Earlier this month, we found ourselves sufficiently annoyed by Internet hype to publish a skeptical, not to say unkind, forecast for the Web's coverage of political conventions this summer ("Confessions of a Dot-Com Delegate," by Andrew Ferguson, Aug. 7, 2000). Cyberenthusiasts had been predicting all year that campaign 2000 would do for the Internet what 1952 had done for politics on television: make it an indispensable part of the way Americans absorb public affairs. All the evidence for this proposition was virtual, of course -- which is to say it didn't exist, beyond the bottomless fancies of webheads and the delusional money men who succumbed to their pitch.
The returns aren't all in yet, but it looks like the enthusiasts will have to wait another four years. Maybe eight. Maybe more.
Calling the GOP convention "the first authentic Internet convention," Thomas Patterson of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government reached a devastating conclusion in a paper published last week: "Our survey indicates that Americans had almost no interest in experiencing the convention over the Internet." The survey was conducted by the school's Vanishing Voter Project, and the numbers are brutal. One in four respondents said they had logged onto the Web on a typical convention day. Only one in three of those one in four stumbled onto any Internet coverage of the convention. And only one in three of those said they had looked at the material for more than "a few seconds." Amazingly, writes Patterson, "only two respondents [from a survey pool of 1,000 adults] claimed to have visited a website dedicated to continuous convention coverage."
These conclusions won't surprise any of those lonely few who actually sought out Web coverage during the conventions, particularly on the for-profit sites devoted to politics. Wandering through the chat rooms was like yodeling down an abandoned coal mine. PseudoPolitics.com, which spent $ 20,000 for a skybox in Philadelphia and bragged of the legion of webjournalists it was loosing upon that hotbed of drama, drastically cut back its coverage in Los Angeles. We must hope the other for-profit sites did the same, if only for the sake of their investors.
Wait a minute. What are we saying? THE SCRAPBOOK refuses to feel sorry for lunatic venture capitalists. But our sympathies naturally fall to journalists of whatever media. So we hope those young guys and gals walking around with their webcams and the stars in their eyes enjoyed the conventions. They probably won't be back in 2004.