The Internet will change government next, Joe Trippi says
Consider this: visitors to YouTube watched 14.5 million hours of video President-elect Barack Obama’s campaign put on the site during his race for the White House.
Buying that amount of airtime would have cost $47 million, said Joe Trippi, a political consultant who worked on the Howard Dean campaign.
Consider this as well: imagine if President Obama were to put up a Web site, ‘MyWhiteHouse.com,’ and harness the energy of 10 to 20 million supporters to help pass his agenda.
Congressional opponents ought to watch out, regardless of how much money they raised from lobbyists and industry, Trippi said Friday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.
A new era of politics is on the way.
“I think we’re about to see the first ‘network’ president” and the potential for new powers to come to the White House, Trippi said. The Internet “is going to change a lot more than presidential campaigns. It’s going to change government.”
Social networking and Web 2.0 stand to remake politics in the same way they turned the Internet into a vibrant interactive environment for reshaping work and play.
Without the Internet, Obama would not be president, said Huffington Post co-founder Arianna Huffington. When the McCain campaign tried to falsely brand Obama as a terrorist or Muslim, it was bloggers and people on the Internet who kept throwing the truth back in its face.
This was “the greatest success of the ’08 race,” Huffington said.
Obama would not have won without Net, Arrianna Huffington says
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said he is now obsessed with the social networking site Facebook. Not long ago, he said he didn’t know what social networks were, now he is attracting online friends as fast as he can.
“I want someone who’s a fanatic, a fan,” he said at the summit. “It’s an extraordinary tool.”
But it comes with a downside. Politicians have to be always on and realize that in the age of instant YouTube videos there are no ore off-the-record comments. Voters are going to see them with all their foibles.
“We’re in a reality TV series, 24-by-7,” says Newsom.
