Politics and Advertising

I noticed your post on surfing the VOX and you could not be more right. I live in New Hampshire, and though it has not been so bad this year where I live to hear about the candidates on television, I do hear way too much about Massachusetts politics.

The problem is this - you're staring at it right now if you're reading this post. Politicians are chasing votes into more narrowly defined and hard-to-reach places known as bulletin boards and chat rooms and blogs. People are taking their opinions and ideas and instead of returning them to their elected officials and candidates for office, they are posting them for the web to see hoping for change from a vast, amorphous entity that may or may not help them.

One avenue of recourse is to flood the airwaves, radio, television and newspapers hoping that an even greater saturation will cause existing viewers/listeners/readers to pull in the segment of the population that generally does all the voting: around 30 years old and a bit older, middle to upper class. Everyone else who gets the television ads, if they are watching will likely make noise, but the sensitive citizens who do the voting will hear what's going on (in theory) and hopefully investigate. Then being the presumably educated demographic that they are, they will decide by voting. The busy people who participate in online expressive socialization (again, my term, not learned or borrowed from somewhere) are hard to imprint with political ideology. They tend to think too much.

That's my analysis. For whatever its worth.