PV. Trippi on Revolution

Listening in on a recitation of some of the above, a helpful friend of mine offered up the epigrammatic comment, "Blog Blah Blah." Knowing the humid hullabaloos that haloed the terms “cybserspace,” “digitality,” and “virtuality” among others in turn over the last decade or so is it any wonder that even openminded tech-savvy netizen-types might hesitate to commit their attentions uncritically, or at any rate unironically, to what appears to be the latest emanation of the American technological sublime? But, given the actual impacts over the last decade or so on countless actual human lives of computers, digital media, and even virtual reality (to the extent that video games, military training simulations, industrial computer-assisted-design applications, and the like constitute workaday virtualities), then, precisely to the contrary, why would anyone hesitate at all to take up “blogging” in full seriousness?

In his recent book, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Joe Trippi juxtaposes the political cultures seemingly differently incubated by mass-media articulated primarily through the lens of national broadcast television and radio networks as against peer-to-peer networks supported by social software.

“As television transformed political campaigns,” writes Trippi, “people began viewing elections as no different than any other product someone was trying to sell them... So they channel surfed. They tuned out. When the networks call elections before voters have even been to the polls, when they turn our political system into just another TV show (and not a very good one at that...) all they do is encourage people to turn the channel.”

Given that Trippi will want to counterpose to this kind of pernicious passivity a more active democratic engagement he would associate with digital networked media practices, I think he might benefit to pause here to consider that the figures through which we articulate the phenomenological inhabitation of networked media often seem to register the same kind of “passivity”: either literally invoking a “surfing” of the web that connects explicitly to the “channel-surfing” he disdains, or invoking the notion of “browsing” the web via a software application like “Netscape” or “Mozilla Firefox” rather like a consumer wandering a mall.

Still, Trippi continues on rather elegiacally from there to point out that “[f]rom that seminal moment when I watched Robert Kennedy declare victory and then turn and walk toward his death in 1968, until now, the involvement of Americans in all levels of politics has fallen precipitously.”

His case here is borne out by a number of compelling statistics. There has been a “decline in the number of voters in the presidential election (...from 62.8 percent in 1960 to below 50 percent in recent years). The percentage of people who worked for a political party also plummeted, by about 42 percent in the past 30 years. The number who served on a committee for some local organization fell by 39 percent. Thirty-five percent fewer attended public meetings. Thirty-four percent fewer attended a political rally or speech.”

Against this, Trippi contrasts what he takes to be an extraordinary upwelling of political participation in the 2004 American Presidential Election cycle, a reinvigoration of grassroots organizing and small-contribution campaign fundraising practices that coincided in his view with the most recent proliferation of social software facilitated communication, fundraising, meeting, and organizational tools.

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