Packet Politics

PACKET POLITICS
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Daniel Henninger]
[Commentary] Computer, the Internet and changing screens hundreds of times each day to access different gobs of "information" has changed the way our brains order the world, which is known as human consciousness. This "change" is having a material effect on just about everything else; why not on who gets elected president next year? In 1996, an eon ago, Steve G. Steinberg wrote a prescient article in Wired magazine on the battle between what he called Bellheads and Netheads. This was essentially an argument over the network design of the Web between engineers for the established phone companies, the Bellheads, and the anarchic engineers of the Web, Netheads. It was a war between the old world of circuit-switching and the new world of packet-switching, the one we inhabit today. Today, the Bellheads are long-form TV, traditional political ads, 74-minute CDs, two-hour movies -- predetermined A-to-B formats. (Newspapers are in fact a collection of "packets," a subject for another time.) The Netheads are YouTube, shared playlists, remixed videos, the idea of personal choice, and randomly arriving political ads such as "Hillary 1984." That Netheads are chop-shopping "The Daily Show" or "The Colbert Report" is ironic, but as the Yoda of old-media Walter Cronkite said, "That's the way it is." Prepackaging versus packets. And so in politics.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117513310695452758.html?mod=todays_us_opinion
(requires subscription)