Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Controlled Interactivity: Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age
@profjsg
Notes from Center for Civic Media Lunch, 02/20/14. This is a collaborative live blog by attendees and may contain errors. A video of the talk will be posted soon.
Jennifer begins by showing a slide: Obama “This person’s got his back – share this if you do too.”
This particular effort launched during the 2012 campaign around the time that Romney was getting attention as the apparent Republican nominee. They made this meme with the idea that people would change their profile picture to this image.
There’s a belief that Obama was the Internet candidate, that he was the candidate to figure out how to involve the digital in a new way. You hear statistics like “Obama reached 5M voters 29 and under through Facebook.”
She details how the traditional methods of reaching voters don’t work with young people who don’t have land lines, who move a lot, and who use cellphones and Facebook more than prior generations.
Facebook therefore became a very important organizing strategy.
Shows slide: “Four More Years.” – Obama tweet after winning re-election. 500,980 retweets, 171,128 favorites, the most retweeted Tweet in history. Obama had 20M Twitter followers vs 12M for Romney.
She wants to push on the narrative that the 2008 and 2012 campaigns used the Internet in new ways to engage voters. And that Obama, in particular, figured out how to do it right.
40% of US adults used SNS to politically engage in 2012 (Pew report)
Jennifer expresses skepticism towards Web 2.0 and says that the Itnernet architecture has always been about knowledge sharing, expertise-sharing, the ease of authorship and so on. This suggests a democratization of practice around politics.
The key to the realm of Gov 2.0 is interactivity – that’s what makes her think there’s something special here. The opportunity to share, remix and adapt.
She shows a diagram of JCR Linklider’s concept of the Internet as a galactic network. You don’t have a single centralized network like a phone system. The key way to resist attack (from the Soviets) would be a distributed network.
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She shows Benjamin Barber’s book “Strong Democracy” and a book called “Electronic Commonwealth” which was heralding the idea of the Internet as a great democratizer, provide means for genuine citizen involvement.
She then shows Daniel Karpf’s “The MoveOn Effect” and Daniel Kreitz’ “Taking Our Country Back” – they talk about new technologies enable new forms of citizen involvement. They enhance the opportunity for networked interactivity. They both push the idea that Obama was the campaign to figure this out – the tools and techniques that we now accept as the way to do digital campaigning.
Shows Dashboard, an organizing platform by the Obama campaign used in 2012 for their grassroots organizers.
Jennifer outlines the two main arguments of her book:
1. Obama’s campaign built upon the practices of prior campaigns’ experiments with digital communication technologies (DCTs), i.e. he was not first
2. U.S. Presidential campaign practices are not democratizing, i.e. the technologies were not deployed for the purposes of democratization
She shows a slide of Howard Dean’s internet site during the 2004 campaign. Dean was a challenger with nothing to lose. Joe Trippi, campaign manager, had been around Silicon Valley and saw an opportunity to make things happen online. They organized online. They were the first campaign to experiment with a blog. She asked why DCT appeared in the 1980s (BBS systems) but the first campaign using DCT started in 2004.
She shows a slide of Steven Forbes, who ran in 2000, declaring that “The Internet for Steve Forbes in 2000 will do what TV did for JFK in 1960.”
He manufactured the label, and wanted to own it. He was a self-funded billionaire. And Forbes would talk about the internet as a democratizing and dehierarchizing force in the world. He held online town hall forums and experimented with video online. Rhetorically this set him up as someone who believed in the power people.
McCain 2000: used the ‘splash page’ – a popup in a web page asking for donations. They raised $700,000 from that single approach. No one had figured out how to raise that much money over the internet before. Capitalizing on that, he held the first video fundraiser soon after. People could participate in a synchronous video chat with McCain. The effort raised $1M.
The Dean campaign, because they had no other choice to raise money, innovated with online fundraising.
She shows a slide of the red bat campaign by the Dean team.
They made their tactics around fundraising transparent. On the blog they were always talking about the fundraising rules and what they were doing with the money. That was remarkable at the time. That openness was a significant innovation.
Erhardt asks about why the technologies used by Howard Dean are not democratizing, since they emphasized transparency of funding sources.
Jennifer responds with the example of the Dean campaign which she says is mythologized as the campaign that opened itself to the people. Some tactics they used were indeed transparent. There was critique at the time how Joe Trippi was spending his time reading blogs and not paying attention to Iowa. Part of the reason Dean failed is that Trippi wasn’t strategizing how to win the Iowa caucuses. There was a sense that Dean’s win was inevitable, and the campaign started to overlook the conventional Get Out The Vote, on the ground activity.
Early in the campaign the Dean campaign was taking people’s comments and suggestions and reposting them on his blog – so there was a clear sense of connection between the voter and the campaign. But that started to decline over time, and Deaniacs began to ask why their comments were not being acted upon. In her reading, Jennifer found only five times where the campaign managers actually engaged in online conversation with the Deaniacs. The engagement by the campaign on the blog seemed to be about fundraising. Elite bloggers started to take up that theme. Campaign staffers respond that they didn’t have the time or resources to engage with all the conversations that were going on around them.
The lesson learned from the Dean campaign was to control the interactivity such that you could direct and guide them. In the Dean campaign, people wanted to paint haystacks and do all manner of crazy stuff. But that’s not what gets you elected.
Ethan brings up Nicco Mele who says that the job of the Internet and politics is to collect email addresses so that you can email them and get them to give you money. Mele had originally gotten involved in that sphere because he thought technology would be a democratizing force but that
Maria Vidart observes that she is seeing something similar in Colombia. Someone representing themselves as an internet candidate was basically a fake.
Jennifer responds that one of the critiques of Republican candidates were buying Twitter accounts to build publicity.
How do the candidates differentiate themselves from the pack?
– One way is money
– Another way is public opinion polls
– And now social media – how many followers do they have? This is seen as a measure of “ordinary” citizens engagement. Which gets complicated when you buy Twitter followers.
Ethan asks about the overall “De-democratizing Case”. How does a medium that was originally hyped as the great democratizer turn out to be not as supremely awesome as we thought?
Jennifer says that winning is about mobilizing just enough people to turn out on election day. All of the efforts and energies that campaigns put towards their apps, sites, and social media is about finding anough people who will vote for them on election day. The involvement of you is structured and controlled that tries to harness you and your friends just enough to get the win. The chaos of the Dean campaign was that there was not enough ontrol. Campaigns have tried to figure out how to control just enough to give the impression of involvement.
Ethan discusses the idea of “thin” versus “thick” engagement. In thin engagement, we know what we want you to do. In thick engagement, you engage the people’s brains (and bodies). Dean invited thick engagement up until the point he didn’t want it. At a certain point, Trippi woke up and said: “We need your money, and maybe we need you to go door to door.”
Q: I’ve been thinking about whether voter suppression is the logical conclusion of campaigns that use the internet to micro-target their fundraising. For instance, if you know a specific community loves a certain artist, and you know the time you need to keep them away from the polls, you can throw a concert at that time.
JSG: That’s red-lining. It’s micro-targeting to decide whether or not to engage or ignore you. The act of contact by a political campaign has been shown to make people more likely to engage with that campaign (in any direction). That shows contact itself can be democratizing. The Obama campaign hired a cable executive to help them build up profiles of particular demographics that they could target. The dark side of that is exactly what you’re describing. Voter suppression is not new – South Carolina is a perfect case in point.
Q: How much are these mechanisms just a means of giving the impression of participation.
Jennifer says she’s a big believer in simulacram. It’s about constructing a facade of interactivity. It’s a push mechanism only. She finds the White House Petition site to be in that bracket.
Ethan says it’s a very basic means of participation, whose roots can be traced back to 11th century China.
Jennifer says she likes the metaphor of the harness to describe digital engagement. It’s not democratization, it’s steering people in a specific direction to realize a goal (getting elected).
Jennifer mentioned that political campaigns attract more attention from people to politics than any time in the four years. Thus it should be the place of civic conversation, and that’s what civic media builders should be thinking about.
Jennifer encourages us to consider how to change the underlying infrustructure – the incentive system – to encourage engagement.
Saul Tannenbaum says that the counter-example is the NH primary. You had truly engaged people there, who had been to eight different events in the past two weeks and were listening for subtle nuances and engagement from the candidates. So this engagement is happening, but perhaps offline.
Jennifer responds that NH is a relatively homogenous state and has established particular norms of behavior around politics, partly helped by the fact that the primary has national significance. She asks how or whether it’s possible to establish those patterns nationally.
Ethan adds that there’s a sense of efficacy. Where he lives in Western Massachussetts no Republicans bother to run, because it’s overwhelmingly Democratic. In a system where most people are politically ineffective, are we reaching the limits of that system.