ABSTRACT
After 15 years of predictions by business boosters and their cybertarian equivalents in academia, from management to media studies, we seem no closer to the collapse of television and the suzerainty of the internet. This is particularly true in the field of US electoral politics. Of course, hype in and of itself is evidence, as the first two fantastical epigrams above indicate. People believe these things, just as they believe in neoclassical economics and religion. Such beliefs have real, material implications, even if their origins lie in fictions. We have long been promised ‘a golden era of politics’ as the internet enters ‘Americans’ cultural imagination’ (Cornfield 2006). Unless you regard the forms of democracy, policy making and programme management offered by George Bush Minor as ‘golden’, this may seem an overstatement. But perhaps the lowest rates of electoral participation in the First World are ‘golden’. As at July 2008, the US population’s use of television, versus the internet
and cell phones, to watch screen texts disclosed that TV was more popular than ever. People watched 127 hours of it a month, as opposed to spending 26 hours online and 2 hours with their cell phones. Video texts are mostly consumed on television and in real time: time shifting occupies just 5 per cent of spectators. People under the age of 24 spend fewer hours on the internet
than older users, but watch more video. Those born between 1984 and 1990 – a desirable demographic both commercially and politically because their fundamental desires are not yet formed in terms of preferred brands – choose TV over the internet and the cell for both entertainment and information (Nielsen Media Research 2008b). Yet faith in the internet as a transformative element in US politics that will
transcend the unidirectional sway of television is widespread among activists and pundits, as these quotations illustrate:
2005 – The Year of the Digital Citizen. (BBC News, Twist 2006)
‘We are … returning to an era of participatory politics rather than broadcast politics.’
