New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen

by Philip N. Howard

• ISBN13: 9780521612272
• ISBN10: 0521612276
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-10-17
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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, 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 fundraising, and at the same time adapts their organizational behavior. The new system of producing political culture has immense implications for the meaning of citizenship and the basis of representation.

Author Biography

Philip N. Howard is an assistant professor in the Communications Department at the University of Washington.

Table of Contents

List of Tables and Figures	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Prologue: The Flows of Information in Competitive Politics	xvi
Introduction: The Hypermedia Campaign	1	(4)
The Evolution of Hypermedia Campaigns in the United States	5	(13)
Information Technology in Campaigns and Elections	18	(11)
Outline of the Book	29	(4)
Political Communication and Information Technology	33	(40)
Politics in Code	34	(2)
Digital Democracy in Theory and Practice	36	(7)
Political Consultants as a Cultural Industry	43	(11)
The Structural Code of Political Communication	54	(6)
Analytical Frames for Studying Politics and Information Technology	60	(9)
Information Technologies as Cultural Schema	69	(4)
Producing the Hypermedia Campaign	73	(28)
The Digital Leviathan	75	(16)
Hypermedia and the Production of Public Opinion	91	(7)
Of Grassroots and Astroturf	98	(3)
Learning Politics from the Hypermedia Campaign	101	(42)
Software and Surveillance	104	(21)
Political Communication and the Open Information Market	125	(6)
Political Redlining and Issue Publics	131	(12)
Organizational Communication in the Hypermedia Campaign	143	(27)
The Development of Campaign Organization	145	(23)
Power and Social Control in the Hypermedia Campaign	168	(2)
Managed Citizenship and Information Technology	170	(35)
The Wizards of Odds	171	(5)
Deviance and Decisions	176	(6)
Citizenship in the Digital Democracy	182	(9)
Political Schema Rationalized in Code	191	(7)
Policy and Process for the Healthy Digital Democracy	198	(7)
Appendix: Method Notes on Studying Information Technology and Political Communication	205	(3)
Methodological Challenges in Studying Hypermedia Organizations	208	(27)
Conclusion	235	(4)
Glossary	239	(6)
References	245	(16)
Index	261