Internet Use On The Campaign Trail

In Friday's debate, President Bush rejected a renewal of the draft as just a rumor passed around on"the Internets." The term made the president seem a little out of touch; it just didn't sound like a word that he uses much.

However, the word could also be seen as a bit of accidental wisdom on the president's part. There are indeed multiple Internets; in fact, there are as many Internets as there are people who use it. We each build our own personal network of e-mail correspondents and commonly visited Web sites, just as we choose what news outlets we watch in a 500-channel world and what newspapers or magazines we read. That reality is transforming how political campaigns are run.

In fact, historians will mark the 2004 election as the first campaign of the Internet era, much as the 1960 campaign is recalled as the first in which television played a major role. But the transformation of 2004 will make the impact of television seem minor.

The rise of independent media efforts such as the Swift Boat Veterans and MoveOn.org is only a suggestion of the changes taking place. Bloggers now amplify the messages of the campaigns, raise money for candidates, and in many cases amp up a level of viciousness that campaigns would never dare to provoke directly. The blogs also generate new messages --- they work like a focus group in which thousands of people take part, suggesting and refining message lines for their political candidate or party. The most appealing lines of argument are then adopted by campaigns as their own.

Technology is also complicating the flow of information. After each of the last two debates, my e-mail was clogged with messages from people all over the country insisting on telling me how their particular candidate had carried the day. Instead of the media influencing the public, the public is now trying to influence the media on how it influences the public.

Overall, such change is positive. While the post-debate e-mail deluge amounted to political spam, the back-and-forth between media and audience is refreshing nonetheless. And it was wonderful that bloggers so quickly exposed the fraudulent National Guard records that snookered Dan Rather and CBS News.

What we're seeing is what John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt call"netwar." The two analysts for the RAND think tank predict that in the modern world, competition will increasingly take the form of network pitted against network. Al-Qaida, for example, is a global network locked in struggle against the American global network. According to Arquilla and Ronfeldt, the network that establishes the narrative that most people find appealing, and that communicates its narrative most effectively, is going to win.

Politics, too, is becoming a form of netwar, a competition between dueling narratives. And one of the most important questions about that transformation is how strongly a narrative will have to be anchored in reality to be effective. The apparent impact of the Swift Boat ads argues that in some contexts, truthfulness may not matter much. When people can wrap themselves in a media environment that only reinforces what they choose to believe, facts may lose importance. The problem is compounded by media outlets that find it profitable to play to that desire, offering viewers not information but comforting affirmation of their pre-existing beliefs.

In a campaign, the result can be two competing narratives that operate in separate worlds, never intersecting with each other. That may be why people have a hard time discussing issues across party lines anymore. There's no common ground.

Only in debates, the oldest form of political campaigning known to man, have the two narratives been forced to interact directly. John Kerry has prospered in those settings because people could see for themselves that he was not the candidate that the Bush narrative had created. Likewise, Bush has not come across as the heroic, confident leader that voters were led to expect.

Artificial as they are, debates at least require the candidates to operate from the same basis in reality. Without that grounding, the process would be hopeless.