Mociology Bites
By Neil Dodds
14 November, 2005
Can blogging change political systems? According to Joe Trippi, former campaign boss for Democrat candidacy challenger Howard Dean, it can and it will. Trippi reckons there's a good chance that the 2008 US presidential election will see the emergence of a powerful, blog-backed candidate who could shake up the traditional party machine system for good.
Trippi makes his play in an interview in today's Guardian. Dean might have been beaten to the Democratic nomination by John Kerry, but the communications innovations introduced in his campaign look like being here to stay. Trippi ordered the creation of a Dean campaign blog, which kept supporters nationwide informed of the candidate's exploits - as well as allowing readers to interact with the campaign team and Dean himself. He used the community site Meetup to mobilise supporters - 138,000 turned up to 820 locations on one day to campaign for Dean.
The interactivity of the web had another welcome side effect: Trippi asked for campaign donations online, and the resultant flood of cash astonished the team. The average Dean donation was around $80 - far less than the legal $2,000 limit for individuals, but so many contributed that the candidate eventually pulled in around $50 million.
There's more to the internet than fundraising, however. Trippi says that the growth of blogging represents nothing less than the creation of the "two-way printing press", a phenomenon he claims will have a great an effect on 21st century politics as print had in the 17th century:
"We have had the one-way press around for centuries, but when you have a two-way press it means that people can actually have a conversation with each other on equal terms. Mobile technology, blogging technology, gives people the ability to connect with each other from the bottom up."
The Dean campaign, he says, was the "baby steps" of bottom-up empowerment.
Unlike televised campaigning, which remains in the grip of big media and the parties' marketing machine, blogging and wireless communications puts power in the hands of the average citizen - or groups of citizens. "Growing big connected communities" is where Trippi sees politics heading.
"It's a qualitative difference, totally different from all previous democracies. In the Dean campaign, people realised, 'Wow! We can really connect and change the established way of doing things.' And they did. We began with 432 people nationwide. That grew to 650,000 and we raised more money than any other candidate in history. And it's not just presidential elections. Look at global warming. Is it going to be solved because the leaders do something? Or because hundreds of millions of people do something?"
"There are those who say you can't change a political system that's as busted as ours. There are others who are realising that, because of blogs and the other new technologies, you can make a change. Democracy is in a lot of hurt right now and the only thing that's going to save it is getting people back into the process. These technologies are coming online just in the nick of time because this world is in a mess of trouble and it's not going to get solved unless we all connect with each other and start to work in common cause."
Trippi believes that it's likely that a credible third-party campaigner will emerge to challenge the two big parties by the 2008 election. It's unlikely to be a multi-millionaire like Ross Perot, he says: More a credible party leader who decides to step outside the machinery of the majors to appeal to the grass roots.
Blogs will make this candidate heard - and force him to listen, not least because that's where his cash support will come from. After that, who knows - will 2008 see the first blogging president?
*Oh, and mociology? That's how how mobile and wireless technology change the way we do things, from texting for a pizza or downloading videos to your mobile.
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