Wisdom of the crowds? It helps if they can see each other…

The Presidential debate frenzy is upon us.  Remember the days when you just watched  it on TV and made comments to your friends and family in the living room?  Thanks to the age of connectivity viewers also have the ability to make their opinions known in a public venue while the debate is taking place. This can be to the delight of pollsters who may watch over the formal and informal feedback arenas, but complete transparency into the audience as a whole has yet to be created.  It looked like there were two areas in which the “opaqueness” happens –  geography and technology.

I was watching the debate on the East Coast on a local channel.  Towards the end, a question would flash on the screen asking  “Which candidate do you think has won the debate?” and prompt the viewer to log on to www.thebostonchannel.com to vote.  When I logged in and voted, I noted that the opinions were quite close, with Obama at 39%, McCain at 38%  and 3% were undecided.   The total numbers of voters were not large – under 2,000 – leading me to understand that the polling was strictly local.  I had expected to see more information on a national level, since the whole country was watching at the same time.  What was happening in New Hampshire?  Ohio?  Colorado?   The next day I talked to a colleague at work about the debate and he had also watched it but was commenting and connected to it via Twitter, the micro blogging tool.  His view of opinions from others was not limited to geography, but by technology.  “Twitterers” are people who , by enlarge, take an early adopter role in  technology use and subscribe to a micro blogging service –  software has yet to be taken up by mainstream America. 

It occurred to me that the debate forum would do well to try and create a feedback loop that was wider in scope and more accessible.  Content differences aside of the programming, why couldn’t the debates include the American Idol format of voting by text messages?  Cell phone use is widespread and American Idol’s popularity indicates that the model of texting as voting is familiar to many TV viewers.   Local TV stations would need to join forces with a central polling service which would parse the messages geographically and integrate them with the texted votes.  Then viewers could see the tally as a whole and by region and device (if they wanted to go that far).  This kind of information transparency would increase knowledge about the voter population, engage a wider audience and further involvement and interest with the debates.  With the long tail theory of internet use,  pollsters might even find out how many Ron Paul supporters are still out there…