>> book tv is on location at george washington university here in washington, d.c. for our college series. this is a chance to talk with some professors who have also written books and to introduce you to those books next up we are going to be talking with matthew, the author of this book, the myth of digital democracy. professor, first of all what is digital democracy? [laughter] >> the book is really about the claims a lot of people have had a lot of the internet is changing politics. everything from how campaigns are run to how we get our news to how we process and interact with the politicians and what is the myth of the digital democracy. >> when we talk about the internet from very early on in the early 90's and what of the claims are not of the internet change in the world but also how the internet has changed

politics and in particular are very robust very durable claims we have about how the internet is supposed to empower ordinary citizens. so the hope was that the internet would allow the campaigns to be run differently and to be less elite and focused and driven but allows citizens to in some cases even create their own news and the hope was ordinary people would have a greater voice in the political system. some parts of that has come true with many others, not to read >> what are some success stories? >> i argued in the book that certainly end of 2004 and 2008 campaign cycle we did see a campaign where big money was less important than it had been in previous cycles, that we saw more of the money that ran on the presidential campaigns coming from people of middle-income. so that's certainly --

>> we certainly saw the first with dena and kerry and of course in 2008 with obama we so much larger portions of the money that makes politics work coming from more or less ordinary citizens and not from the top tenth of a percent of the income this region. >> in your but the myth of digital democracy, you have a chapter the lessons of our team. >> right. the argument in that chapter is that it's pretty easy to understand why howard dean failed haag. so much of the literature on the presidential primary focus is on the momentum and what you stumble once you have something that had in your campaign it's difficult to recover with the puzzle is how he ever got to be the front runner, the democratic front-runner in the first place in their i would argue answer has to be the internet but in practice in 2000 for the internet was the essentially

have a primary have a digital primary for the democrats and a primary on a very liberal constituency, yadin more or less on the primary, he walked away with it total web traffic. >> one of the things that talks about if we talk about how the internet is going to change politics we have to start with the facts and the facts are the relevant traffic is this tiny, tiny portion of what people like julie do longline. if categories about 10% more than 10% of what people do online is what is the content. one is slightly less than what people do and the news and the media include everything from

entertainment news to sports to the hard news is only three or 4%. the tide of the political sites that have been - political blogs or interest groups, campaign sites, the new types of the political information that is supposed to change everything are about one tenth of 1% of all web traffic. >> how many hits does that represent? >> larger than you would think. part of the issue with the with trafficking is people visit lots of sites, according to some members in average web user may hit 80 or 90 pages in a day which is a lot. at the same time, the portion of traffic is quite small. >> barack obama, 2008 and the

internet. >> i think it is pretty clear that bernard obama wouldn't have been done nominee in 2008 without the internet. it was a very close race and the internet was very important in obama's success. some of this is well-known the notion that he raised a lot of money online. some parts of the story are less well known. it's a difficult to imagine obama winning the democratic race without winning a iowa and in some place like aucilla tools like facebook proved important. the the the for an organizer to roll into a small town in iowa and already have half a dozen or a dozen volunteers makes a huge difference for the on the ground organization. many operatives will tell you that it's much harder to get the first dozen volunteers and to get the next hundred, so in that sense we do see pretty good evidence of the internal matters and i would even go further to say that this is not quite so

well known but john mccain what almost not likely have been the republican nominee, not for the internet. in the summer of 2007 when things were looking pretty bleak for the mccain candidacy everyone was expecting rudy giuliani to go against him the real clinton. mccain went to ground and cut almost all of his campaign staff except a few senior folks and the ret team and that is what sustained him all the way it to iowa and new hampshire and kept him alive as a viable candidate or at least as a possibility through the early part of the campaign cycle. >> what about conservative and liberal viewpoint web sites? >> there's a big gap between the conservatives and liberals online and in fact that traffic numbers hugely favor the liberals. it is a web traffic of black

sites serving during our the liberal sites and the conservative leaning sites. a couple things. first in terms of total traffic does much more traffic to the left. second, traffic is much more concentrated actually on the right. if you see what traffic there is it is a few sites comparative to the sites like a free republic or related sites. so this leads to very different dynamics for the public cycles we have seen including in 2010 it's more important in the greater resources for the liberals and conservatives we started to see some evidence of that narrowing but in terms of the traffic we are nowhere close to that. >> when we talk about the

mainstream media "new york times," "washington post," etc., etc., what's been their success or non-success on the internet? >> i think it's important to understand first that most of the news consumed on - the traditional what was media. cnn, nbc, i know that doesn't last but everyone's like yahoo! which is quite some majors or the washington post. what they are doing is aggravating and then read posting the content originally created for print. so yahoo! for example an awful lot of wireless news. so in terms of the total number of people who visit of least one over the course of the month, the on-line news category looks pretty healthy. the hundreds of millions of

americans visited on-line news at least a few times a month. again, the issue is the overall traffic is quite small and we have to be careful about reading too much into the fact of obama news when a love of the visitors to the dahuk for example are looking at that point just a few minutes a month. >> the drudge report. >> for the drudge report it is an interesting insight partly because it's important in redistributing traffic. lots of people going to judge and a redistribution of of traffic particularly to the right landing web sites. so it's partly straight news but has an editorial plant as well. what you see with websites is there is a period orphanages more or less fluid.

early sites have a big advantage if they are relatively bigger leon they tend to stay pretty big. the drudge report is a classic example of this. the site that got big initially in the 90's with the berlinski affair and was able to maintain its position. that is certainly true in the whole now and in 2001 there were popular blogs into the center, 2,000 for there was a couple new blogs but it's striking that we have almost no political blogs in the 2008 cycle, and the example of this different model. the biggest name among us would be what really started as a diary under the coast of the

left-leaning political group blog, and it's -- as need said there is the community he is able to spin this off and do his own thing. now of course he is blogging for "the new york times," so what we have seen it is the institutional lusatian of blogging over the past couple decades, not decades but years. >> 15 or 20 years since the internet has become widespread use. has it increased arnall legend has it contributed to our democracy? >> the answer is actually a tricky. on average, the media said is and doesn't know more what is changed is what citizens know.

is there is a group of people better news junkies who is more about politics than the most popular 15 or 20 years ago. at the same time, lots of people are now that interest in the marching up paying attention, they're an hour or an hour and a half a day. the white house resulted in lower levels. this is just this doesn't start in '95 with the web but it's something that really starts with the decline of broadcast television and cable and the news radio as the environment starts to a fragment early in the 70's with the internet is certainly the culmination of the term. >> has the internet let to more polarization? >> i think there's a strong circumstantial case.

there's a big difference between polarization and the eletes, not in public as the whole. there is no question that politicians today. for example some political measures suggest that politicians in congress, elected leaders in congress are more polarized than they have ever been in the history of the republic. at the same time, that polarization is not as evidence as a whole. we see much lower levels, most voters to most citizens still portray themselves as moderate and at the same time we see increasingly in the past five for ten years we're going to look for the facts and evidence even with and citizens as a whole. there's a national we see among elites moving in that direction.

so, how much of that is due to changing media environment is an open question but i don't think there is any question some of it is related. >> what you mean by the missing mittal? >> one of the things we assume about the internet, very nice, is the idea that the internet is making the media environment much more fragmented. but all about no, the personalization and the worry among a lot of scholars, among a lot of journalists and other public figures has been that people will get their news from the radical right wing .net and the left-wing website.com. it's fine because that doesn't seem to be what's happening. what we have in the news environment is actually the news environment that were the top ten outline get substantially more of the total reliance