Yule Heibel's Bookmarks tagged reality →  View Popular

One demonstration of this phenomenon lies in the oldest form of human
communication, politics. In the early days of the internet in 1992, Ross
Perot, the Texan tycoon, claimed that he would transform democracy by
campaigning for the presidency on the web. Bill Clinton responded by
campaigning old style, from the back of a train.

Sixteen years later, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were still barnstorming
around every key state in their primary election battle. They knew that
people would not believe in them unless they were physically and visibly
present on their territory.

The difference of the internet to the campaign lay in sending messages and
raising money. If it supplanted anything it was other media such as the
letter post, radio and television. Obama’s online securing of $270m combined
the e-mail with computer banking to sensational effect. As with show
business, the internet supports live but is in no way a substitute for it.
Clicking a mouse can never beat pumping flesh.

Futurology has a built-in distortion towards technological novelty, while
ignoring the continued appeal of what has gone before. It cannot recognise
what the historian David Edgerton of Imperial College has dubbed “the shock
of the old”. Our demands rarely change over time, only the way in which the
market supplies them.

I find this form of conservatism vastly encouraging. People like people. They
crave the immediacy of human contact and congregation. They want to see
those who inspire or excite them live, not digitised. And what they want,
they will pay for.