BuyPartisan sounds like a great app: scan the bar code of your favorite food and figure out if that company leans to the left or to the right and how much it contributes to the various parties. It’s inventor told the Washington Post that the app was designed to “empower individuals so that they can make every day like Election Day in how they spend their money.” Oddly enough, the editorial board doesn’t like this one bit. Surprising!
For now, I think this app is a great idea. It boils down the one fast rule of life: money is everything. People as a whole have known for some time that voting with your dollar is the quickest way to make the change you want. It’s no surprise that after corporate sponsors of the regressive think tank ALEC were outed a lot of them went “What? Nope…not us!” and hustled out of the door so fast. It’s how groups of people threaten to boycott certain corporations that are doing things they don’t care for in order to persuade the corporation to maybe just have ONE day where they’re not being the evil, black-hearted, cocks they tend to be. Glenn Beck knows all to well the power that corporations provide through advertising. So much so that when they started leaving his accompanying shows in droves, he left the television airways with them, and now hocks “real made in the USA” denim jeans on his radio show and “internet television network“.
Unlike the Washington Post editorial board, I don’t think one app is going to further splinter the country. I would be amazed if it did, and that would mean that a lot of red state citizens would probably have to buy a Smartphone first. With their tin-foiled hat fear of the government scanning their thoughts for future crime, and dragging them away in the night, I doubt a surge in Smartphoned right-wingers is going to happen.
To attempt to try and validate its point, the editorial pulls out that stupid ass Pew Research poll that proves that America is driving itself further down ideological lines. I say stupid ass because all it’s proving, like a lot of polls showing this divide, is that it’s CONSERVATIVES that are becoming more ideologically rigid, and unwilling to work with other ideas. NOT the other way around. You’d think the right-leaning Washington Post would do better than to include that quote from the Pew poll, but they do.
The editorial continues with the notion that “if” the app “succeeds” it will take ideological sorting to a whole new level. Have they even used a Smartphone before, do they even know what an app is? This editorial is strangely technophobic and profoundly ignorant to just how much of an impact an app can have…on any level.
The app seems to be more about informing consumers about how a corporation does its business, and less about driving an ideological agenda. In fact, the app seems more to fill in the gap that has long been abandoned by the news altogether: public information. The internet also facilitates this notion, and it’s any wonder the news industry is suffering as a whole.
This notion of fearing the impending “ideological silos” is laughable, because it’s mostly a right-wing construct. Why is there still this constant need to have your own views represented in everything? The GOP/right-wing has a white knuckle grip on talk radio, they have their own channel, and a fair amount of newspaper editorial boards. This fear of marginalization was laughable when it was established and is absurd now. No one’s driving the GOP/right-wing ideas away from the mainstream but themselves and their idiotic actions as a party/ideology.
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