It is difficult to articulate what fascinates me so much about the Internet and politics, the Internet and democracy. But allow me to dream for a minute. For months now, I’ve been itching to put together a project or write something — anything — on everything from the initial discussion to the unprecedented election of Obama as president and the role that the Internet had to play in it, even if everyone’s written about it already.
By now, it is a given, uncontested, soberly accepted fact that the key to Obama’s success was not just the message, but the medium. Marshall McLuhan might have spoken convincingly about light bulbs and television in arguing that “the medium is the message,” but never has this been more clear than in the case of the Internet and Barack Obama. ”Al Gore may have ‘invented’ the Internet (as his critics occasionally charged) but there is no question that Barack Obama is the first successful presidential nominee to fully exploit the medium’s potential,” reports O’Reilly.
To try to account for the roots of the Obama victory online and see just how far-reaching his message was would entail a massive study into archived Internet matter. And in the ever-evolving space that is the online commons, who knows how different the world wide web will be when you emerge from the annals of pre-Obama campaign fodder? By now, we know who won and grasp the significance of the collective efforts that it took to make it happen.
But here’s where it matters — in 2010, the Philippines will elect its next president. And in this critical election, you have the whole host of characters meeting again and more than just the distant possibility of the country taking more than just a few steps backwards. But in 2010, there is that chance to make things right.
Where all of this matters, is if the Philippines manages to go the same route — and there’s no reason it shouldn’t, with how technologically savvy and irrepressibly imitative of success we are as a people — then we might actually be able to pull off what just happened here.
I’ve been studying the Internet for different reasons over the past few years. The first research paper I ever wrote, I did on how the Internet was being used for education, back in the days of Geocities and Yahoo. But it is the thought of the 2010 elections back home that feeds this interest today.
Filed under: Politics, philippines
