Communications of the ACM

Staying connected

Shaking Hands, Kissing Babies, and . . . Blogging?

By Meg McGinity Shannon
Communications of the ACM, September 2007, Vol. 50 No. 9, Pages 21-24
10.1145/1284621.1284639
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I was fidgety while watching the televised U.S. presidential debates last spring. It wasn't just the rapid-fire, sound-bite answers the candidates smugly gave in reply to the moderator's questions. It wasn't just the staleness of the forum, which didn't really give me a better understanding of each politician's position. It wasn't even the familiar, chummy banter and comfort of the candidates as they stood pulpit to pulpit to pulpit with their competitors. I was used to all that.

It was the nonchalant factoids that got me.

When a former mayor of a big city says he cut crime by 67% during his tenure, it should impress. When a governor talks about how he proposed and enacted a successful health care experiment, it should evoke some appreciation. When a suit-wearing, smooth-coiffed gentleman talks of his record of tax cuts, it should garner approval. But with each composed reply of the candidates, the unexplainable `fidgety' in me increased. The more I tried to concentrate on the content of the program and the candidates' replies, the more distracted I became.

Then it was clear what had to be done to satiate my jitters. I walked over to my computer, logged onto one of many news sites, chose several different forums, and randomly, freely Googled any of the expelled nuggets and factoids to help gather information that could aid me in choosing whether or not to validate the politicians' claims. For this presidential candidate debate, it became clear that things had forever changed. The peripheral information providing background of a candidate had become just as important as the real-time answers the candidate was giving.

I am not alone. The fact that about one-third of Americans used the Internet to track down political news or to swap political viewpoints over email during the 2006 midterm election campaigns, according to Pew Internet & American Life project polling, is a testament to how the Internet has changed and is changing politics and policy. That report also revealed that from 2002 to 2006, the percentage of Americans saying the Internet is their primary source of political information doubled.

Content companies have caught on to the Internet's influence on politics. Yahoo! announced in April its plans to host two presidential debates—one for Republican candidates pursuing presidency in 2008 and one for Democrats looking for the job—in an online format early this month. The debates will feature both real-time questions sent in by an online audience as well as viewer questions uploaded on video, according to news releases. Along with Yahoo!, the two others partners in the project—The Huffington Post and Slate—will host the content on their Web sites.

"We're opening the doors of democracy for American voters to participate in the presidential debates like never before," said Scott Moore, head of news and information at Yahoo! in a company statement. "Armchair politics will take on new meaning this election season, as we're offering voters the opportunity to ask the candidates what's on their mind."

Look for bloggers to sound off about candidates' replies as soon as they are uttered. Snippets from the debates will be dissected and resurrected. The debates will stir media reports of how candidates must be Internet-savvy, and how the medium is changing politics, for better or worse. Even months before the planned debate, the question of fairness about the online forum was raised. Techpresident.com blogged that with a 61% Democratic readership to 15% Republican readership of Slate, a sponsoring partner, the online debate is already lopsided before it starts. The same criticisms surround YouTube's intent to hold a mock presidential election that allows all U.S.-based users—regardless of age or eligibility to actually vote in a U.S. election—to `vote' on January 1 and 2, 2008. The discussions about the Internet's relevance, importance and influence are in full bloom.

But regardless of which party has a so-called cyber advantage, an online forum for presidential debates is a natural. Of the forthcoming next generation—users younger than 35 years old—the Internet is as often cited as the most important source for news as television, according to Pew research. And many pundits are looking to 2008 as the election that tips the scales in the Internet's favor.

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Grass Roots.com

How will the Internet further change the way politics is played? Reports have likened the Internet to the earlier days of television, when John F. Kennedy debated Richard Nixon. Nixon might have won by content, but JFK's telegenics and poise stole the show. The televised debate added a new element to campaigning.

Howard Dean's use of the Internet to propel his own campaign in 2004 is legend. "The Internet community is wondering what its place in the world of politics is," Dean told Wired three years ago. "Along comes this campaign to take back the country for ordinary human beings, and the best way you can do that is through the Net. We listen. We pay attention. If I give a speech and the blog people don't like it, next time I change the speech." Dean was able to use the medium to excite volunteers and rake in donations. Six years before Dean, Jesse Ventura, previously best known as a colorful professional wrestler, was able to harness the power of budget-friendly email and the presence of a Web site to launch a successful campaign for Minnesota's governorship.

But what was cutting edge then is stale by comparison now. Blogging, for instance, once an innovative way to get a message heard is in danger of becoming institutionalized. A certain small group of influential bloggers, a few important social networking sites and other Net-based tools will become essential sites of interaction between politicians and the public, but these interactions will become increasingly controlled and formalized, speculates Nathan Ensmenger, assistant professor in the History & Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. The kicker? Candidates will have to raise and spend even more money to get the best media consultants to advise them on blogging, Web sites, MySpace pages, and online strategies. All areas the online community considers innovative forums for free and even exchange.

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With politicians becoming more online-savvy, Internet usage issues are getting more attention.

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Today, candidates like John McCain, Barack Obama, Rudy Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards have a presence on social networking sites like YouTube. But the video clips can work just as hard as against them as for them. Click on an inspirational video of Edwards, for instance, with sweaty brow and rolled-up sleeves pitching in to help after the Katrina disaster. Inspiring. Scroll down and click on another bit as he fusses over his hair and has makeup applied while "I Feel Pretty" plays in the background. Not exactly helpful after that $400 haircut fiasco.

The fact that everyday folk can create, doctor, or alter video images or text and post it on the Internet makes the future even more murky as politics and the Internet combine. Citizen-generated content will give politicians another thing to think about as they climb the ladder of civil service. Take Barack Obama's camp stumbling in the press relation arena over citizen-generated content. When a Obama supporter set up and maintained a MySpace page supporting the candidate since 2004, he slowly built up interest to the tune of 160,000 friends, reported Technewsworld. He thought some compensation would be in order. Obama's camp, the reports go, asked him to name a number. When that figure was deemed too high, the election squad, with the blessing of MySpace, took over the site. Scores of blogs and chats about the situation flared. Why should a political `volunteer' want compensation?, asked some. Why wouldn't a politician's campaign reward the grassroots efforts of a concerned and passionate citizen?, argued others.

No doubt ownership, control, and copyright issues over political information are issues that will have to be explored going forward. Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford University, made a request of the Republican and Democratic National Committees that had people talking. Network broadcasting agencies, he argued, should make the footage involving the presidential debates available for online video sharing, according to reports. In a letter sent to the Republican National Committee, Lessig praises CNN for agreeing to make such content available in the public domain and asks the same of the networks. "These debates are part of our political discourse," he writes. "While the networks do the nation a great service by hosting and broadcasting them, the issues and ideas are bigger than the networks that carry them, and deserve a life beyond their air date."

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Net Gains

With politicians becoming more online-savvy, Internet usage issues are getting more attention. Is the Internet used by all strands of society, across educational and socioeconomic groups? Will the digital divide translate into a political divide? Will the lack of broadband access be a deterrent to policy information? Will the question of Net neutrality and control of content have a more `conspiracy feel' once politics are played more heavily online? And will politicians pay more mind to the Internet once they gain or lose from it?

Some academics argue that while certain Internet technologies can and will play a role in contemporary politics, the more things change the more they will stay the—relatively speaking—same. Radio, TV, inexpensive cameras, videocameras, and other technologies have been shaping the political process since the beginning of the 20th century and have not fundamentally changed the way politics works, points out Ensmenger.

"If anything, they have only served to reinforce the importance of traditional power structures (lobbyists, political parties, etc.) by making it so much more expensive to run a political campaign in this new media environment," Ensmenger says.

The elections of 2008 will likely usher in new technologies, and new ways to leverage existing mediums like the Internet for political gain. It's also likely there will be large sums of money dictating how to keep the right message getting distributed.

Hmm, it could just make you nostalgic for those plain old televised presidential debates.

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The Digital Library is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2007 ACM, Inc.

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