Casualty number one of this growing new media trend is campaign finance reform. Philip de Vellis may not have been (in Web consultant
David All's words: ) "some kid, in his apartment, on a Sunday, with some editing equipment." Regardless of the ad's origins, the fact remains that a few thousand dollars in equipment plus time-and-materials were leveraged into a national story with millions viscerally refreshing it on YouTube. And it was used to produce the kind of attachment to advertising we probably haven't seen since, well, the original 1984 ad.
It used to be that money alone dictated whether you got to the chance to produce a message like this. No longer. Thought paid advertising will always have its place, it will matter mostly on the margins, with campaigns using it to squeeze out that last, critical percentage point or two. Ninety percent or more of campaigns today are waged freestyle, whether that's through media coverage, on the Internet, or in peer-to-peer conversation.
Ever wonder why something as important as a Presidential election setting a course of the entire country can cost as little as $1 billion? (That's right, as little...) Because that's just the tip of the iceberg. The real value of all the volunteer effort and passion poured into Presidential politics is many times more than that. That's the way our politics has always been since riders mounted horses for Thomas Jefferson, and it's what makes our democracy tick. All the Internet does is make more of that activity visible 24-7. How do we wade through it all? By adding a layer of interestingness to it. The Web has a way of filtering what's interesting and what's not almost instantaneously. Chances are when you say "Oh yeah, this is good" to the latest viral video sensation, millions of others are doing exactly the same. The medium is binary and unforgiving.
There has been a lot of talk, particularly on the left, about the Internet enabling "community." I think there's something to do that, but the bigger story is how the net has empowered individuals. It's the individual who produces the YouTube video, who slaves over code late at night, who generates the paradigm-shifting ideas that new communities are built around. Groups of individuals are remarkably adept at "post-filtering" ideas, sifting the good from the bad. But the Web depends on the effort of rugged individuals to generate those ideas. And those ideas are no longer ignored just because they don't fit into a predefined media frame.
No matter what your perspective, that's a great thing for democracy.