"The evidence that things are changing fast can be seen in the dramatic increase in the influence of blogging. We should be collecting emails as we used to collect telephone numbers and using them to better communicate our message to key voters"
About this Quote
It has the charming urgency of a celebrity-politics era discovering, in real time, that the internet is not a hobby but an infrastructure. Adam Rickitt frames “blogging” as proof that “things are changing fast,” which dates the quote to that mid-2000s moment when online influence was suddenly legible to campaign professionals: not just chatter, but agenda-setting. Coming from an actor, the line also carries a performer’s instinct for audience management. The premise isn’t abstract democratic renewal; it’s reach, repetition, and message discipline.
The specific intent is tactical. Rickitt isn’t praising blogging as a new public square so much as treating it as a signal flare: attention has moved, and campaigns that don’t follow will lose. The second sentence makes the real play explicit: convert that diffuse online energy into a measurable asset. “We should be collecting emails” is the tell. Email is not romance; it’s a list. It’s permission to re-enter someone’s life on demand, to bypass press filters, to micro-target “key voters” with tailored prompts, donations, turnout nudges.
The subtext is a quiet pivot from persuasion to data. By invoking the old habit of collecting telephone numbers, he normalizes what could sound intrusive: political communication as contact acquisition. Blogging is cast as cultural change; email collection is the institutional response, turning enthusiasm and identity into a pipeline.
Contextually, it captures an early chapter of the attention economy colliding with electoral strategy, before social media platforms fully swallowed blogging. It’s optimistic about connection, but the machinery underneath is already the modern campaign: build the database, control the channel, keep the audience close.
The specific intent is tactical. Rickitt isn’t praising blogging as a new public square so much as treating it as a signal flare: attention has moved, and campaigns that don’t follow will lose. The second sentence makes the real play explicit: convert that diffuse online energy into a measurable asset. “We should be collecting emails” is the tell. Email is not romance; it’s a list. It’s permission to re-enter someone’s life on demand, to bypass press filters, to micro-target “key voters” with tailored prompts, donations, turnout nudges.
The subtext is a quiet pivot from persuasion to data. By invoking the old habit of collecting telephone numbers, he normalizes what could sound intrusive: political communication as contact acquisition. Blogging is cast as cultural change; email collection is the institutional response, turning enthusiasm and identity into a pipeline.
Contextually, it captures an early chapter of the attention economy colliding with electoral strategy, before social media platforms fully swallowed blogging. It’s optimistic about connection, but the machinery underneath is already the modern campaign: build the database, control the channel, keep the audience close.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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