“It’s all about the blogs.”
So says George Shulman, a professor at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Shulman is the recipient of an NYU Distinguished Teaching Medal in 2003 and the author of Radicalism and Reverence. Sitting in his office, where bookshelves take up the bulk of the wallspace, it seem incongruous to be talking about the healing powers of the ‘Net. After all, what can a guy who has a copy of Plato’s Republic on his wall tell us about information dissemination in the Digital Age. Well, a lot, it turns out. Shulman, surprisingly, comes across as a True Believer in the Internet Revolution, and its power to shape the political process.
More specifically, he attributes the success of Howard Dean and his grassroots campaign to the powers of the Internet.
“It let young people access his candidacy in a way that they hadn’t been able to before. The information, the platform, was always available,” Shulman says. “He made his plea directly to the electorate, to young people. His fundraising wasn’t targeted at corporations or at the wealthy, it was targeted at people who would visit his site and give $20.”
In September 2003, New York Magazine published the following: “The Dean campaign, everyone knows, has been made possible by the Internet. The campaign is a pure response-rate phenomenon. By being the first presidential candidate to deftly and efficiently access interest groups assembled through the Internet—a method first demonstrated by liberal groups like moveon.org—Dean has assembled a financing basis that threatens to swamp his competitors.”
Professor George Shulman
Copyright New York University, 2004.
The success of Dean has helped spur greater involvement in the political process from young people. Jordan Bowler, a student at the University of Washington and a former member of the Dean campaign, explains how Dean helped motivate young voters. “He was the only candidate [for the Democratic Presidential nomination] who really seemed to be speaking to the youth. He proposed universal health care, he was vigorously opposed to the war in Iraq. But most of all, you really got the feeling that your contributions helped. The bulk of his funds were raised by people giving less than $200. Early on in his campaign, he would travel the country and stay with donors. He really made his volunteers, and his donors, feel like they were important.”
According to the New York Times, “interest in the election among the young is near the highest level it has reached at any time since 18-to-20-year-olds were given the right to vote in 1972.”
Shulman says that that’s about more than Dean: it’s about the ‘Net. “Young, computer-savvy people have access to so much more information than they used to. Now, they have hundreds of sources of news about the War in Iraq, or the President’s education policies, or whatever interests them. Plus, they can really engage in the process, through online donations, through blogging.”
But it’s not all about the medium, it’s the message, too. According to Shulman, some of the major issues in this campaign are major issues to young people. That helps explain why young people are more politicized than before. “There’s a kind of idealism, a frenetic energy that needs to be tapped into. War always seems to do this for young people. It certainly did it for my generation, the Boomers. We had this motto, ‘not in our name,’ and I hear a lot of that from young people. They’re not just afraid of a draft, their afraid of what the country has become, and that really seems to matter to them.”
Shulman added, “They can’t say that this one [the election] doesn’t matter.”
The Virgin Voter staff (of one) prepares for the debates.
