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Chapter 9 Social Networks Will Change America’s Political Map MOVING FROM A BROADCAST entertainment architecture , with its centralized control over both the production and distribution of content, to the decentralized, user-driven structure of the Net was not easy to accomplish for many in the media industry. “I want my MTV” was the emblematic 1980s mantra of Gen-Xers, who demanded their parents give them access to that cable channel and its music. But today, MTV’s corporate parent, Viacom, struggles to find the right formula for attracting Millennials to its web sites (Karnitschnig 2006). The idea that the Internet was just another distribution channel for the type of programming that had madeViacom so successful with Generation X was firmly fixed in the company’s underlying strategy. In March 2007,Viacom’s owner, Sumner Redstone, made it clear just how much he believed in the old model by suingYouTube’s new owner, Google, for $1 billion in damages for alleged copyright violations. Viacom could have joined its media brethren at NBC Universal and News Corporation in their efforts to create a rival toYouTube’s video-sharing web site, one that would fully respect the intellectual property rights of all the media companies involved in this new venture. But Redstone preferred the RIAA’s “sue ’em” strategy instead. “It’s hard for us to believe [Google] has any desire to protect our content,” remarkedViacom’s chief executive, Philippe Dauman, summarizing the motivation for the lawsuit (Delaney and Karnitschnig 2007). Completely missing from this statement is any acknowledgment that viewers on YouTube might have something of their own to contribute to the site’s content. ButViacom, unwilling to give up the control it felt was necessary to make money from its investments in its existing properties, in effect sacrificed the 156 Chap-09.qxd 11/20/07 1:51 PM Page 156 potential brand loyalty of an entire generation just to preserve the value of what it could control today. Political campaigns are the equals of any media company when it comes to wanting to run things from the top and control every aspect of the product they are selling. As Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s campaign manager in 2004, wrote, “Most campaigns do everything in their power to control every element of the candidate’s image and message, from the clothes he wears to each word out of his mouth” (2004, 109). As a consultant to SiliconValley start-ups,Trippi could see that the notion of running a campaign from the bottom up would require an “open source” approach, with control located, if at all, in the swarm of contributors to the campaign’s efforts rather than at its headquarters. But, as he pointed out to Dean, attempting such a feat would be like“jumping from a fifteenstory building” and trusting the front line troops would be there to catch you. In a DeanNation blog posted in May 2003, Trippi wrote, “Every political campaign I have ever been in was built on the top-down military structure. . . . This kind of structure will suffocate the storm [groundswell of support], not fuel it. . . .The important thing is to provide the tools and some of the direction . . . and get the hell out of the way when a big wave is building on its own” (119).The idea, as the Dean campaign itself proved, is easier to articulate than to execute. But those candidates who master the art of putting the voters in charge of the campaign will be rewarded with victory. Changing the Map One State at a Time Those who cut their teeth in 2004 on this new way to involve the voters soon found themselves in demand by all of the 2008 presidential campaigns. Mark Warner, who left the governor’s mansion inVirginia in 2005 to explore a presidential run (which he ultimately decided against), recruited one of the more prominent members of the Dean campaign, Jerome Armstrong, who had coined the term word “Netroots” in 2002 to describe the growing community of people who became politically active through online interaction. Armstrong was hired for what turned out to be a one-year test of the ability of online campaigning to build support for a relatively unknown presidential candidate. Warner, who had co-founded Nextel and invested in other Internet start-ups before he became governor, fully appreciated the potential of this new approach to Social Networks 157 Chap-09.qxd 11/20/07 1:51 PM Page 157 [18.119...

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