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Politics

The next general election will be won and lost on the internet

Tim Montgomerie

Wednesday, 6th June 2007

But the gatecrashing of the propaganda monopoly long enjoyed by the established parties is only the beginning of the political revolution that will be produced by the internet. The next steps will deliver changes that will make YouTube videos appear as old hat as those 1979 Saatchi ads.

The internet has already changed the media and other businesses but the biggest changes are still to come. Many predict that most print newspapers will have closed by 2025 as more and more young people rely on websites for news and comment. Old-fashioned, top-down politics is just as vulnerable as the dead tree press.

Few people understand all of this better than Joe Trippi. Trippi ran Howard Dean’s internet campaign in 2003/04. Dean didn’t win the Democratic nomination but his campaign showed what might be possible: 600,000 internet users, through their fundraising and grassroots campaigning, briefly propelled an outsider candidate to the status of frontrunner. Trippi wonders what will happen when a campaign has enlisted millions of web-based activists. Barack Obama is already on the way to building such an online army.

Trippi, who is in London next week for a Bebo-sponsored conference on the internet’s transformation of politics, wrote a book about the lessons of the Dean campaign, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. For him, the internet age is not so much the information age but the empowerment age. Whereas television involved square-jawed talking heads telling us what to think, the internet gives every citizen a voice. ‘You have the power’ was Howard Dean’s catchphrase at every rally. For Trippi, the internet is the ‘simple and radically democratic idea that a million computers are always better than one’ and that ‘a million people are always smarter than the biggest corporation’.

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