The Opposite of Interactivity
By Zephyr Teachout, 02/04/2008 - 11:00pm

When Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy, she did it online. By spreading a video message instead of handling press questions, she used the internet to actually reduce interactivity, instead of increase it--she didn't have to interact with questions, and she could take several takes before putting the video up.

Now, on the night before Super Tuesday, she is returning to using the web for something that looks interactive, but is the opposite of interactive. I'm watching the Hallmark Town Hall, and she's answering questions from supporters. Are the questions pre-picked? I don't know, but since the website doesn't tell me, I have to assume so. Are the people who are asking questions pre-vetted? The site, skipping over the great benefit of the web (that there is plenty of space to be transparent about process) doesn't tell me.

I'm from Vermont. I know Town Hall meetings. They are contentious, boring, complicated, arcane, and proof that the ration of eccentrics to conformists are pretty high in any political community. Senator Clinton, this is no Town Hall.

Why does it matter? Because Presidents interact, and so we want to see it (note: when she did interact, pre-NH with true undecideds, it really helped her...). But also because real interaction is transformative, in a way controlled events never can be.

Full disclosure: I support Barack Obama.

Go gurl

It's almost pathological their aversion to serendipity.

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...but on the other hand

Dan Manatt wrote the opposite regarding this event. And it's the "Most Emailed."

I don't know if people really care. In politics, as with anything else, if you can fake sincerity, you've got it made. I hate to be cynical-- but there's a limit to how "interactive" I personally need to be with a Presidential candidate.

Andrew Rasiej spoke to Michele Noris on All Things Considered yesterday, where he flat out said that the Republican candidates are not doing any viral marketing. I plainly don't believe him-- he runs PDF, which has a claim of bipartisanship, and he could find no example of anything a Republican candidate is doing? Sheesh. If only he read the article you wrote in November about Mike Huckabee, who you felt was making the most effective use of the web: "He is the only candidate consistently--every day--sharing user-created videos on his blog, the videos that many predicted would dominate this election. The user-created videos are far more irreverent (even tweaking Huckabee himself) than videos other campaigns will share, and they are far more interesting."

I'm a reluctant occasionally reader of TechPresident. But it seems like too often contributors take the shortcut can go with their gut as opposed to doing real research (as you did in November.)

Of course, there's also limited returns of the hocus-pocus. And there's far many more electronic battlefields. The NYTimes dealt a body-slam to Obama on page A1 of Sunday's paper, bringing up the issue of how he apparently acquiesced to the nuclear industry in a bill he brought to the Senate. The Obama website -- or, rather, the campaign's lesser known factcheck domain-- swung back. But the conservative blogs (strangely trusting the Times for a change) lapped up the story. I couldn't find a top liberal blog which picked up the campaign's talking points.



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