Here we are. I go to bed now in India, and in the US the electoral day is only half-way through. When I’ll wake up, in some states the vote counting will be over, and probably a few hours later America will have a new President.
But, as far as I am concerned, Obama already won. He gained his place in history, the history of an electoral campaign of big-dreams-made speeches, of intense emotions that made into exact strategic moves, of a precise communication that reached everyone everywhere, using at its best the scary democratic potential of web 2.0.
Obama, either he gets into the White House or not, won -for me- because, despite all the analysis I have read (and tried to do), despite I know very well how much attention goes behind every natural-looking move, despite al the “tricks” i could individuate, today I saw again some of his speech on YouTube; and they touched me, again, moved me, excited me all over again as if I had never heard them before.
And as if I had never studied communication, not even a bit. But, thinking about it, maybe it’s just right.
A few years ago, trying to convince a bunch of students that it would make sense to consider getting a masters in semiotics, Umberto Eco did one of his speech. Which was all about how semiotics would have made us able to analyze not only a book, an ad, a movie but, really, all that we wanted and there were very few limits: he was offering a discipline capable of making us look behind the curtains of the world. Eco’s speech ended with a question, that he asked himself: isn’t it that all this analyzing the world ends up taking its charm away? And with a pretty straight answer: even gynecologists fall in love.
Happy Election day everyone, hoping on the other side of the Ocean they do the right thing.
