Takin' it to the Tubes
At Redblueamerica, Ben Boychuk gets in the week’s best (and most poorly-veiled) Kaiser Chiefs reference, predicting the Dems will not experience a riot in Denver — no thanks to Rush. But Ben’s passing reference to virtual riots is what really caught my eye. He cites this agitated lefty:
My generation lost its fight, largely because we had virtually no access to mass communications or the mass media. When you told someone 40 years ago that your were “networking,” it meant was that you owned phone and a phone book. All we could do to get our message on the evening news was to demonstrate, raise hell and shout insults at the police.But this generation is all about networking and mass communication.Sticks and stones didn’t get it done for us in 68, but I suspect the tech-savvy, hyper-connected YouTube generation will make Democratic Party hacks long for those “good old days,” if they cross them.
It seems to me that the injection of blogging and YouTubing and basically all of Web 2.0 into this presidential campaign has been an absolutely unqualified good. (Yes, my memory of the YouTube debates has been effaced. Hasn’t yours?) Rarely do I have nothing bad to say about a development, but it strikes me this morning that not only might virtual riots be better than real ones, they might actually be more effective, too.
