New Choices

From todays Guardian interview with Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's old campaign manager and new communications guru:

"When I first started the Dean campaign there were something like 4,000 blogs worldwide," he claims. "There are now 20m and growing. It's an entirely new development - the arrival of the two-way printing press. We have had the one-way press around for centuries, but when you have a two-way press it means that people can actually have a conversation with each other on equal terms. Mobile technology, blogging technology, gives people the ability to connect with each other from the bottom up. It'll do for 21st-century politics what print did for the 18th."

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"This new technology puts power in the hands of the average citizen. It's a qualitative difference, totally different from all previous democracies. In the Dean campaign, people realised, 'Wow! We can really connect and change the established way of doing things.' And they did. We began with 432 people nationwide. That grew to 650,000 and we raised more money than any other candidate in history. And it's not just presidential elections. Look at global warming. Is it going to be solved because the leaders do something? Or because hundreds of millions of people do something?"

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What does that mean for the next presidential election, in 2008? "I think there's a good chance that a third person - a third party if you will - is going to emerge, with the power of blog behind them. It has to be from outside. The Democratic party crushed Dean from within. The party will never change from within. In the past you couldn't leave the party. Where were you going to get the money for an effective campaign? Howard Dean showed how - from bottom-up subscriptions of a few bucks. That says to me that very soon, somebody is going to step out of the two-party apparatus. I'm not talking about someone mega-rich such as Ross Perot. I'm talking about a credible party leader who steps out and says, 'You know, we don't need the traditional two parties any more.'"

So the age of the political machine is over? "Yes. The new machinery is in the hands of the people and it's blogging and it's mobile phones. There are those who say you can't change a political system that's as busted as ours. There are others who are realising that, because of blogs and the other new technologies, you can make a change. Democracy is in a lot of hurt right now and the only thing that's going to save it is getting people back into the process. These technologies are coming online just in the nick of time because this world is in a mess of trouble and it's not going to get solved unless we all connect with each other and start to work in common cause."

I agree with pretty much all of this. Not because I'm a pie-in-the-sky idealist - although I do think there are alot more practicable solutions out there than we're made aware of, and that's a theme I'll be returning to in far greater detail - but because the basic foundation of Trippi's argument is correct: this is the first time since the printing press that the technology of mass communication has become so freely available. Before now, the machinery of mass communication was always a corporation, or a tycoon's game - making newspaper, TV or radio news content isn't necessarily very expensive - distributing it widely, is.

But that's changed with the internet, phone technology, things like blogs and other cheap, popular formats that no doubt are yet to be invented and that has to translate into how we effect politics.

There have always been large groups of politically active people who feel unrepresented and seek change, the rise of these technologies and the capability to raise finance in small amounts from large groups of people has to have an impact - a qualitative impact that affects the entire terrain rather than just the capabilities of one party or another.

That has to be reason to hope.