This is a name game, by the way. That's my middle name.
Here's what I wanted to ask you. I'm going to play devil's advocate about the new media and the other side of it. I'm of that generation for which, you said, it is something we've gone to as opposed to it being part of us. I see it with my 17-year-old daughter. It's night and day.
However, I've been around politics for an awfully long time, too, in all three orders of government, and one thing I know about politicians and politics is that it's very adaptive. Radio came along, and you could argue that at the time it was going to give the public a whole new awareness. And it did, but the politicians adapted. Then TV came along, and it was much the same thing. Politicians adapted. Now we have all the social sites--Twitter and everything. You know, blogs all seem normal now, but it was just a few years ago that they didn't exist, and now people have blog masters. In other words, politicians have hired people.
Whatever the public tries to do in a pure way to talk, we're going to find a way, and the system is going to find a way to get in there and attempt to spin it and manipulate it, if not to affect the outcome, at the very least, then to affect appearance. We're very much like a Hollywood movie set. You have to take a look at what's behind what you're looking at.
There's this notion that it's going to provide a new ability for the public, by itself, to be a different participant in politics. Yet I still see politicians and politics being able to adapt to make it work for them too, leaving us in the same sort of spot after we've gone through a transformative process.
What are your thoughts on that?