My friend and I were discussing yesterday how antiquated bumper stickers, yard signs and other 20th Century tactics will seem in twenty years to a professional campaigner..."wait, you used to just wear buttons and make TV commercials with no way of measuring effectiveness, and expect to win? How quaint."
If advertisers are figuring out the power of measured media and audience targeting, you can bet the tech-savvy political leaders of the future will soon follow, in this country and abroad.
There are examples from London to Minsk of how social
media is enabling people to physically organize below the
nose of the authorities like never before, as in last Friday's Dance Flash Mob in the
London Tube organized via Facebook, or Belarus's Ice Cream Eating Flash Mob guerrilla protest in 2006 organized via LiveJournal and sms.
These examples give me me hope that the direction of technological innovation is driving us towards a world where power is increasingly distributed rather than Orwell's 1984 where it is centralized. It is the young and restless who always adopt technology and mold it faster than their old and complacent counterparts, be they parents, corporates, or governments.
Dare I say it, like the AK-47 before, social media spread via the Web and, by extension, the Mobile Web, is technology that won't just strengthen incumbents, but rather will increasingly empower rebels and protesters anew, to disrupt and challenge anachronistic, and sometimes authoritarian governments around the world.
I've often heard people joke around Sand Hill Road that some of the most revolutionary entrepreneurs are young, angry men in their twenties who want to change the world. The fact that they share these traits with many of history's political revolutionaries is no coincidence.
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