Daily Archives: January 18, 2008

When generations collide at the intersection of Hip and Clueless, some interesting things can be found in the bits of wreckage left on the pavement. Earlier this week I wrote about how Obama won’t get the Democratic nomination here, and discussed at some length why the broadband youth that have helped propel him from ignominy to viability won’t carry him the distance. What can be funny to watch is failed attempts to even get as far as Obama has already.

Candidates – weak and strong – have woken to the power of Web 2.0 in all of it’s blogging and social networking glory. Whether to reach their base or expand it, many are using these new Internet platforms as their latest tool in the hard work of campaigning. Any tool that can be used can be misused however, and just because you can figure out how to upload to YouTube, make a zippy looking blog or an interesting FaceBook profile does not mean that you are going to connect with anyone. Particularly not with people that you couldn’t connect with through other mediums or in person.

Take this kind of catchy though mostly meaningless campaign video from Mike Gravel’s utterly failed run in the 2008 Democratic nomination race. Who is Mike Gravel? Well, that’s kind of my point. Have a look.

This was apparently the product of a contest that a Gravel supporter sponsored to promote his campaign. $25,000 to the winner, and I presume this one took the Benjamins.

Everyone has witnessed or experienced those really awkward moments when an older person tries to communicate with a younger person by “speaking their language”, you know, when a parent says something like “What’s up dude” to their teenager. The result of course is that said teenager feels violated in a particularly unique way, no communication happens and the grownup is left baffled. I think Mike Gravel may have accomplished just that dynamic here.

Our grandparents and their parents came of age across a span of decades in which media were by definition proper nouns – there was nothing really personal about their media. They grew up saying “the papers”, “the movies”, “the radio” and, finally, “the television”. It’s easy to understand, but still funny, when they date themselves so obviously by saying things like “the computer”. A younger person would say “my computer” or something else entirely depending on what they were doing with “the computer”. The Onion captured this funny quirk of generations in their piece on Google a while back.

Anybody want to bet that Mike Gravel called it “The YouTube” before one of his young staffers corrected him?