Campaign Analysis: Citizenship and the Networked Public Sphere in the 2008 Election Cycle (excerpt)

While many candidates back in 2004 such as Howard Dean, had begun to explore the possibilities of internet technologies - most notably through web-based fundraising, early social networks like Meetup.com, and establishing a practice and relationship with the then burgeoning political blogosphere - the social and historical factors which helped set the stage for the Obama campaign’s success had not yet reached maturity during the 2004 presidential election cycle.  By the 2008 election cycle however, “Web 2.0” technologies and mobile device use had reached critical mass, the open source and social sharing movements were in full force, user-generated content was an established part of popular culture, the political blogosphere had become an agenda setting institution, and the internet had become a standard information and entertainment source, particularly for the younger generations.  During the 2008 election cycle, 46% of Americans used the internet to get political news and converse about the campaign, up from 31% during the same survey period in 2004, and the population of online political users was bigger than the number of Americans who used the internet for politics during the entire 2004 election cycle.

The Obama campaign was quick to advance on these developments while building on the work of political predecessors, and more importantly they understood the measure to which they should balance and leverage traditional campaign strategies with newer hypermedia strategies and technologies.  A marked difference in the 2008 election cycle and cycles of past was the degree to which candidates could communicate directly to their supporters and the public.  The direct messaging and feedback loops of blogs, email, and text messages facilitated not just direct, real-time correspondence, but also a dialogue between and within the campaign and its community of supporters.  Their vice-presidential candidacy announcement delivered via text message and email became a famous example of the campaign’s mode of delivering messages directly to the public, rather than through traditional media outlets; this in turn broadened their organizational reach along privatized communication channels through which they could control their message and make subsequent campaign appeals.

Primarily though, the campaign used digital communication tools to facilitate conventional campaign practices – marketing, organizing, mobilizing, canvassing, and fundraising – with the collaborative and organizational innovation that the new information economy had brought to bear on social practices.  For example, the Obama team used their YouTube channel to disseminate up-to-date progress reports via PowerPoint presentations and pep talks from local campaign leaders and officials as high up as senior campaign manager David Plouffe, which were in turn used to organize and coordinate campaign activity across localities; they also used it to broadcast celebrity endorsements and political advertisements with the added viral capabilities of embedded code and a many-to-many communications platform.  The campaign further employed distributed, peer-to-peer production models by using wikis and the official campaign social network site MyBarackObama.com to organize field events, and to collaborate on and coordinate both online and offline campaign activities such as the completion of caller lists through local phone banks made available online (information traditionally managed by upper level campaign officials).  Site content and campaign materials were Creative Commons licensed and provided in downloadable formats, and user generated content was encouraged.

Together these so called “open-source” and “user-generated” strategies demonstrated the campaign’s ability to harness the affective labor market prevalent within this type of information environment.  For instance, when rumors were being spread through chain emails and other communication channels the Obama camp directed users to an arm of their website called www.fightthesmears.com, where they were invited to “spread the truth” through pre-made emails, pdf files for print, hyperlinks, or dynamic widgets that could be embedded on their own web space.  The site was framed as a fact checking information source while making it very easy for users to participate in the campaign’s counter persuasion strategy.  Furthermore, the campaign effectively co-opted the computing resources and social capital of their user base utilizing in-house websites and other social media platforms with an understanding that appeals made through preexisting relationships were most effective in activating social capital.  On MyBarackObama.com users were encouraged to create their own profiles and conduct online canvassing by tapping their personal social networks via the website; the Obama iPhone application (a volunteer team-led, peer-produced contribution) was created for the task of sending campaign and event information to personal contact lists stored on users’ phones.  The methodological impetus to activate social capital in campaigning is of course nothing new, however the scale to which this could be accomplished was both amplified and expedited by digital media technologies during the 2008 election cycle.

Contrary to popular rhetoric, the Obama campaign was organized in a top-down organizational structure, with assigned roles and leader-driven teams who were accountable to higher-ups in a managerial hierarchy.  Beyond the basic strategic protocols, talking points, and leadership training however, volunteers were given an inordinate amount of responsibility and power to meet objectives, handle voter files, and collect field data, as well as freedom to self-organize and make tactical decisions, and to adapt campaign rhetoric to their own personal narratives.  This pragmatic top-down structure with bottom-up features is described by Philip N. Howard as a heterarchy, a “bureaucracy [that] is fitted around the project” where “decisions are made by identifying problems and paradoxes that need managing not solving…constantly refined by the experience of what works…the hypermedia campaign is fluid, allowing active constituents a greater role in generating content…and flattening the overall campaign structure.”  In the business community this organizational form is known as “permanently beta,” referencing the perpetual iterative design process behind digital technologies.  This type of structure gave the Obama campaign an enormous amount of flexibility and access to a larger concentration of human resources, while still allowing them to retain a certain amount of control over campaign activities.

Finally, the Obama campaign was an intensely database-driven operation, with voter data being collected and processed in real-time up until the very end.  This data was used to create “computer generated models of states, down to segments of the media market,” allowing for up-to-the-minute, iterative status assessments, scheduling decisions, and resource allocation.  As Matthew Hindman notes, “the statistics used to model voter attitudes and behavior have gone from rudimentary cross tabs, to the same sorts of cutting-edge learning algorithms Amazon and eBay use to predict consumer behavior.”  Information technologies that aggregated and processed volunteer collected data, voter registration data, and the various data trails of information consumers online (such as that collected from MyBarackObama.com) allowed for an unprecedented ability to rapidly target both resources and message content to voters in real-time and through multiple venues, a campaign practice known as redlining.  As a candidate campaign, the Obama campaign’s role within the public sphere was inextricably a persuasive one, however the degree to which it facilitated civic participation and mobilized voters should be given due consideration.