Does the internet exert the same influence?

Forty years ago today the first televised debate between Presidential candidates of the United States, John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon, took place. It was a watershed in the history of media, and of politics. There are those who claim that politics have never been the same since. It's hard to imagine that only sixty years ago the press in the United States published photographs of Franklin D. Roosevelt only from the waist up so that the public wouldn't know that he was confined to a wheelchair. Back then it wasn't considered important, or necessary, for the public to have this information. The Kennedy/Nixon debates weren't necessarily the event that changed all that, but they most certainly were instrumental in the victory of image over content. (Lest someone get the impression that I'm suggesting that Nixon had more content than Kennedy, let me make it clear that I'm far from impressed with the "content" of either.)

Today, of course, discussing the influence of television is passé. What interests us is how the internet influences elections. Lance Morrow in a recent Time Magazine article, for instance, seems to think that our ability to comment immediately on anything and everything, and the extent to which we exercise that ability in discussion forums and anywhere else, "encourages a certain violence of opinion".

Others suggest that the internet doesn't exercise any influence at all on the elections. In a recent report from CNET, for instance, we find the following paragraph:

The Democratic and Republican parties recently made a show of broadcasting their entire national conventions on the Web. Unfortunately, it was a show no one came to watch. According to research from the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, during the four days of the Republicans' coronate-the-candidate spectacle, only one in 63 Americans sought out related information online, and even fewer--one in 500--actually visited a convention-dedicated site.

So the question of whether the effort devoted to preparing attractive candidate web sites actually brings results remains an open question. Influencing the political atmosphere isn't quite a easily measured, which is, perhaps, why that's easier to speculate upon. Opinion polls conducted every hour, designed to identify even the tiniest flux in voter opinion, probably influence elections more than do web sites, but they're not as sexy, nor as au courant, as the internet.

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