“An amazing thing happened in the presidential contest of 2004: For the first time in my life, maybe the first time in history, a candidate lost but his campaign won.”
(Joe Trippi, The Revolution will not be Televised)
What Joe Trippi trying to say when he emphasizes Howard Dean’s Presidential campaign in 2003? “A candidate lost but his campaign won”.
The Dean’s campaign started with seven people in the campaign staff, $100.000 in the bank and four hundred thirty two supporters. At the end of 2003, almost in a year, Dean’s campaign ended with $50 million fundraising (from small donations $100 or less) and 640, 000 supporters. However it wasn’t enough for him to be the President of United States.
As Trippi says end of his book’s introduction one of the most essential results of this campaign is that it was the story how American people engage in real dialogue. Dislike other political campaigns in the past; this campaign stopped “selling” to them. This time the platform where the parties meet was different: Internet.
The aspects, interactivity and social networking have made internet a convenient place to give voice to voiceless, to share, to talk and to access information. It is not all about how much technology emerged in 21st century. I believe that if you don’t use the internet primarily for public’s favor (not only being accessible but also being questionable), you will not be accomplishing anyway neither as a businessman nor a politician.
TVs and radios haven’t given us a chance to show our reactions and express our opinions about what we’ve considered most. We were just listening and watching in the past but now we have been getting a part of the conversation. We have started to make our preferences on the internet easily and quickly. For instance online buying, selling, searching, watching, networking, mailing, discussing, surveying, talking, reading…etc.
As we realize almost everything what we were doing manually before the internet came into our lives, has been getting ONLINE.
In this sense why we don’t think about “online democracy“? As long as we maintain and encourage democracy on the internet we will be eligible to apply democracy among grassroots. The transformation from “TV society” to “Internet society” has been emerging increasingly. The internet will reach everyone in the world eventually. Thus why we don’t launch revolution on internet in favor of democracy?
I think Howard Dean’s campaign was launched with this belief and has devoted itself to power of democracy. Alike Dean says: “To really use the Internet well, you have to build community, not just enable fundraising.”
In my opinion whoever adopts this mentality would be successful in the future like Howard Dean and Joe Trippi.
Politika - Medya - Gündem 