The Internet is Not a Fad

We are three weeks past Election Day 2007, but there is still one thing that I need to get off my chest:

I live in Poughkeepsie, and this year was the first year that I really paid attention to the candidates running for mayor. On the right was enormously popular Councilman John Tkazyik, who seemed to me to be the presumptive favorite. On the left was Dutchess County Legislator Fred Knapp, who earned his role as the Democratic candidate after beating current Mayor Nancy Cozean in the Democratic primary. Mr. Knapp came to my house, and while he seemed like a sincere and qualified candidate, there was one question that I wanted to ask him then, and that I want to ask him now: Why didn’t you have a website?

Mr. Tkazyik was running for Mayor of Poughkeepsie (and won); he has a website. I’m not running for public office of any kind; even I have a website. It costs me about $12 a month. I am part of a younger generation that gets the vast majority of its information from the internet, as are a lot of my friends. Wouldn’t it make sense, especially if you are (in my eyes, at least) the underdog in a public election, to have a web-presence? That just seems like common sense to me; and when someone doesn’t understand that, it raises other questions in my mind.

This just in: the internet is not a fad.