2007 was the year of the online identity — and politicians scrambled to keep up. Whether they recognized it or not, the internet was creeping into every aspect of American politics in some very strange ways. The game was changing, and sometimes even the faces of the players — both online and off.

Here’s ten news stories that prove it.

Thursday Barack Obama won the Iowa caucus. But last July his startling popularity was already drawing attention online, when Nielsen/NetRating’s realized that Obama’s web site was receiving vastly more visits than any other candidate’s site. With 717,000 unique visits, BarackObama.com brought in 60% more traffic than HillaryClinton.com (though JohnEdwards.com trailed them both with just 348,000 unique visits).

But ironically, just the previous month Obama had joined Joe Lieberman and 17 other Senators to co-sponsor a resolution highlighting “the dangers of the internet” and declaring June to be “Internet Safety Month.”

So is the internet nurturing a magical virtual kingdom filled with democracy and innovation? Or are blissed-up technophiles just playing Second Life. In 2007 it was both, as political dialogue competed with in-game hijinx.

A supporter of Presidential candidate John Edwards launched a virtual campaign headquarters for the game in May— and within two weeks it was attacked by pranksters looking for “lulz.” The sixth anniversary of the September 11 attack was greeted with a heartfelt virtual memorial — and a new study about the game’s kinky S&M community. And in October, even Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich melded with the virtual community, being greeted in a Second Life forum by civic-minded futurists — and by a virtual bikini model.

And a giant cat wearing a Barack Obama t-shirt.

One AP article reminded Americans how the true costs of the war have eerie online representatives in the “ghosts of MySpace.” They’re profiles on the popular social networking site that were created by U.S. soldiers whose web pages ultimately outlived them. “MySpace pages are grass-roots stories on the foxhole level,” an army veteran told the Associated Press. And as long as the servers remain online, the internet never will never forget.

Things got even stranger when controversial political pundit Ann Coulter mistakenly announced her retirement, adding that her 11-year career had all been a practical joke, in five paragraphs which were actually written by a web page “hacker” who’d taken control of her site. Coulter’s administrators learned that domains represent your online identity — raising the stakes for online identity theft.

But Ann Coulter later began wearing a bikini, along with Michelle Malkin, in photoshopped images which had somehow leaped to the top of the text search results being offered by Google. It confronted Coulter’s administrators with the ultimate lesson of 2007: online identities are hard to control.

And good luck if you’re running for President. In 2007, that meant answering questions from a cute animated snowman. Back in 2004, the Presidential candidates had received hard-hitting questions from the audience. CNN decided that for the 2008 elections, candidates should receive questions drawn from the unpredictible online world, and teamed with YouTube to solicit videos. Ultimately this meant that every Presidential contender had to worry about facing “Billiam the Snowman,” who was raising the issue of global warming as “a concerned snow parent”

In 2007, Karl Rove faced an internet-induced nightmare. President Bush’s political advisor loves the instantaneous communication of the internet, but what happens when you’re publicly telling one story while your emails tell another?

500 of Karl Rove’s emails took a wrong turn thanks to a bad email address, and ended up with Greg Palast, the crusading journalist who’s definitely no friend to Republicans. They shed a candid historical perspective on controversial policies at the U.S. Attorneys office. Palast shared them with law professor Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who argued the aggressive political maneuvering could be seen as a political felony.

The Democrats may have failed to revoke funding for the Iraq war, but the Democrat-controlled Senate took steps to address “The Great Mooninite Scare of 2007.” In January Boston bomb squads made an embarrasing mistake when what they thought were terrorist bombs turned out to just be digital placards promoting the cable TV cartoon “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.”

America’s lawmakers nonetheless responded to the incident by proposing an amendment to the federal criminal code called “The Terrorist Hoax Improvements Act of 2007.” If it passes, it will allow the government to sue anyone involved in hoaxes if those hoaxes are mistaken for acts of terrorism. Even if they’re talking fast food products from a cable TV cartoon.

Conservative Republican Senator Mike DeWine was in for a surprise in 2004. His 25-year-old staff assistant Jessica Cutler was also keeping a dirty blog online about her sex life. The blog led to her firing, and then a notorious spread in Playboy magazine, and a book publishing deal. But the next year brought a lawsuit from one of her former lovers, complaining she’d publicly humiliated him. Finally in 2007, the political staffer’s online blog took its final toll — when Jessica Cutler was forced to declare bankruptcy.

When a student tried to question John Kerry about the 2004 election results, he was tased. But before the sun had set, the entire nation had seen dramatic footage of the incident on the internet. At Salon, one online cartoonist even joked that the politically-charged incident would make “Don’t Tase Me, Bro” a national catch phrase, eventually leading to its passe use in cellphone ringtones, until it became an “ultra-hip nostalgic retro phrase.” Two months later, AOL proved him right, incorporating it into a parody ad for their online news service.

It was one of the most powerful television ads ever — in 1984. But 2007 saw it being resurrected with a political purpose. And in a small but significant trend, this viral internet video began getting real coverage in offline newspapers.

Hillary Clinton tried fighting back with her own viral video — a request that the web choose her campaign song — but it’s possible that it was the anti-Hillary ad’s Vote Different” message that would finally have echoes in Iowa.

Web designer Philip de Vellis — an Obama supporter — created the ad on his Mac, and on the Huffington Post issued a warning for politicians of the future. “This ad was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last.

“The game has changed.”

Entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 4:41 am under Google, Internet, Politics, Second Life, Strange.  Print This Post