Oblomovka

There’s now a fairly large confessional group attached to those of us addicted to 538: a friend of mine described hitting reload there as an “instant election endorphin hit”. God knows, it’s getting more like crack these days, in more ways than one.

I think the reason why there’s such an addiction to polls — perhaps more in this election, perhaps no more than usual — is a phenomena that I’ve described before: it’s just impossible to gauge what other people think at this scale, and with this level of cultural separation. Most of the people who supported Obama were spooked by Palin, just because it was so impossible to predict how she would play out. Revitalizing VP? Nightmare neophyte? When I watched her convention speech, I was convinced that she’d blown it: she seemed like an amateur reading from a script.

I know well enough that my impressions are not the same as others: but where do you find out what others really think, and in what proportion. You’d think that the Net would be good for this, but there’s no proportion there: you can hear people’s opinions, but only individual opinions, never an aggregate.

On my Twitter stream, my friends were saying predictable things about the Palin speech. But then I switched to searching for palin through the public sum of twitters. It was like a sudden reveal: almost everyone was talking about how well she’d done, and how Obama must be scared now, and how awesome she was. It was chastening: particularly because, if you were going to ascribe a bent to Twitter, it would probably be a liberal one. (I doubt that now: like blogging, it may have started with a majority in new-san-fran-londonaustincisco, but it’s everybody’s now). Palin’s speech was, sure enough, a hit.

Now today, and cut to McCain’s current randomness. How’d it play? If the Twitter searches mean anything, really badly. For people who don’t seem to really care about politics, Letterman’s drubbing of McCain in tonight’s show is all there is right now. From the moment the preview tapes got uploaded to YouTube, when people talked about McCain, that’s what they talked about. And I really didn’t detect much sympathy for McCain.

Like the Palin moment, it’s mostly about the spectacle. It’s not so much about whether they themselves could support the person, it’s whether, in the distant arena of politics, the candidate make a good or bad throw. As the convention bump showed, that kind of impression can be transitory. But it’s going to be hard to turn this one into a positive. I wonder if the presidential run that started on Letterman will end there too?

Anyway, I think in times like this what people are looking for in polls and the Net, is just an aggregated taste of what everybody is saying: I do wish there was time before the debate to create a webpage that had three dials, one for Republicans, one for Democrats, and one for Independents. You’d pick one, and spend the debate (if it happens) twiddling your dial, up for good, down for bad. The stream of values gets ajaxxed over to the server(s), which average the total value they get, and report it back in realtime to be displayed on the same meter (so you can see how others in your demo are reacting). It’d be live-streaming bandwidth/latency intensive, but averaging would be pretty simple and parallelizable function. Probably gameable, but maybe not in this timeframe — or maybe not if it got popular enough. World wide focus group!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 1:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS/Atom feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.