New Media Campaigns

It is undeniable that information technologies have come to play an increasingly important role in contemporary political campaigns and in all likelihood, their role in future political campaigns is going to increase rather than diminish. Howard’s methodology of ethnographic immersion in exploring the dynamics of political communication on the Internet moves beyond media effects to expose the power of the political consultants whom Howard, 1996 recognizes as the power brokers mediating the political communications between the citizens and the political leaders. The important question is what implications this changing equation of power has for citizenship and the notion of democracy where values and ideologies of the architects of technology define how to conduct political campaigns on the Internet. The political consultants have no scruples in surreptitiously mining confidential data or buying it from political data vendors. Political preferences have been reduced to information bits stored in relational databases mined through unsuspecting people’s personal confidential data. What this data therefore, represents is not the political preferences of the voter but his “data shadow, the political personality deduced from the data about the voter” (p.189). Moreover, like all probabilistic models, the political preferences or choices deduced from these stolen or proprietary data are at best predictive never truly indicative of the true opinions. Few might argue however, that research conducted through traditional survey methods is also not completely free or without their biases but the probability that the data obtained through conventional survey methods is more closer to their true political preferences is much higher.
In discussing the role of the community of e-political consultants, Howard does not discuss the role of other competing sources of information such as interest groups, advocacy groups, individual bloggers, journalists, many of whom have their own independent blogs, or other independent organizations that provide alternative views in countering the effects of the community of e-political consultants. Howard’s interpretation of e-political consultants invests them with more power than they probably exercise This outlook may not represent the whole picture since it does not take into consideration the other interactions that are simultaneously occurring for instance, the voter interacting with other sources of information. It assumes that the voter is a passive receptor of messages as hypothesized in the hypodermic needle theory. In the absence of concrete data on the contribution of narrow casting, a service provided by the consultants, in determining the success of political campaigns it would be pre-mature to state that the e-political community has become very powerful. In addition, factors such as the quality and the subsequent analysis of the data by the e-political consultants should also factor in determining the power of the e-political consultant community.
The grand notion of the e-political community that the Internet will revolutionize the democratic participation by improving the quality of democratic deliberation and participation seems like a whitewash. The Internet has afforded the developers of information technology greater latitude in controlling information. This is evident by the redlining technique that Howard describes that political consultants use to target the most likely voters. Thus, narrow casting and redlining information might serve to be inimical to the ideals of democratic participation. This is not to say that the Internet has not improved the democratic deliberation but the results have not been as spectacular as envisioned. In all likelihood, the Internet will have greater impact on the generation Yers or the generation dotcomers, as the newest generations are variously called. Born into the internet environment they would not be shy of using the Internet. As more and more human transactions shift to the Web sphere, it is not improbable to assume that future elections will be fought on the Web sphere and the Internet may have a greater impact in deciding the outcome of election campaigns. Another assumption here is that the people of the coming generation would be aware of the manipulations of the e-political consultants and would be able to make true contributions to the democratic processes.