this election (for, as ryan already noted, Dean didn’t win), but the long term impact this specific form of technology will have on future campaigns and election results.

The important recognition here is that advantages come only at the margins of technology. Dean attracted attention from media and the general public because of his innovative and technologically advanced strategies. When the internet is actually universal (only 159 million people were online in 2002, out of a total U.S. population of 288 million according to the CIA and Census Bureau), the question becomes: When every candidate has an equal technological advantage and every voter has equal access to the Internet, what changes?

We’ll continue to explore this issue, but it’s worth noting that pervasive Internet shares a lot of qualities with pervasive TV, radio, and print.