What is the Internet useful for in political campaigns?

The general consensus of many of the “old guard” political consultants that I have come in contact with is that the Internet is not a successful tool for driving messages. This group believes that the best way to promote a campaign’s messages is through earned media and paid advertisements on television, cable, radio or print media. Messaging is considered the top priority of campaigns and is central to the majority of their actions. Part of this disbelief regarding the Internet’s potential among “old guard” consultants certainly derives from a fear that they can’t control their message online (something that has been debated online since the Dean campaign). However, many consultants believe that, regardless of online message control, it is impossible to convince people of anything through Internet tactics.

There isn’t a political consultant in their right mind who would advocate completely ignoring the Internet. However, the Internet is not considered to be the top priority in lower budget campaigns because political consultants don’t see evidence that the Internet can convince people that their candidate/cause is better than their opponent’s.

The real question boils down to this: What kind of medium is the Internet? Is it a reach medium? Or is it a reinforcement medium?

To clarify, I consider a reach medium to be one where a message distributed on the medium reaches and is consumed by a population of people. Thus, if the message is effective and the consumer is receptive, the message will impact the person’s opinion on the matter at hand. Television and the radio are the best examples of reach mediums. They both amass large audiences and more importantly they affect the opinions and decisions made by those consuming them.

Whereas, a reinforcement medium is one where people explicitly seek out opinions similar to their own and through consumption strengthen those opinions. Niche publications and ideologically affiliated publications are the best example of reinforcement media. There is certainly an argument to be made that certain television channels and radio stations are reinforcement media. However, as a whole I view media to fall on a spectrum falling somewhere in between a pure reach medium and a pure reinforcement medium.

“Old guard” political consultants would argue that based on people’s online habits, they use the Internet to reinforce preexisting opinions, rather than seeking out information from both sides of an issue in order to choose a stance. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been an academic study based on whether or not the opinion of “old guard” political consultants is accurate on this issue.

As such, one of IPDI’s next major research projects will be to look into the political information consumption habits of people. I believe any research must combine survey data similar to the Pew Internet & American Life Project with a controlled experiment that specifically watches people’s consumption habits.

We are looking for input on how such a study could be conducted. My current thoughts entail giving people a news story about a topic such as the economy, global warming or foreign affairs. Following the article the research subject would be provided with a list of stories from a variety of ideologically coded news sources, which they would be required to click on at least one. The experiment would be preceded and followed by a questionnaire regarding their views on the issues at hand, in order to determine how their opinion changed over the course of the exercise.

Do you think an experiment in this style would work? Do you have any ideas to improve the study? Please email me at akellner@ipdi.org.

Caveat: If the Internet is jus t a reinforcement medium, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There is fairly substantial anecdotal evidence that the Internet is very successful at rallying the base and invoking them to take action. A recent example is the number of people who have volunteered for the Obama campaign that was initiated and often carried out entirely online.

File Eve Fairbanks recent The New Republic article about wiki politics under “don’t build it and forget.”

In “Wiki Woman,” Fairbanks looks at the wiki profiles of Clinton and Obama – and the dedicated supporters who guard them. According to Clinton wiki-guardian Jonathan Schilling,

You constantly have to police [the page] . . . Otherwise, it diverts into a state of nature.

Including unsavory comments about the life and times of elected officials on their wiki pages. Or hacks. Remember when Duncan Hunter’s site was hacked into last autumn, and the cover page include a picture of children in Africa with a line about Darfur? That seemed to stay up for months.

This is almost entirely unrelated to technology, but I still think it is a great development.  Listening to NPR this morning, I heard that Stanford will no longer be charging undergraduates tuition if their parents make less than $100,000.  Looking at this article on NPR’s website expands it further and says that room and board will also be waived if the parents income is less than $60,000.

The tenuous tech tie-in, I suppose, comes from the fact that with the rapid development and continually falling prices of new technology, educational technology is always getting cheaper as well.  This is a great development all around, and hopefully other very well endowed schools will follow.

IPDI’s very own financial director, Chris Brooks, who moonlights on campus as the chairman for the George Washington University College Republicans, made CNN last week. In a short three-minute video you can see here, Chris and a few other GW students managed to get their two cents in about college-age voters’ use of the Internet.

Chris, like most of us here at IPDI, is a compulsive Web surfer and admits as much in the video. While this expression of love for 24/7 access to the candidates might scare off a few Luddites (mostly because that’s all that is really left of that movement…just a few), Chris is a good example of how plugged-in young voters can enjoy greater breadth of knowledge about the candidates than our parents’ generation could through newspapers and once a night newscasts just by heading over to the dot-coms for the news networks or junkie sites like RealClearPolitics.

And I am not just saying this because Chris is the guy who fills out my paycheck…although a small blogging bonus could never hurt!

This piece on Inside HigherED amused me.  A couple of years ago (2005) the MPAA put out a release stating that college students were responsible for 44% of the movie industry’s domestic losses.  To be honest, I find that number quite impressive.  Especially since the MPAA said that college students only made up 3% of the population.

The truth is that the MPAA’s number is way off.  They are putting out a 2007 release that lowers the number to a much more believable 15%.  They attribute the initial number to an “isolated error”, but I will give them credit for at least owning up to the mistake.  It’s more than I expected from the MPAA.

There is a piece up on the New York Times Bits blog interviewing the founder of Slashdot. He questions the wisdom of crowds and points to Digg as evidence of its problems. He specifically cites the fact that “Ron Paul may be a valid candidate. But what that is really demonstrating is that you are seeing 1 or 2 percent of a community shaping where the whole community is going. A small dedicated group of people can manipulate these sites very easily.”

And he is correct. We all know Ron Paul has used the Internet rather effectively, especially for raising money. But before he was known for the “money bombs”, he was getting tons of articles submitted to Digg and other community news sites. These articles would make their way to the front page because the Ron Paul Internet herd would consistently vote them up.

This is different than the Slashdot method where a team of editors chooses what makes the front page and what doesn’t. Personally, I enjoy the Slashdot method even though its less democratic. It prevents a site from being overrun by a small band of dedicated supporters.

Not the forecasters.

George Anders recently looked back at some of the predictions Wall Street Journal published about what technology would look like in 2008. It looks like the crystal balls of five and ten years ago failed to predict one major trend in the way we use technology: our desire for interaction and interactivity.

The most elusive insight: the public’s desire to move beyond passive consumption of digital technology, in favor of active creation and sharing of personally shaped content. Forecasters didn’t foresee anything resembling the rise of YouTube, Wikipedia, MySpace and incessant blogging.

In fact, Ambuj Goyal, then vice president for systems and software at International Business Machines Corp and one of the technologists interviewed by WSJ ten years ago, put it most correctly:

We have predicted the hardware speeds and feeds very well. We haven’t done nearly as well in predicting how these machines will be used.

This brings me, yet again, to what I have already noted on this blog as one of my favorite panels at the 2008 Politics Online Conference. The panel is called Pervasive Politics, and it looks at the ways in which ubiquitous, pervasive computing (think microchips embedded in watch, constant online surveillance, etc.) are shaping politics and public policy. We’re combining techno-futurists, like Adam Greenfield (author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing), Genevieve Bell (IBM) and Alex Pang (Institute for the Future) with representatives from the Beltway set (Garrett Graff and Tanya Tarr).

Next Thursday (February 7^th) IPDI and GW’s Graduate School of Political Management are hosting a postmortem Super Tuesday discussion that will look at

• How has this primary session challenged and confirmed the expectations of pollsters, political analysts, and the media?
• How has technology shaped the way the primaries will unfold?
• Did Super Tuesday change the political game?

Speakers include Mike Allen (Politico), Ana Marie Cox (Time.com), Charles Ellison (BlackPolicy.org and IPDI), Frank Greer (GMMB), Mark McKinnon (Public Strategies and President of Maverick Media) and Maya Rockeymoore (Global Policy Solutions). Ron Faucheux, a faculty member at the Graduate School of Political Management, will moderate the discussion.

Details:

Thursday, February 7, 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.

The Jack Morton Auditorium, located on the first floor of GW’s Media and Public Affairs Building, 805 21^st Street, NW (Corner of 21^st and H Streets), Washington, DC 20052

RSVP is required. RSVP to ipdi@ipdi.org. More details here.

Speaking of events, check out the lineup at our annual Politics Online Conference. Tickets are filling up extraordinarily fast, and we’re one month out. Register soon!

I can’t pass up the perfect opportunity to use a Who quote to title a blog post and this is as good a reason as any.

Earlier today, F. Christopher Arterton, Dean of the Graduate School of Political Management, announced that Julie Germany will be the new director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet. Julie has been with the Institute as the deputy director since 2003 and played a key role in developing the Institute over the course of the past four years.

Julie, who has served as the fearless leader to the research assistants in IPDI labs, was the perfect choice for the position. She brings a passion for politics and technology unrivaled by anyone else I have met, combined with the fresh ideas that are necessary to bring about innovative projects and research. Beyond that she knows more about the Institute than the rest of us here at IPDI combined.

I met Julie in August, while I was still an undergrad. It was my sixth interview in four days and I was incredibly burned out by the job search. I sat down and we just started talking about a variety of topics related to the Internet and Politics. Within five minutes I was sold. I had to work at IPDI.

Since that conversation, my interactions with Julie have further inspired me to make an impact on the poli-tech community. And without asking them, I would bet the rest of my fellow IPDI-ites feel the same way.

Just in the last couple weeks, we have been discussing some changes to take place in IPDI and a handful of very innovative ideas for IPDI to venture into. These will be announced in the next several months, but I can reasonably guarantee that the next 12 months will see some very positive changes and growth within the Institute. Needless to say, we are in good hands.

Congratulations Julie- this was well deserved.

While listening to NPR this morning I heard that Colorado is going to decertify their electronic voting machines.  According to this article from a Denver TV station, the Secretary of State said they were “seeing a 1% error rate when counting ballots.”  The voting machines used in all 64 counties will need to reapply for certification.

Then looking at Slashdot this morning I found out that Maryland is also scrapping their Diebold electronic voting machines.  They are returning to paper ballots that will be counted by optical scanners.

Is this trend going to continue?  I don’t know.  But less than 8 years ago we thought electronic voting machines would be the saving grace of elections and now we are returning to our old ways.