Thread by @davekarpf

Here’s @WIRED on digital citizenry in the 2000 election. “Technology has gone mainstream in a flag. Americans are racing ahead, looking for new ideas - now politicians just have to catch up.”

I have two comments to make... (1/x)
#wiredarchive

First, it’s amazing what counted as “very wired” in 2000. This is the height of the Internet boom, months before the first crash.

They define “very wired” as ppl who use 4 or more of: the Internet, a cell/wireless phone, a computer, fax, email, online banking, & online shopping.

So, in 2000, if you used a connected computer (thus internet and email) and had a fax machine or cell phone, you were “very Wired.” And that’s only 31% of the People surveyed!

That’s just a completely foreign communications landscape to the one we now occupy. (3/x)

2000 was the first election to be labeled “the Internet election.” (Heilemann tried to affix that label to 96 in his “netizen” column, but it didn’t take.)

04/08/12/16 have also been Internet elections. I’m And in a sense that’s all true, bc they’re such different internets.

(This isn’t a new observation, btw. @kreissdaniel and @profjsg both have great books on the topic)

My second point, though: that line, “Americans are looking for new ideas - now politicians just have to catch up” is an evergreen journalistic trope.

Heilemann bemoans the lack of ideas in 96. Breslau says the same thing here. Matt Bai says the same about 04...

And it has become standard fare in pundit-class critiques of the past three elections as well.

When exactly was this era of big, new ideas supposed to have occurred?

I suspect that writers are constantly harkening back to an imagined past that never existed. (7/x)

I'm confident we will see this in 2020 as well. We'll have a thousand pieces from the campaign trail, talking about how digital technology is changing everything, and we'll have a thousand pieces asking "where are the big ideas/where are the solutions voters today crave?" (8/x)

Reading this type of campaign coverage over time, it becomes obvious that this sort of coverage is a genre.

(I mean, just read John Heilemann covering the '96 election vs Heilemann covering the '16 election. You could probably swap paragraphs at random w/out changing things.)

A lot has changed in politics, technology, and society over the past 25 years. But it is not clear to me that there has been a corresponding decline in "big ideas." (end)

...Okay, no, sorry, not done yet:

Polling was SO BAD in the 90s and early 2000s. Just so, so bad. The survey this article is based on finds essentially ONE thing -- that more people are online in 2000 than in 96. And from that(...)

...the author proclaims that "we are building a new kind of politics" & "extending the evolution of freedom among human beings."

That's a comically bad use of polling. You don't need a poll to know more people are online in 2000, and mass survey responses can't prove this stuff.

So, at the very least, I'm willing to say that the past 25 years have led to improvements in how we use polls/surveys, along with improvements in how we publicly complain about bad polls/surveys. (end, for real this time)