Editorial: Keep an open mind on plan Editorial: Grocery bags get recycled The dating scene not in my teens' future Will the 2008 presidential election be decided by blogs? Mercy! What a frightening thought.
But next year's election surely will be influenced by postings on the Internet to a degree way beyond the cyberjungle's influence on the last presidential election. As you may — or may not — recall, YouTube didn't even exist yet in 2004. Let's try an online update on the political scene — with the clear understanding that Web sites and other cyberspace tactics are changing so rapidly, this update will be obsolete almost immediately.
To start with, here's a factual clue about the popularity of online politics: Newsweek reports the most popular blog in politics is currently Dailykos.com — with as many as 14 million postings each month. That figures out to about 350,000 a week or 50,000 a day.
And, in the immortal words of Al Jolson — as unedited by any English teacher — we ain't seen nothin' yet. Now we're told that MySpace is going into politics in a big way. For the uninitiated, MySpace is one of the top 10 most-visited Web sites.
According to Mike Kelly of Cox News Service, MySpace has launched the Impact Channel — "featuring a voter registration tool, personal profiles of the official candidates, and a fundraising tool that allows users to donate to the candidates of their choice." Not only that, Kelly reports that MySpace will sponsor a nationwide presidential primary election on New Year's Day, 2008 — two weeks before the Iowa caucuses. "This primary will be open to all MySpace users in the U.
S.," writes Kelly, "regardless of age." Kelly also reports: "In cooperation with Mark Burnett, the reality-show guru who brought the world Survivor' and The Apprentice,' MySpace will launch a political reality show — an online competition where MySpace users can select a candidate whom they feel best represents the collective voice of America.
" They could just call it "American Presidential Idol." It's slightly scary to think where that poll would wind up. Already, Web sites are playing a role in real presidential politics.
We must hope the role is just as walk-ons. The most salacious example, and also the most popular, is Amber Lee Ettinger — alias Obama Girl — whose Web video, "I've Got a Crush on Obama," attracted more than 2 million hits during its first three weeks online. According to Jocelyn Noveck of Associated Press, Obama Girl cavorts in a bikini, red underwear or a tight Obama T-shirt.
The official reaction of the Barack Obama presidential campaign to Obama Girl: No comment. Who knows? In this wacky Web-site world, she may even help him be seen as the coolest of all the candidates.
Meanwhile, back in the print world — no we haven't gone out of business yet — comes a Newsweek piece by Steven Levy confirming some of our fears that the Internet is really the free-flowing sewer running through the middle of town, as I have described it in the past — in print, but never online. Levy discovered that Wikipedia, the self-proclaimed online expert on everything, was snookerd by a 24-year-old college dropout, who was passing himself off as "a tenured professor of education who holds a Ph.D.
in theology and a degree in canon law." Confronted with the unmasking of this Internet imposter, Wikipedia finally quit relying on his "expertise." The same Newsweek column quoted Andrew Keen, author of the Web critique, "The Cult of the Amateur," as saying that with the Internet, we're moving toward a "dictatorship of idiots.
" Whenever I start gnashing my teeth in print about the lack of any kind of monitoring of content on the Internet, I get letters asking how a newspaper guy can support censorship. If I use this column to trash someone in print, whoever I'm dumping on can sue me and drag me into court, to make me prove the defamation is true. But I can go online with my own blog and dump on whomever I please — and they have no recourse at all.
Online, I wouldn't have to take responsibility for what I write — just as so many bloggers now manage to drop stink bombs on helpless individuals with no repercussions at all. Would I want Congress to step in and monitor the Internet? The best answer to that is the old Will Rogers line: "Nothing bad can happen to the country when Congress isn't in session.
" You can bet that Congress won't try to regulate content on the Internet. Why not? Because the Internet is so popular in this country, American politicians are afraid to touch it.
We'll see if their attitude changes because of below-the-belt blogs during the next election campaign. At the moment, the loudest protests about Internet censorship come from one of the heaviest hitters online: Google Inc. Christopher Rugaber of The Associated Press reports that Google is trying to get Congress to help fight government censorship of the Internet in other countries — such as Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and Thailand.
Google wants Congress to consider this an issue of "free trade," not free speech. According to Google spokesman Andrew McLaughlin, the "product" being traded is "information services." Google's prime concern is the advertising revenue from its online site.
The fewer hits online, the less ad sellers think they're getting for their money. Please don't waste your time going online and searching for my blog site. Right now, I can't imagine that there ever will be an Uncle Chuckles blog, but so many things that I could never have imagined have already happened in cyber space, it's hard to rule anything out.
What's truly scary is this conclusion by Steven Levy in Newsweek: Speaking of the Internet, he wrote, "In any case, we will ultimately get the media that we deserve." — Chuck Thomas is a Star columnist whose column appears on the Opinion pages each Saturday. His e-mail address is star4cthomas@earthlink.
net.
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