Jimbo Wales launches “a new Wikia website aimed at being a central meeting ground for people on all sides of the political spectrum who think that it is time for politics to become more participatory, and more intelligent.”
For more than 50 years now, we have been living in the era of television politics. In the 1950s television first began to have a major impact on politics, and the results were overwhelming.
Broadcast media brought us broadcast politics. And let’s be simple and bluntly honest about it, left or right, conservative or liberal, broadcast politics are dumb, dumb, dumb.
Campaigns have been more about getting the television messaging right, the image, the soundbite, than about engaging ordinary people in understanding and caring how political issues really affect their lives.
Blog and wiki authors are now inventing a new era of media, and it is my belief that this new media is going to invent a new era of politics. If broadcast media brought us broadcast politics, then participatory media will bring us participatory politics.
I’ll be interested to hear what my friends at UFOB think about the effort.
One Comment
I like Wikipedia. It’s a novel concept that’s unfolding well, in spite of some troubles. Wales is an interesting man and he’s right about the idiocy effect of broadcast media on politics. Wiki politics will have its troubles too, but anything really is going to be better than the crabbed, inane discourse of the boob tube.
The maturity of these things takes a while. If we’re still around in fifteen years, I’d love to see what happens to what Wales has turned loose.