I find it implausible that people who are using the internet to retreat from offline life would choose a political action online community in which to do so.
That's never been asserted. What's been said is that the dependence on online technologies can lull some people into a false sense of security. Look folks, this isn't aerospace engineering. There are a whole range of factors that determined why Dean is where he is, and none of them are simple. I don't understand why people assume they are. I have some questions: 1. Why do we assume that Iowa and New Hampshire speak for the entire country? I live in California, and don't understand why other states get to decide the field of candidates before I've even had the chance to vote. For all we know, Dean could have 100% support in other states, but due to the nature of the primaries, people get knocked out before we can discover that. Anyone here done some research on the flaws in that? 2. Most of the focus on Dean was about the internal organization of volunteers and core supporters, but little was said about voters not a part of the campaign (that includes people who didn't have time to waste going to MeetUps). Dean's strength was his staff and volunteers, but that can't be equated with votes. Too many people made the assumption that one would lead to the other or that they were one and the same. Why? 3. Dean would be nobody without the net. Why is there an assumption of failure? If Bill Clinton was running with the same figures as Dean, that would be failure, but that would also assume that he was somebody already. Dean was a nobody, who used the internet to become a somebody. That's not failure, that's incredible success. Why do the idiots like Clay Shirky and all of you smart researchers wholly swallow the false paradigm of failure that Capitalist media feeds us? 4. Why is everyone ignoring the politics? Why do people assume that the reason people didn't vote for Dean was something other than his politics? Lots of the people who were assumed to be Dean supporters don't really like him or even know who he is. Remember the article talking about the lack of support among African-Americans for Dean? Did Clay Shirky and the rest of those blog idiots have much to say about that? Well, African-Americans are one of the core constituencies of the Democratic party. If they weren't all that enthused how do you think other people might have felt? 5. Too much of the focus on and of Dean's campaign was about youth. That's nice, but youth don't vote. Youth aren't stupid, they're just rightly cynical about the lies fed to them by Capitalism. While Dean had tremendous youth support that doesn't mean that he had lots of eligible voting-age support. Too much high-tech focus on youth and gadgetry and not enough on the offline old folks who actually go to the polls and those city council meetings consistently (which are important, whereas a MeetUp don't mean shit to them). Art