Analysts say the campaign television advertisement, already diminishing in influence with the proliferation of cable stations, faces new challenges as campaigns experiment with technology that allows direct messaging to more specific audiences, and through unconventional means.
Those include Podcasts featuring a daily downloaded message from a candidate and so-called viral attack videos, designed to trigger peer-to-peer distribution by e-mail chains, without being associated with any candidate or campaign. Campaigns are now studying popular Internet social networks, like Friendster and Facebook, as ways to reaching groups of potential supporters with similar political views or cultural interests.
President Bush's media consultant, Mark McKinnon, said television advertising, while still critical to campaigns, had become markedly less influential in persuading voters that it was even two years ago.
"I feel like a woolly mammoth," Mr. McKinnon said.
It seems as though this intervention is no longer a purely artistic gesture operating in a relatively closed cultural system (art world, modern at) as it did with the historical avantgardes. Rather, it would seem that these interventions are simultaneously symbolic and real (in their immediate effect because of their real- time mediation) at the same time. In my 'transfiguration of the avantgarde' text I tried to investigate these problems analysing the work of the yesmen in particular. Much later their now famous appearance happened on BBC World commenting on the 20 year anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, posing as Dow Ethics representatives. The real effect of this intervention was indeed problematic, since it raised hopes but also stirred up pains and later on resulted in more deception in and around Bhopal, by those people directly and still today affected by the disaster and its aftermath. Those feelings were very real indeed, and they were the greatest concern for the people involved in the action.
However, not to act (as Klein suggested in her text and later in her book) would have been an even bigger defeat for the environmentalists who for twenty years have been trying to get those responsible to acknowledge their responsibility and finally do something for those people affected by that horrible disaster (like clean up the area after twenty years!). What the yesmen / BBC World intervention managed to do was to link the name of Dow Chemicals inextricably to the Bhopal disaster, something the environmental movement never succeeded in doing (Dow bought up Union Carbide the original owners of the factory in Bhopal).
Now is this just symbolical?
Symbols, or substance, or perhaps both in one?
best wishes,
Eric
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