The Internet generation and the Election of 2008

I've been thinking about this for a couple of weeks now. There is something fundamentally different between the election in 2004 and the one now. It is the broad integrated use of the internet to disseminate any and all information whether factual or not about every candidate. This phenomenon was not as prevalent just 4 years ago.

Now, almost every single day, there are Youtube snippets, blog postings, news blog postings, internet polling, political forums, facebook, craigslist, and upteen thousand "political" web sites with various political agendas and leanings.

McCain, Clinton, and Obama have been dissected, probed, prodded, examined, and xrayed by every single media type and political angle that this growing internet minded election can think of. If it wasn't for the internet explosion of information, would we even care about the documents appearing out of thin air that Clinton couldn't find? Would we even care or even remotely believe that McCain could possibly be a Manchurian Candidate possibility? Would we ever have heard or seen any candidates pastor's sermons?

Would FDR have been elected if the national press had presented his affliction with polio in the same manner as they do every blemish of candidates today? Would JFK have been elected if his indiscretions and “lack of experience” been chronicled on every blog, political forum, and media outlet in the country?

Can any candidate actually survive this kind of magnified scrutiny that can in a second disseminate every possible aspect of a candidates life to millions of people who then put their own perspective and pass it on to millions more?

Regardless of which candidate you may be supporting in this election, imagine what the next election may be like when even new and improved vetting (and I use that word loosely) avenues are around, and every piece of news, whether accurate or not is instantly downloaded to those cool video glasses with the little monitor that everyone will be wearing in 2012.

Can any candidate actually survive this kind of election? Could any of us survive that kind of scrutiny?