Technology changes fast...But not that fast...

I'm a little baffled by the Frank Watkins piece. It contains a good discussion of targeting, which is quickly becoming far more sophisticated and integral to good campaigning than it was even four years ago. However, most of the other discussion of the Jackson campaign's use of technology is incredibly dated. He hopes soon to create a "HomePage" for his congressional office? They used a database of phone numbers to do phone banking? Good things in 1995, and I assumed that the piece was written shortly after that campaign. But the link to the piece from Emi's homepage says it's from a 2004 publication.

Surely a republication, right? This wasn't really written last year? If it was, our party is in far more trouble than I thought.

Assuming this article is indeed from the dark ages of the mid-90s, the most interesting thing is the speed at which different techonologies have developed. 2004 was the first year that a campaign's targeting scheme varied much from the Jackson campaign's. The kind of thinking Watkins reports going through was quite similar to the strategies I saw used by small campaigns' direct mail campaigns in 2004.

Electronic communications, however, have been revolutionized in the last decade. Faxes? Do people use faxes any more? Watkins discusses the usefulness of bookmarks in an internet browser? Uh, great...but if you asked a modern computer user to name the 50 most useful things about their computer and the internet, I doubt bookmarks would make the list. It's interesting that some elements of campaigns can stay so constant while other change so rapidly.