At your fingertips

THIS being the information age, they say not only is the amount of information available at your fingertips virtually limitless, but that it's freer and more intimate than ever before. That may be so, but it also requires something that's no different from the manner in which information was accessed and used in the past. That is -it takes time. Time to produce, time to find, and time to digest. And yet, time is something we keep saying we don't have much of, anymore. YugaTech says blogging is like a virtual handshake. Taking off from where Abe Olandres begins, perhaps blogging and so forth have the potential to evolutionize politics because, as populations get bigger, it's the only way to restore something fundamental to politics: it's a process between the candidate and the voter, one-on-one, personal, and up close. Since the stump-every-Plaza-in-the-country style of campaigning is well, going out of style (too many plazas, too many people, too little time, too much money and not enough bang per buck in terms of peso-per-candidate), the most effective virtual handshake before the blog and the internet was the TV ad. And yes, as visiting the helpful links provided by Julius Enerio and wanderlust shows, you can learn something about the candidates through their ads. The heartening thing is that more and more people are unsatisfied with, even offended by, the ads. Even more heartening, to my mind, is that the limitations on media in the past, that made it expensive (often, prohibitively so) to provide data and make it handily available, are disappearing. A newspaper is limited by the number of pages that can be printed, and by the paper only being on sale for a day; unless you record everything, what you see on TV or hear on radio now won't be available to you after you've seen or heard it. And so, you can review things at your leisure, and in a sense, journalists can produce it at theirs, and everyone can benefit from it -including, of course, the candidates. Again, much has been said during the present campaign, about how things are often only a he said, she said, exchange of shouts between the opposition and the administration, with few independent voices getting a chance to be heard. All of a sudden, someone like Martin Bautista of Ang Kapatiran, has a reach as potentially massive as any traditional politician. You can listen not only to his podcast interview on Inquirer.net, but listen to those of all the others who have agreed to be interviewed. And if you don't want to listen, you can read transcripts of their interviews and even leave feedback. And with Eleksyon 2007, you can check on all the candidates, too: see their profiles (click on each candidate's photo). And you can see how everyone else feels by doing your own comparison of survey data. the Survey Says section keeps all the reports together, so that as John and I have been doing, you can compare and contrast figures on your own (and see whether you agree or disagree with our take on the surveys). But the most amazing of all is Eleksyon 2007 Google Map. Seriously, this is hours of learning fun for the whole family. I'm not kidding. You can click on provinces, see how many voters there are, start doing your own version of electoral math: which provinces might carry more weight, electorally-speaking; and refresh your memory of our political geography. My understanding is that, as the campaign proceeds, each of these sections will become even more dynamic!