Of swarms and flocks
Sep 11th, 2003 by jimmoore
Right now the campaigns for president have official blogs, and there are scores of informal political blogs swarming and flocking around the candidates. What will happen as the race continues? For example, if Dean wins the nomination, what will happen to all the blogs flocking around him? What will happen to the blogs of the other democractic candidates? What will happen to their flocks?
In the old mass media days the media becomes more focused as the candidate group is winnowed down. Because fewer and fewer groups can afford to buy TV time.
But in the new web days more and more groups and individuals will start up blogs–because the dollar cost is minimal, because more and more people are blogging anyway, and because the narrowing campaign will also feel more and more relevant, and thus will become more interesting to non-political junkies.
So there will be massive flocks and swarms whizzing around the landscape. We will need Technorati and Blogdex and all sorts of new tools to make sense of what emerges and what declines and what morphs and what is distorted. It will be a wild world.
And my sense is that the political bloggers of the candidates will need to become more and more aware of the “zeitgeist” of blogdome–just as media-savy candidates are aware of the zeitggeist of television-land. This will be, as they say, a whole new ball game. Leadership of flocks and swarms will spawn new tools, new skills, new kinds of folks–new kinds of consciousness.
Come to think of it, this is already happening–witness http://www.blogforamerica.com/