Why the revolution will not be televised

I hadn’t planned on attending AlwaysOn: The Innovation Summit today at Stanford (I’ll be here tomorrow), but when I heard Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for Howard Dean, would be speaking, I popped on down. (There’s a live webcast for the rest of today and Thursday.)

The panel with AlwaysOn’s Tony Perkins moderating and Trippi and San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor — just concluded. Here are some notes from the session:

Joe Trippi: The press was ticked at us not because they didn’t like us, but because we didn’t feed them. …

Perkins probed the thesis of Gillmor’s new book, We, the Media, which is being released this month, and asked about the distribution of media power. “People believe Rupert Murdoch will own all media. These guys will run away with it.”

Gillmor: Consolidation of media is dangerous and is a problem as we’re on our way to the more widely distributed future. I hope those who do serious journalism like the New York Times do survive and thrive. The big risk is the end to end principle of the Internet. If indeed the duopoly that’s emerging — the cable and phone companies — start discriminating on content, that would make today’s media consolidation look pretty tame. … We’ll come to this balance between big media and the grassroots thing.

Perkins asked Trippi about the impact of open source and distributed community on the presidential campaign.

Trippi: We’re in 1952 in terms of where the Net is in terms of its impact on politics. Nixon gave his Checkers speech in 1952, and all of a sudden bullshit had meaning. … I think television’s just dead. You look at TiVo. It’s the same empowerment scheme. It’s more than time shifting. We’re not going to be watching the same thing as we were before. … The Dean campaign was nothing more than a Checkers speech [in terms of its impact and influence, not in terms of its genuineness]. It took 11 years to get from 1952 to 1963, but now it’s not 11 years away, it’s a year or two or a few months away.

Perkins asked what happened in the Iowa caucuses.

Trippi: We had lifted off. We had 2,700 email signups in the entire state of Iowa [out of 650,000]. It was the worse possible set of circumstances possible. Most caucus attendees were over age 65. Gephardt ran a zillion ads saying Dean would raise Medicare rates and bankrupt Social Security. That’s what happened.

Gillmor: Mutual suicide.

Trippi said that the legacy of the Dean campaign was still impressive. “It’s like a small group of us, along with 650,000 Americans, wandered out there and took on the Boston Red Sox and we were ahead for nine innings until they creamed us in the bottom of the 9th.”

Gillmor: I want to challenge the idea that what I’m doing or what the Dean campaign did is entirely open source. It’s not. But it has important elements of open source. I put up draft chapters of my book on my weblog for readers to comment on. JD Lasica went futher. He put his book up on a wiki for people to actually dive in and edit it. That’s really interesting. I’m not sure I’m that brave. [Thanks for the plug, Dan!]

Trippi: I’m thinking of putting the book up [his new book is The Revolution Will Not Be Televised] and asking anyone who participated in the Dean campaign to write their own story and put that out there.

Gillmor: We, the Media is being released under a Creative Commons license, meaning people can reuse it and do anything they want with it as long as it’s not for commercial purposes. I suspect people will take it in new directions. I want to see if someone remixes it and comes up with a better book than I did. I suspect they will.

Perkins launched into a critique of television. “On television, we are being fed junk food.”

Gillmor: To get something deeper, people have to hunt for it. Destroying with innuendo and lies is a hell of a lot easier than building up.

Trippi: People do want something better. One of the things they want is a community. The Dean campaign came in part out of the bulletin boards in the late ’90s.

Perkins: With grassroots participation, will we end up with higher quality discussions about politics between candidates and constituencies? Will we have higher quality content in journalism?

Gillmor: Eventually, sure. One of the things in the Dean campaign that was fascinating was the Dean blog, which was done with a human voice by people inside the campaign, and they became sort of political rock stars within the Dean campaign. … One thing that happened was shutting down the trolls. Someone came up with the idea, ‘Every time someone posts a troll, we send funds to the campaign.’ That was a pretty creative idea.

[On the AlwaysOn Live Chat, which was being projected onto a large screen next to the stage in real time (nice!), Ross Mayfield posted: “Dan has a big troll problem on his blog now.”]

Trippi: We’re at the stage where the fourth wave comes, open source. Remember, in 2000 John McCain had the big Internet juggernaut. He had 40,000 people join up over the Internet. Three years later we had meet-ups and blogs and amazing success in online fund-raising. But we’re just at the beginning. In 2008, they’re going to laugh at what we did.

Perkins criticized the patina of objectivity that the mainstream media adhere to. “The Economist says, ‘This is our world view, and this is our opinion.’ That’s more honest than the New York Times, which I open up and see as no more than a political advertising sheet.”

The panelists then began discussing television advertising.

Trippi: I own a TiVo, and once everyone begins to triple time everything on TiVo, you’ll see more product placement

Gillmor: Something people want desperately is authenticity. Blogs are growing in popularity because they have an authentic voice. That’s why I’m bothered by reality TV, it’s fake and it’s a closed system. I think there’s a hunger for truth and authentic voice.

Perkins: Would you say Michael Powell came off as authentic last night [when we gave the keynote address] and we don’t see that translated through the media?

Gillmor: Slick, too. Five years ago you wouldn’t have heard those things from an FCC chairman. …

The session wound down from there.

Later: I just published a short photo album of some of Wednesday afternoon’s speakers, including Trippi, Perkins, Gillmor, Verisign CEO Stratton Sciavos and AOL search chief Gerry Campbell.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.