How Will the "Internet in 2020" Affect Campaigns in 2020?

There's been a lot of talk about the future of the mainstream media, including how and when newspapers will die. Earlier this summer, I blogged on whether or not TV ads are now a waste of money in political campaigns. But there hasn't been as much discussion about the future of the Internet.

Yesterday, Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet & American Life Project released The Future of the Internet III, a "survey of internet leaders, activists and analysts" on how the Internet will evolve over the next decade and how it will shape society (or how society will shape the Internet even further.) I am not a Web 2.0 expert like others who write here, but some of the key findings evoke several questions on how the evolving Internet will impact the future political campaign:

"The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020."

It seems like the mobile device will be the primary tool of 24-hour news cycle as more and more people move away from CNN and Fox News towards Twitter updates on their BlackBerry from the New York Times or RSS Feeds from the Politico on iPhones. What kind of political (or commercial) ads will voters see on Twitterific or in the sidebars of sites they visit? And with so many ways to communicate with voters on mobile devices, what will the primary objective of these "mobile online ads" be? To get your email address or phone number so that you can be texted? More importantly, what kind "mobile online ads" would be tolerated by the user? How can the political ad on the mobile device not become spam?

"The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness."

True. Politics will always have a few people like Rod Blagojevich. But Soren rightfully points out that the GOP should take on a transparency and ethics agenda, and the Internet is the obvious portal by which, for instance, "faster and more complete campaign finance information" can be transmitted. And with the growth in ability to show video on mobile devices, will the demand for "putting video of all publically accessible business meetings online" will grow? More importantly, there's a real possibility that increased transparency can initiate a more substantive two-way conversation between voters and candidates. Will the future of the Internet as a transparency portal allow voters to ask for information from campaigns and allow campaigns to more instantly respond to information requests?

"The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected, and the results will be mixed in their impact on basic social relations."

My first reaction would probably be similar to Patrick's: that the Internet is not just about blogs and Twitter ... and that investment in grassroots organizations will still be much more important that in old and/or new media buys. In order to be a registered voter, you still have to have a physical place of residence. But with personal and work time being merged as well as physical and virtual reality, campaigns, state parties and the national party organization have to embark on a long term, on-going voter indentification efforts to see where people spend most of their time online, what their online and offline interests are and how they intersect, where and how often they get their news, etc. What other questions would be relevant in such a voter identification project?

As the summary of the report states, the respondents "disagree about whether this will lead to more social tolerance, more forgiving human relations, or better home lives." But as the physical and virtual interaction and communication between human being start to overlap, how campaigns interact with voters will have to be re-examined.