If 1960 was the year television came of age as a political force then maybe the same is also true of the Internet in 2008:
Huffington says flat out that if it wasn’t for the Internet, Obama would not be president. Trippi notes that Obama’s YouTube spots gathered an aggregate of 14.5 million viewing hours. The Internet was used by candidate previously, he said, noting the Howard Dean campaign, but Obama really leveraged it fully with online video, blogging, social networking and fundraising.
The panelists also note how mainstream media tends to fail in politics, simply reporting on what each candidate says without saying who’s right or wrong. The blogosphere, they say (particularly Trippi and Huffington), tends to call out factual inaccuracies better than mainstream media.
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How can you make such an assertion? Who really knows? I imagine there are a number of things about current US society that made it more favourable for Obama than 20 years ago.
No-one really knows yet, that’s why I said maybe, there will be a flood of academic research in the next few years trying to test the importance of the Internet to Obama’s victory. And I didn’t say that the Internet was the only reason of course there were many other factors inclufing profound social changes