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TechnologyDaily Mobile
The Internet's Impact on People
by Bara Vaida
The events of the past week highlighted the greatest strength of the Internet: its ability to enable communication and connection, according to Phil Noble, owner of the political affairs consulting firm PoliticsOnline.
When phone circuits jammed on the East Coast on Tuesday, sometimes e-mail was the only way to reach family members and friends. Meanwhile, hundreds of online groups formed to enable people to discuss the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. "During this crisis, people turned to the Internet for what they needed and wanted, just as they began doing with the telephone many years ago," Noble said.
Indeed, a Pew Internet & American Life Project poll released Monday found that 4 million to 5 million people used e-mail to reach friends and family. And in the two days following the attacks, 10 percent of online users visited forums or chat rooms to discuss their feelings, a much higher than normal percentage, according to the Pew study.
The Internet also is being used to raise money and organize volunteers to help victims of the attacks. Amazon.com, for example, turned its front page into an appeal for help and by Friday, 128,000 people had contributed $4.7 million to relief efforts. The Congress Online Project also distributed a special newsletter to guide members of Congress on how to use their Web sites to tell constituents how they could help.
Mike Cornfield, a political management professor at George Washington University who is currently writing a book called Democracy Moves Online, also noted that the Internet was used to exchange photos of an imagined rebuilding of the World Trade Center towers in the shape of a hand making a rude and defiant gesture.
"Articulating a common emotion is something that the Internet is good at," Cornfield said. "Sometimes that emotion is off color, and most main [broadcast] networks would probably not report on it."
Whether the use of the Internet in the terrorism crisis is a defining moment for the medium remains an open to question. Cornfield said people currently have an insatiable appetite for information via the Internet, and he thinks any company or individual who can capitalize on the moment will dominate the Web in the future.
Stranded Tech Officials
People who attended the quarterly meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) held in Montevideo, Uruguay, last week were stranded all over the Western Hemisphere after terrorist attacks stopped air traffic, officials said.
The meeting concluded late Sept. 10, and many ICANN aides remained in Montevideo after the Sept. 11 terrorism led to flight cancellations. Other people who attended the meeting said they were stranded in Mexico, Texas and New York.
"For those who are still stranded en route," ICANN President Stuart Lynn said in a statement on Friday, "please take care with the rest of your journey. I do hope you reach home soon. And please do get in touch if there is anything I or the ICANN staff can do to assist."
About a dozen of Microsoft's Washington lobbyists were stranded in the company's home base of Redmond, Wash., all last week, a company spokeswoman said. The government affairs team was attending a strategy meeting scheduled for Sept. 10-11, but none of the staff could return to Washington until this past weekend. "At one point we joked that maybe we'd have to rent a Winnebago and drive us all back to D.C.," one of the Microsoft lobbyists said.
Some of TechNet's Silicon Valley aides, meanwhile, were stranded in Washington. They had worked for weeks to organize a TechNet day with policymakers.
More than 35 TechNet CEOs were supposed to fly to Washington on Tuesday for the meetings with White House and congressional leaders and to attend an annual fundraiser for the organization on Wednesday. None of the CEOs arrived before the flight ban, according to the group's vice president, Connie Correll.
The group is hoping to reschedule the events for later this fall or next February, depending on Congress' focus over the next several weeks.
New Hire for High-Tech Outreach
The Computer Systems Policy Project has hired Karin Heitert as deputy director to replace Moya Morgan, who left to join Siebel Systems. In her position, Heitert will manage the project and oversee its member relations and government affairs outreach efforts.
Heitert spent the past four-and-a-half years working for Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., most recently as his legislative aide. She worked on taxes, budget, trade, technology, Social Security and small-business issues.
Newcomers To FCC, Defense
FCC Commissioner Kevin Martin named Catherine Bohigian to be his legal adviser on cable and mass media issues. Like Martin, Bohigian previously worked in the Washington office of the law firm Wiley Rein & Fielding. Before law school, Bohigian worked as a legislative analyst for Bellcore and as a program analyst for IBM governmental affairs.
President Bush, meanwhile, said he intends to nominate Michelle Van Cleave to be the assistant Defense secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict. Van Cleave is presently the president of National Security Concepts, a firm specializing in strategic planning and senior-level policy analysis for government customers.
During the 105th Congress, she was the staff director and chief counsel of the Senate Judiciary Technology, Terrorism and Government Information Subcommittee. From 1987 to 1993, she was the general counsel and assistant director for national security affairs in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Moves in the Political World
Christine Iverson, who has served as the communications director for House Republican Conference Chairman J.C. Watts of Oklahoma for more than a year, will return to South Dakota politics to work on the campaign of GOP Rep. John Thune. Thune, who self-imposed a limit on his House serve, is expected to challenge Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., next year -- although Iverson has declined to confirm the speculation.
Iverson served as Thune's communications director from 1997 to 2000, leaving for the GOP conference in February 2000. Kevin Schweers, who has worked for Watts since 1999, will become the conference's new communications director.
On the West Coast, California Democratic Gov. Gray Davis has named his ex-press secretary and former Voter.com spokesman Michael Bustamante as a senior adviser. Oliver Phillips was named Davis' new communications director.
Bustamante served as Davis' press secretary in the 1998 gubernatorial campaign. Phillips, a producer for CNN in Washington since 1999, will replace ex-communications director Phil Trounstine.
No More Laughing At Bush
The Hotline reported that the Web site www.bushorchimp.com is no longer available to online users. The site matches pictures of Bush with funny expressions to photos of chimps with similar expressions. It was replaced with a notice: "We here at bushorchimp.com have decided to take down our site, maybe permanently."
The anti-Bush site Bush Watch, meanwhile, posted an American flag Sept. 16 and asked readers what "they thought about a possible 'political ceasefire'" on the president. However, "the way the question was posed, comparing Bush with" ex-presidents Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, "it didn't seem any ceasefire would last long," San Francisco Chronicle columnist Rob Morse wrote.
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