Phil Howard at the University of Washington just released his book on the role of ICTs in political campaigning. New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen is a solid empirical study, it is one of the few thorough studies out there and will become a must read for anyone studying political communication. I have included the formal book description and contents below:
\”The political campaign is one of the most important organizations in a democracy, and whether issue- or candidate-specific, it is one of the least understood organizations in contemporary political life. This book is a critical assessment of the role that information technologies have come to play in contemporary campaigns. With evidence from ethnographic immersion, survey data, and social network analysis, Philip Howard examines the evolving act of political campaigning and the changing organization of political campaigns over the last five election cycles, from 1996 to 2004. Over this time, both grassroots and elite political campaigns have gone online, built multimedia strategies, and constructed complex relational databases. The contemporary political campaign adopts digital technologies that improve reach and fund-raising and at the same time adapts its organizational behavior. The new system of producing political culture has immense implications for the meaning of citizenship and the basis of representation.\”
CONTENTS
Introduction: the hypermedia campaign; 1. Political communication and information technology; 2. Producing the hypermedia campaign; 3. Learning politics from the hypermedia campaign; 4. Organizational communication in the hypermedia campaign; 5. Managed citizenship and information technology; Appendix: Method notes on studying information technology and political communication.
There was an article in yesterday’s Inman News (a real estate news service) on the growth of Internet based neighborhood search services. It focused on the problems that some Web services have in defining the boundaries of neighborhoods. It also provided an interesting statistic, that 15 percent of all searches on the Web are local (unspecified source). Unfortunately there was an error in my quote, \”localization\” should of course be \”glocalization\”. Back in 1999 Barry Wellman and I did a user study for onemain.com (now Earthlink). We found huge demand for local content, but users were completely unable to find local content at the time. It seems that this need is now partly being met. It is interesting that almost every site I have seen focuses on the \”outsiders\” view, that is what content an outsider would like to know about a neighborhood. Few if any provide content from the perspective of what an \”insider\” might want to know. This includes the ability to communicate with other local residents. Another finding from the 1999 Onemain study, low interest in local syncronous chat forums – based on my experience with Netvill, E-neighbors and i-neighbors.org, this is something I think remains true today. Asynchronous email lists are the way to go.
In a followup to last week\’s posting on mobile phones and surveillance of personal networks, I was forwarded an article from the Penn State Digital Collegian on how Facebook is being used by campus police to identify students who \”rushed the field\” after a recent football game (as a Canadian not having experienced college football, I have no idea why this is illegal). Penn State has the largest number of students on facebook (52,016 students) and apparently a significant number had posted pictures of themselves and friends (often taken with mobile phones) on the field after the game. Students appear legitimately surprised that police and university administrators would access the site and view profiles that were \”only meant for fellow students\”. One of my undergrads recently pointed out to me just how much information people post on facebook about themselves. In particular she noted that student journalists regularly entered their political affiliation as part of their profile, she wondered how these future \”objective\” reporters would react when someone produced copies of their facebook profiles (from when they were in college) in response to an article. This also brought up memories of two recent articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education warning graduate students of the dangers of blogging, Google searches and being on the academic job market (article 1, article 2). Regarding the football game, according to the article, students found guilty could face up two years in jail, up to $2,000 in fines, and discipline from the university.