July 19, 2009
The Way We Live Now
The Shuffle President
By MATT BAI
Obama is the nation’s first shuffle president. He’s telling lots of stories at once, and in no particular order. His agenda is fully downloadable. If what you care most about is health care, then you can jump right to that. If global warming gets you going, then click over there. It’s not especially realistic to imagine that politics could cling to a linear way of rendering stories while the rest of American culture adapts to a more customized form of consumption. Obama’s ethos may disconcert the older guard in Washington, but it’s probably comforting to a lot of younger voters who could never be expected to listen to successive tracks, in the same order, over and over again.
Such an approach does, however, invite significant peril. Random play may popularize your music in the aggregate, but it doesn’t foster the same kind of investment in the songs themselves. U2 may have more fans than ever, but that doesn’t mean these listeners can name half the tracks on the band’s latest release.
Similarly, Obama retains higher favorability ratings than any of his recent predecessors — about 60 percent, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted last month. But only 46 percent in the same poll were either “quite” or “extremely” confident that Obama had the right policies to revive the economy, and only 33 percent volunteered support for his health care plan. That last number grew to 55 percent when the broad plan was explained to voters, which means that even the outlines of what is arguably Obama’s most important proposal haven’t been absorbed by the public. In other words, most Americans seem to like the president, but they’re not engaged with the specific arguments he’s making.
And should the president prevail on one or another of his proposals, he might find that acclaim, in this digital moment, can be ephemeral. Landmark legislative proposals, like hit singles, can come to seem interchangeable and dispensable. Creating a new health care framework, after more than a half-century of talking about it, would be a monumental achievement for any president, but even that might seem somehow small when viewed as only one in a series of competing storylines. What about carbon emissions? How about reining in Wall Street? Too much comes at us now, too devoid of context, for any one thing to matter as much as it probably should. In a society on shuffle, we’re always left to wonder what’s next.
More of an interesting read at.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19fob-wwln-t...
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