Hello Fellow Obamans...
Interesting article by John Alter at Newsweek addressing the fading effectiveness of "soundbites" that the politicians and MSM have relied on like crack cocaine during the election season.
They are convinced that a good hit of soundbite will get the masses all agitated and wired. And they are still right about that. But just less and less right as time moves forward.
Thanks to us.... you, me, and every inquisitive and insightful blogger and citizen here. We are immediately dissecting and assigning value (or lack thereof) to each attempted distraction. Sure, we still get all riled up by comments now and then, but the i think their duration of effectiveness is measured in hours and days. Compared to weeks and months for the average non-tech citizen....ie. daily audience of the MSM.
I agree with Alter's premise here. In a world of exponential booms in internet socializing (where Progressives have HUGE advantages compared to their conservative brethrens) the future is clear....
The future is ours, and it will be blogged.
Go Obama!
Here is the article:
http://www.newsweek.com/...
Juice quotes:
It's not that sound bites, which date back at least to Lincoln's "a house divided against itself cannot stand," are dead. In fact, the good, colorful ones get much more play now than in the pre-YouTube age. Obama's words about "bitter" working-class voters who "cling" to religion and guns would have received even greater attention if video had surfaced of him saying them at a closed-door San Francisco fund-raiser. (The poor-quality audio lessened the impact.) All of the candidates still work to fashion memorable expressions to imprint their views—and network news programs still attract large numbers of viewers with their "packages" of sound bites.
But the ecosystem of political media has changed, with sound bites losing their authority. Consumers of news are less easily manipulated by the 24/7 barrage of bites and images (Hillary Clinton doing whisky shots, Obama bowling), which are dissected endlessly on cable. Voters search for their own context. The bad news is that they are often simply looking for their opinions to be validated. The good news is that the search engages them more actively in the process and makes them demand more information than is contained in sound bites.