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Mark S. Bonchek
Chief Strategist

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Soundbridge is a global business media company.

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    "It's About Community, Stupid!"

    The original online article has disappeared, but these two references convey the main point of the article:  television creates an audience, but the Internet creates community.

    From "A Pre-History of Web Politics" by Phillip Hallam-Baker, now principal scientist at VeriSign, Inc.

    "The term disintermediation was already being applied to economic relationships as customers and suppliers eliminated the middle man. Mark Bonchek used disintermediation to describe the effect of the Internet on the information relationship between the campaigns and the voters. From now on the campaigns could talk directly to the voters without the intervention of what George W. Bush later described as the 'media filter'."

    From "Campaigning On The Internet" in General Computing, September 1996

    "According to Mark Bonchek, director of the MIT Political Participation Project, in his Web-published column "It's About Community, Stupid!," politicians need to move past the old ways of campaigning.

    "Candidates think the Internet is television," he writes. "The Internet is not television any more than television is print. Whereas television creates an audience, the Internet creates community. Television broadcasts a single message to large groups of people. The Internet facilitates communication within and among groups. No other medium provides the same opportunity for such immediate interaction, collaboration, and participation."

    "Bonchek says politicians who have capitalized on the differences between new media and old media have been successful throughout history, citing as examples Franklin D. Roosevelt's early realization that the radio was superior to the newspaper and the famous televised debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy.

    "Everyday, there are millions of people worldwide engaged in debate and discussion on every political issue from abortion to welfare. Politicians need to become more involved with this communication to successfully take advantage of the Internet, Bonchek says."