Softball

I'm feeling ranty today, regarding the frustrating state of political debate.  As the blogosphere twitters on about yet another piece of campaign propaganda, I wonder why people who profess to have a genuine interest in how technology and the political process have intertwined can so easily become cheerleaders for its lowest-common-denominator use.

If you think of Yahoo!'s candidate mash-up from earlier this year, you saw a brilliant use of technology to help people form educated opinions.  While it's certainly the nature of culture – and especially digital culture – to create memes, it's just so... intellectually lazy.

Today's poster child is the video "I'm Voting Republican."  It's a kind of sophomoric attempt to frame the right as the source of all evil, not to mention quite mindless in their pursuit thereof.  As of this morning, it's been viewed by over 3 million people.  Understandably, it's been commented on by nearly 30,000.  The discourse is not exactly give-and-take, nor especially eloquent (my personal favorite rebuttal: "I'm voting Democrat because I want free stuff.  Abortion is murder."), it's a fairly predictable response to polarizing campaign rhetoric.

If your attempt to position yourself by framing your opposition, expect the counter-attack.  It's Marketing 101.  If you claim to stand for something great by claiming your opponent stands for something worse, you don't change minds.  And so we death-spiral into five months of unenlightening generalization-lobbing.  I feel sorry for those folks who really do want the kind of meaningful information that can help them decide, if this is what cheerfully passes for "campaigning."

Politics and Culture My Ass

Thoughts from the Advertising 2.0 conference: Politics and Culture panel discussion

Y'know, panel discussions are hard enough (christ, you can't get a freaking' word in edgewise), without panelists having something to sell.  I'm good with an ax to grind, or a POV (educated or otherwise) to expound, but ignoring the topic in order to convince an audience that your 100-year-old media brand is suddenly relevant because you can serve it up on a mobile device is just irritating.

The saving grace was getting to sit next to Kurt Anderson, founder of Spy magazine, and kind of a personal hero to me, journalistically speaking.  He offered an interesting counterpoint to the assertion by one of the mainstream media channels that they were experiencing "explosive" growth in news consumption among a younger demographic.  Kurt pointed out that it might be the "Obama Factor" – people, and especially younger people – are consuming Obama news, not... news.

Obama is the first legitimate digital political brand.  (My apologies to Ron Paul.)  He's simultaneously being created online by his own brilliant strategists, and thousands of anonymous and famous denizens of the web.  Will.i.am's "Yes We Can" video is the most powerful piece of propaganda since Leni Riefenstahl.  And don't read anything into that.  Barack Obama is a magnificent orator on his own.  Combine him with music, celebrity and message, and that's some powerful shit.

But the question plagues me: can a digital political brand be built without substance behind it?  I bet it could....