Rachel Sklar is a writer and social entrepreneur based in New York. She is the founder of Change The Ratio, which increases visibility and opportunity for women in tech and new media. Follow her on Twitter @rachelsklar.
This weekend kicks off one of Washington D.C.’s biggest events: the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Think of it as the equivalent of SXSW for political-media-wonk types.
Denizens of D.C. have jokingly referred to it as “prom” for years now, and with the advent of Twitter, the hashtag #NerdProm quickly stuck. Traditionally, apart from providing celebrity photos and viral videos of the President doing stand-up and comedians zinging Donald Trump, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (aka WHCD) is an excuse for a weekend-long bender. Of the tasteful variety, of course.
Cocktail parties on rooftop terraces, tented garden brunches bedecked with lush flower arrangements — this is the standard fare, along with after-parties of varying degrees of exclusivity, depending on the number of Hollywood stars and clout-wielding politicos in attendance. That’s “clout,” not “Klout.” This is an old-school weekend, after all. And by “old” I mean media, institutions, traditions, and people. Yes, everyone is still tethered to their smartphones, but in D.C., that means mostly Blackberries.
So why should anyone outside of D.C., the tech community in particular, care? It’s no surprise that the tech community does not typically revere anything preceded by the word “old.” In many ways, that point of view is one of tech’s biggest weaknesses, because with age comes wisdom, experience, and a larger sense of context, essential for dealing with the world beyond an early-stage startup. If you doubt, look no further than Eric Schmidt at Google, Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook, and John Maloney at Tumblr. There’s no shame in hearing from the grownups. Quite the opposite.
This is where WHCD’s true value lies. Yes, with one swivel of the head you can take in Bradley Cooper, Kim Kardashian, Madeleine Albright, and Donatella Versace, but that is just the bait. Its real function is to serve as a place where the groundwork for long-term relationships is laid. Where a cub reporter can hit up the world-weary editor she chatted up at the Bloomberg after-party.
What makes this year different is that it’s tech, politics, and the media that link them that are doing most of the relationship building. This is reflected in the tech types who have descended upon the capitol. It’s not just Dick Costolo and Katie Stanton from Twitter, which is on the very front lines of the 2012 election, but Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, Zynga’s Mark Pincus, Groupon’s Brad Keywell, and Tumblr’s Liba Rubenstein. These tech giants and their companies are having an impact on every part of the Washington system, whether they’ve meant to or not.
Twitter and Tumblr have already had a disruptive effect, spreading memes like wildfire. We can also expect voters to act and react collectively, thanks to platforms like NationBuilder, ElectNext, and Votizen.
The tech and Hollywood connection is also tight, with investors like Ashton Kutcher fueling innovation and growth, and comedians going straight to the audience through vehicles like Funny or Die (an amazing outlet for sardonic political commentary, by the way). In this way, the upstarts and renegades have a thing or two to teach the olds, too.
And of course, there are the presidential candidates, both armed to the teeth with tech tools and teams. President Barack Obama has dominated digital thus far (obliterating Gov. Mitt Romney on Instagram 588,793 to 8,122) and has an incredibly well-oiled machine. But it’s April. At this time in the last election cycle, Hillary Clinton was still in the race and no one would know who Sarah Palin was for four long months. This time last year, President Obama and Seth Meyers spent the night yukking it up over Trump jokes. Some 24 hours later, everything would change, because we’d learn that Osama bin Laden was dead.
Game changers happen like that all the time in politics. It just so happens that this year’s game changers are tech titans, with deep pockets. And money is something any politician can appreciate.
So, for those and many other reasons, the 2012 White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend is important. I’ll be on the scene for Mashable, sending dispatches back with the essential and the totally frivolous, because we will probably want to know who Kim Kardashian is wearing (especially if it’s Kanye). I, of course, will be wearing a startup — that is to say, Rent The Runway — and FourSquaring, Instagramming, and Tweeting as I go.
It’s WHCD 2012, and tech is in the house…yeah, that house.
Disclosures: Rachel Sklar serves as an advisor to Votizen.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Vacclav
More About: 2012 election, Google, politicians, technology, trending, White House correspondents dinner
The last time a proposed law captured our attention it was so widely loathed it was never even put to a vote, but today we bring you the kind of no-brainer legislation that seems to have strong support on both sides of the aisle. The US House of Representatives has passed the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA), a bill that calls for the creation of an independent board to log all federal spending on a single, centralized website. What’s more, these expenses need to be recorded with identifiers and markup languages that make them more easily searchable. As Computerworld notes, the vote happens to come on the heels of a recent dust-up involving the US General Services Administration spending $ 823,000 on a conference in Vegas — precisely the sort of excess this proposed website would be designed to expose. The next step, of course, is for the bill to win Senate approval, though for now it seems the legislation has garnered strong bi-partisan support: in a rare showing, all of the lawmakers who discussed the DATA Act on the House floor argued in favor of it.