August 27, 1996
THE DAILY FED
The Virtual Convention
et's see. You're not a delegate or a member of the media or a Democratic Party official. You don't have a pass that gets you past the not-so-thin blue line guarding the perimeter of the United Center. You don't relish the prospect of standing in the hot sun with protesters, and you're sick of the same-old, same-old that the networks call convention coverage. So, how to be part of the action this week?
Turn on your computer and join the ''virtual convention.''
At the Democratic National Convention's site on the World Wide Web, the multimedia corner of the Internet, you can read or hear every convention speech; get the latest in convention news from a real-time ticker tape; and talk via electronic technology with such Democratic luminaries as Senators John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV of West Virginia and John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, Reps. Nita M. Lowey of New York and Barney Frank of Massachusetts and West Virginia Gov. Gaston Caperton. The address is http://www.dncc96.org.
And if all that political blather proves too ponderous, you can even play ''Newt Pong,'' an electronic game where, instead of a tennis ball, the head of House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia bounces across the playing field.
''Our goal here is to bring people into the hall. We're more of a service than a spin,'' said Roger E. Schneider, a computer consultant from Huntsville, Ala., who coordinated the design of the convention Web site and who is serving this week as ''Internet producer'' for the Democratic News Service, the convention's radio/television/Internet division.
Political parties, advocacy groups, grassroots organizers and media companies have been using the Internet to bring political messages to computer-savvy voters for several years. But with a new generation of computers appearing every six months or so, and with the number of Americans on line growing by the millions, technological advances are bringing the Internet closer to a sort of live, two-way television than ever before.
Of all the innovations appearing on the DNC's convention site, Schneider is proudest of the interactive ''chat room,'' where any voter who can navigate his or her way to the Web can converse, by typed sentences, with other Internet users across the country about issues raised at the convention.
Chat has been a popular feature of the Internet since the network began in 1969 as a Defense Department project, but until this year, would-be chatters had to have a certain amount of technical expertise to make the right connections. New software programs, however, have swept away all the technical confusion.
With a click of a computer mouse, computer users can ask questions about convention events, comment on convention speeches even as the speeches are being given and discuss activities in the hall as either taped or live video presents them on the computer screen.
''Interactivity is crucial,'' Schneider said. ''Like [convention manager] Don Fowler says, we want to turn a monologue into a dialogue. We want to bring people in and let them experience a convention, instead of just watch it.''
Even in its early stages the chat room was packing 'em in, by Internet standards. In only one hour on Monday morning, more than 340 computer users had stopped by, electronically speaking, to shoot the breeze. Other points on the convention site were registering about 10 computer hits per second.
As flashy as the bells and whistles on the DNC site are, some on-line political experts question their effectiveness.
''The problem with large chat forums that are Web-based is that the people who are talking don't have a common bond. You end up with people simply butting heads together and not accomplishing much,'' said G. Scott Aikens, who organized the first on-line debate between Senate candidates, in October 1994, and who is now a coordinator for the Minnesota E-Democracy Project, a Minneapolis-based on-line activist group.
Since Sunday, the DNC site has offered computer users the opportunity to converse, either in a written or live-audio format, with key Democratic officials who are attending the convention. Aikens says such conversations are more for show than anything else.
''Chat might be effective for interacting with a 'star,''' he said, ''but in terms of deliberation on serious issues, it's a lot more like CB radio or a party line on the telephone.''
And the DNC site doesn't go nearly far enough to woo voters and encourage Democrats nationwide to speak up for the candidates they back, said David Lytel, chair of Democrats Online, a new independent political committee which is launching its Web site today.
Democrats Online, which can be found at http://www.democrats.org, has a who's who of former Clinton Administration and Democratic Party officials on its board of directors. Members of the group don't agree with the approach that the party takes to the Internet.
The Republicans have dominated the new-media portion of politics so far, with the development of GOP-TV and elaborate use of the Internet, Lytel said. Democrats Online hopes to challenge that domination by helping computer users create their own Web pages to support Democratic candidates, he added.
''Our site is different from the DNC's. It is not just a message amplification site,'' Lytel said.
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