Packet Politics ~ "Netheads" take on "Bellheads." Look out, Mrs. Clinton.

opinionjournal. ^ | Thursday, March 29, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT | DANIEL HENNINGER

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The thing I like most about the "Hillary 1984" political ad on YouTube isn't the face, shrouded in a ghastly pixel haze, but the voice. Her voice recedes into a weird, unreal echo. Truth to tell, you could insert any of the faces imploring us now to make them president, and achieve the same effect. (If you're still playing catch-up, go into YouTube.com, search "Hillary" and watch in wonder.)

It took some days after it posted on YouTube for the non-Web media to confer legitimacy on the one-minute, 13-second clip, calling it a potential "conflict" between the Hillary and Obama camps. Days later, after claiming ownership of the video, political pro Phil de Vellis wrote on the Huffington Post that he'd done the ad in a Sunday afternoon on his Mac with "some software." He said there's more where that came from. "The game has changed."

He's right. But it began a long time ago. The change came some 40 years back, when the U.S. defense department bought into a suggestion by electrical engineer Paul Baran, the son of a grocery store owner, that it build a data transmission network based on "packet switching." This was the Internet.

As someone who's on the Web too many hours, I have wondered what changing screens hundreds of times each day to access different gobs of "information" has done to the way our brains order the world, which is known as human consciousness. This "change" is having a material effect on just about everything else; why not on who gets elected president next year?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

In 1996, an eon ago, Steve G. Steinberg wrote a prescient article in Wired magazine on the battle between what he called Bellheads and Netheads.

*********************************************

See link for the rest........

[jokar]

Interesting bump.

[scan58]

The change came some 40 years back, when the U.S. defense department bought into a suggestion by electrical engineer Paul Baran, the son of a grocery store owner, that it build a data transmission network based on "packet switching." This was the Internet.

...but but but...you mean it wasn't al gore???

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Was Al around then?

[AZLiberty]

Thanks to the negative and positive examples of Clinton and Bush 43, the electorate understands that presidential elections are as much about character as about politics. When things get tough, we want the President to do the Right Thing, not necessarily the right or left thing.

[AZLiberty]

To complete this thought:

Thanks to the negative and positive examples of Clinton and Bush 43, the electorate understands that presidential elections are as much about character as about politics. When things get tough, we want the President to do the Right Thing, not necessarily the right or left thing.

Hence our presidential candidate selection process has evolved into a two-year test of character, instead of a selection made in smoky back rooms.

[TenthAmendmentChampion]

I'll have to think on this for a bit. Interesting post.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks E.

[Milhous]

If it is true that our political thinking is being bent by constant streams of small, value-laden packets of data that we constantly remix into personal hierarchies, then paradoxically the "new" politics of Web sites such as Moveon.org or the Daily Kos are really Old School.

As we all know newfangled moonbat sites simply parrot tired Marxist trope essentially aping a big old mass media that first started talking down to "the masses" decades ago.

[Billthedrill]

Packet-switching, bah! It'll never work.