A Couple of Post-Election Thoughts

In a conversation with a political reporter yesterday, we wondered whether collaborative communications had made a breakthrough in this election cycle. I said there had been some progress, but not the ultimate breakthrough we’re all hoping for.

More than ever, campaigns used the Net to communicate with the faithful and especially to raise money. They did so eagerly and successfully in many cases, having seen how well the technique worked in the 2004 elections.

But they were less eager to use technology to reach out to the already unconvinced, it seems to me. By far the bulk of political advertising remained in the traditional media, for example.

I also suspect, however, that the poisonous spewing of lies, deceptions and other garbage may have reached a point of diminishing returns. (One hopes that people are studying this in a scientific way.) If so, look for the politicians to move a lot more of their advertising to the Net in the next cycle.

The collaborative nature of the online medium got a workout in several journalistic ways. Perhaps the most notable was Talking Points Memo‘s Josh Marshall’s brilliant gathering of string on what turned out to be a last-second bit of trickery — not the only thing of its kind by the two parties, but one of the most notable — the now-notorious Republican “robo-calling” stunt where automatic phone dialers inundated voters with repeated calls that appeared, at first glance, to come from Democrats — a tactic quite plainly designed to annoy voters, not educate them.

Marshall, more than any other journalist, blew the whistle on this stunt — and, moreover, he led the charge to persuade the traditional media to wake up and cover what plainly was a big story. I strongly doubt that this story would have been in the major newspapers and on TV had Marshall not done this work.