Conventions, RIP

Megan McCardle relayed on her blog that this year's convention has lower Nielsen ratings than the 2004 conventions, which had lower ratings than 2000. I have a little more to add to yesterday's post.

When I look at the hypothetical "viewer data" from the last post, it becomes painfully clear to me that the theory of a party convention is a vase of dying, if not already dead, flowers .

For several decades now, conventions have been showcases built for "the public," a faceless throng who's news supply consisted of Edward R. Murrow, the local gazette, and Life magazine. It's too bad that all three of those sources are dead. Furthermore, the theory of conventions is obliterated, not only by the demise of those mid-century media, but is beseiged from the other side by the rise of 24 hour news channels and internet media. 

Conventions have long-winded speeches by brainfreezingly boring politicians. Conventions "introduce" a man or woman who has already been on television more than any other citizen in America, and act like the majority of people who are tuned in are just learning about the politician. Conventions rehash memes and storylines that have already been repeated to exhaustion. Conventions are the media equivalent of screaming repeated answers to a nonagenarian relative. "I said, "I JUST FINISHED MY SECOND YEAR OF COLLEGE, GRANDMA!!'. . . 'NO, I HAVEN'T GRADUATED YET!!" But to turn this analogy on its ear, the television stations and political parties are the deaf members, failing to realize that their two target audiences, news junkies and ignorati, have both moved on.

The more I mull it over, the more comfortable I feel generalizing: people fit into the two categories, news-seekers and non-news-seekers. 

There have always been men and women who were content to dwell on the the more quotidian elements. It's an admirable instinct, one I greatly covet for myself, but seem unable to acquire. These blissful types don't feel any need to know what's going on in the world, and all the more power to them. The rest of the populace, however, needs, to varying extents, timely information about current events. Some need it on a weekly basis (think the old man who reads the Sunday paper with his morning coffee, but who can't find the time to read the rags any other day of the week), while some need it at an up-to-the-second speed (read: Crackberries). There might be differences within the "news" group, but there are still distinctive lines between newsies and non-newsies. Wheat and chaff and all that.

The increased intensity of news media has more aggressively culled the field in the past decade or so. The "knowledge gap" between the highest and lowest has increased. In fact, if you didn't catch the current-events tone of that last sentence, you are probably in the "blissful" category while simultaneously proving my point. (Thanks) With the advance in technology, the speed of information has pushed people towards the margins. If you used to casually consume the news, you now find it near impossible to converse with a typical modern news-consumer, who has read dozens of sites, aggregated hundreds of headlines, and read four differing opinions on each of those stories. You got two options at this point: fish or cut bait. To keep on fishin', though, demands an enormous level of effort and involvement (for the uninitiated, that is. For those normalized to the hyper-speed, it seems quite normal).

To drag this trail of string back out of the labyrinth, the conventions are still built on a model of Ma-and-Pa-chewing-over-the-local-cud, when the near totality of their actual audience, including the aforementioned Ma-and-Pa, are now Hannity and Colmes junkies who comment on ten different online op-ed columns while forwarding on several web briefings and chain-letter political rumors. And that's the old people.