Whenever I give a speech (or get started on a rant) I explain the power of the New Media this way: Consuming news in the Old Media environment is a “lean back” experience while consuming news in the New Media environment is a “lean forward” experience. Think about the old days when your grandpa used to read the newspaper on the La-Z-Boy. His bifocals would be halfway down his nose, he’d stare at the same page for what seemed like hours and pretty soon you’d see the newspaper collapsing to his lap. And that’s when the snoring would begin.
Has anyone ever fallen asleep surfing blogs? I doubt it. That’s because news consumption in this modern era is no longer a passive activity. When we read blogs or New Media news portals like Townhall.com we are “leaning forward.” And increasingly, we are taking action on what we read.
There are two recent examples of this.
The first is "The Pledge" advocated strongly by Townhall.com’s own Hugh Hewitt. Hewitt and others asked conservative cyber activists to pledge the following:
If the United States Senate passes a resolution, non-binding or otherwise, that criticizes the commitment of additional troops to Iraq that General Petraeus has asked for and that the president has pledged, and if the Senate does so after the testimony of General Petraeus on January 23 that such a resolution will be an encouragement to the enemy, I will not contribute to any Republican senator who voted for the resolution. Further, if any Republican senator who votes for such a resolution is a candidate for re-election in 2008, I will not contribute to the National Republican Senatorial Committee unless the Chairman of that Committee, Senator Ensign, commits in writing that none of the funds of the NRSC will go to support the re-election of any senator supporting the non-binding resolution.
Almost 33,000 people signed “The Pledge” in short order. There probably are no millionaire fat cats from K-Street on the list of pledge signers, so the NRSC would no doubt still have plenty of money to fund their campaigns. But depriving the GOP of financial resources was almost beside the point of this exercise (though 30,000 contributions at fifty bucks a pop yields a million-and-a-half dollars; not a shabby payday for doing the right thing). The real goal was symbolically to pull fence-sitting Republicans in the Senate toward supporting President Bush’s plan for victory in Iraq.