Thursday, October 11, 2007

Amplifying the megaphone

I have written very little about the entire metamorphisis of mudslinging, stalking, projection, false outrage, real outrage, and disgust concerning the Frost family because I have very little unique insight to add, and I agree with James Joyner that the massive uproar is not particularly interesting reading.

There is one area which I think is interesting in this entire story-line and that is the look at meme-transmission, idea amplification and communication infrastructure. The orgininating point was the Democratic Saturday morning radio response to President Bush's radio address. I am a reasonably hard core political and information junkie and to the best of my knowledge, I have never listened to either party's radio address on a Saturday morning.

This entire sequence of events happened from a minimal event that in the normal course of events may have had thirty to sixty seconds on broadcast national news on a low viewership night and a couple of column inches on page A-22 in the Sunday paper.

Amazing how a miniscule megaphone has been amplified in this cycle. And, combine this incident with several from the 2006 cycle, including the recording of Macaca coming from George Allen, it is a good precursor of the next couple of election cycles. This will produce boring politics or explosive politics, and little in between.

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