Monday, December 20, 2004

Technology and the Election

"If Hitler had an email list and some online tools - yeah, we'd be speaking a different language now."

BOPNews has a great election assessment from Zach Exley, former online communications chief for the Kerry-Edwards campaign, who spoke recently at Harvard's Internet and Society 2004 Conference. His take is not that friendly to those who think that technology is the answer to getting out the vote.

The take away was pretty stark: after a year of Panglossian happy-talk from media outlets like NPR, the tools proved not to be magic: and the much-lauded "conversation" proved to be an irrelevant distraction from building a real world field organization. None of this should surprise most readers, but the fact that this is even considered controversial shows how much techno utopians have to learn.

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