The Presidential Campaign and the Internet

The 2004 election was definitely quite interesting. Who can forget the famous speech where Howard Dean came off bad for yelling too loud in a certain way? But there's one other thing that Howard Dean became famous for and that was using the Internet in his campaign. All the candidates today are very vocal on the Internet. Individuals use websites to setup little house parties to talk about their favorite candidates. There's people dedicated to blogging about anything and everything campaign related. And with the Internet, does a big issue really ever die down? To follow the campaign, you don't have to pay attention the whole time. You can sit down at your computer on any day and start researching what is going on and find out details that happened a year ago. With all this information out there, can individuals remove the 'media' influence from the equation and come to their own conclusions?

It's not there today, but what if in the next election you could pull up a website and do a search for a candidate and their take on a specific issue and it would give you a list of sound bites of that person talking about their views on that issue over time. I always remember that when Bill Clinton was going through his impeachment troubles, there was this clip of Hilary from when they were young saying that she'd never be the Tammy Wynette, Stand By Your Man type. Of course John Stewart does this all the time on the Daily show and it's hilarious, but it would be interesting to be able to see anything you wanted on public figures and cut out the media middlemen.

And how is this going to change what people are willing to say and do in public? Right now it seems like people are willing to 'put it all out there' for the world, but will that change twenty years from now when the people who have put it all out there have to live with what they said?