A lot of us live in suburban communities where it's hard to congregate, and we're rushing around and moving from place to place,'' says Michael Cornfield, research director for the project. But despite the Web's proven ability to congregate virtual communities of people exchanging ideas and opinions, the election did not spark increased participation in online chat rooms and discussion forums. A study by the Pew Center found that although 69 percent of those polled used the Internet to get information about candidates, only 8 percent joined chat rooms to discuss the issues. That's far lower than the 31 percent during the 1996 presidential race. In this election, the line between politics and entertainment wasn't just blurred, it may have been erased for good.
Blogs serve as online diaries for their creators to vent and spew about the news of the day.
Or, to wax poetic. But the 2000 presidential campaign proved the Internet is an invaluable information appliance that allowed workaday election-watchers to keep tabs on the race even if they didn't have a TV nearby. I think that in a substantial number of households and offices, the Internet was competing with TV and print,'' says Chris Long, who runs C-Span's Web site. For many overtaxed surfers, the Web served as an always-on archive of stories that they may have missed on TV or print, effectively freeing them from traditional news cycles. The devil was in the details, and during this election, the details were often available online.