[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JO-yNwTMvU&w=560&h=340&fmt=18]
Historians and sociologists are worried that Americans are not as engaged with the government as they used to be. There has been a fear that people have become jaded and apathetic over the last several years, and feel powerless now that the economy has fallen apart. Quite the opposite is true, if online behavior is an indication. Unique visits to Whitehouse.gov are up 88% compared to July 2008 and unique visits to House.gov and Senate.gov are up about the same amount. That does not say anything about whether citizens like what is going on at of the federal level of the government, but it would be nearly impossible to make a case that they are not interested.
Only one government website had a precipitous drop-off in traffic and that was Irs.gov. Visits were down 52% in July compared with last year. That really is not a surprise. People do not have income to pay taxes on, so the site doesn’t have much utility. There will be reason to hope that a rapid recovery of the economy is underway when Irs.gov starts to get the kind of traffic that The White House website does.
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