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Wednesday, May 10, 2006
The new Brave New World
Blogger sees the political future in cellphones and MySpace
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Before he zipped off to a booksigning session at Manuel’s, we sat down with Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Democratic crown prince of the blogosphere and scourge of the “incumbent consultant class,” for a while Monday afternoon. We were looking for insights into what new technological wrinkles may affect the next presidential election, and Kos, as he’s known to readers of www.dailykos.com, had some fascinating things to say.
Blogs, he says, are passe. They are so 2004. The big new things that will impact the next presidential election, he believes, are cellphones – Sonny Perdue’s ahead of the curve — and the rise of “social networking communities,â€? like MySpace.
The usefulness of phones for organizing groups through text-messaging was shown in the recent immigration demonstrations, he noted. And by 2008, video by phone will be much more common, he believes. Oh, and the new TIVOs are going to have the ability to select RSS video feeds, so you can download your political programing at home straight off the web.
Exactly how politicians will manage to intrude themselves into those web social networks — which currently are used mostly by high school and college students — Kos isn’t exactly sure. But the campaign probably are already hard at work figuring out how to do it.
Kos also talks about how even he feels overtaken by the gallop of technology — “I have no doubt that I’ll be obsolete in a couple of years.” And he names Mark Warner as the most internet-savvy of the 2008 contenders. You can hear exerpts from the interview here.Audio
