Mike Minehan
The history of politics is the history of politicians who were able to successfully use available media. Churchill’s voice resonated on the radio, Kennedy looked fresh and enthusiastic on television and he famously won the presidency after his opponent, Nixon, appeared shady and shifty during a pre-vote TV debate.
But if the internet is the new tool of democracy, which politicians have successfully migrated across to the digital domain? And also, how is the performance of politicians in the digital age to be assessed?
A purely quantitative survey of appearances on YouTube gives the following picture (numbers indicate numbers of videos listed in September 2007):
Hillary Clinton 7,960
Barack Obama 5,450
John Howard 219
(although most of these videos on John Howard concerned his statements about policies on climate change. A significant proportion of other videos about John Howard are satirical and critical).
However, the number of appearances of politicians on YouTube do not give a good indication of the success of politicians on the internet. For example, on the 5th of March in 2007, an advertisement appeared on YouTube, placed by someone called ‘ParkRidge47’. This name consisted of the place where Hillary Clinton grew up and her year of birth. The advertisement was an updated version of Ridley Scott’s famous Apple Macintosh ad from 1984. It used the Orwell-inspired original, in which a massed army of workers are lectured from a vast television screen by Big Brother. But ParkRidge47 replaced the face and voice of Big Brother with those of Hillary Clinton. ‘One month ago I began a conversation with all of you,’ she says from the screen, addressing the masses as ‘hard-working’. A digital subtitle appears across her face: ‘This is our conversation’, before a colourfully clad sprinter races up to the screen and smashes it with a mallet.
The ad aimed to show how Hillary’s one-way mode of address is anything but a conversation. The ad, entitled ‘Vote Different’, ended by transforming the Apple logo into an ‘O’, underneath which was written, barackobama.com (The Observer, 8 July, 2007).
In less than three months, ‘Vote Different’ had been seen by more than 3 million people, and discussed extensively, making an ad that was disseminated for free far more effective than any official ad made up until this time by the presidential candidates in the 2008 race.
Barack Obama and his campaign headquarters denied any knowledge of the ad. Parkridge47 turned out to be an internet activist who made the ad in his living room one Sunday afternoon, using an editing program called Final Cut Studio on his MacBook.
Interviewed on TechPresident.com. a new website designed to track the 2008 candidate’s use of the internet, Park Ridge47 said proudly that ‘considering Hillary Cliinton’s biggest video has only received 12,000 views on YouTube, I’d say the grassroots has won the first round’ (The Observer, 8 July, 2007).
2008 has often been referred to as ‘the YouTube election’, and candidates are all trying to keep up. During the last presidential election, bloggers were the new digital phenomenon to contend with. Now YouTube as taken over, and it has the potential for much more dramatic effect.
For example. in 2006, George Allen, the Republican Senator from Virginia, publicly addressed a campaign operative from the opposing side who was videotaping him (as is traditional) in the hope of finding negative material for an ad. He called the campaign worker, who was of Indian descent, 'macaca'. The racist epithet flew onto YouTube immediately. Why bother to spend time and money making an ad when you can bring down a politician instantly with his own gun? Allen lost his campaign for re-election (The Observer, 8 July, 2007).
Andrew Rasiej, co-founder of TechPresident, thinks it's a mistake to suppose that only 'viral' videos such as the 'Vote Different' ad can have an effect. He suggests, rather, that if one person who lives next to a lake whose high-water mark is 20 feet lower than it was 20 years ago makes a video showing that and saying he'll vote for the candidate with the best environmental policy, all he has to do is send it to 10 friends, who'll then pass it on, to make an impact.
'What the internet has done,' says Rasiej, encapsulating the change, 'is it's taken the conversations over the backyard fence, or around the water cooler, and put them on steroids.' (The Observer, 8 July, 2007).
Another form of online activism is the way in which people are organising themselves against government and bureaucracy. www.MySociety.org is a British web site that helps people take joint action against perceived injustices. On www.FixMyStreet.com people report anything from dumped household furniture to missing manhole covers.
Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, took a tentative step onto YouTube in July 2007 to launch his climate change package. Prime Minister Howard sat behind a large desk with the Australian flag featuring prominently in the background. His message was one-way, and his appearance was described as ‘uncool’ and ‘old-fashioned’ by some internet users (The Australian, 19 July, 2007, p4). Howard demonstrated that the techniques of old media do not translate well into new media.
Barack Obama showed the way when 62,000 of his supporters gathered on Facebook without the candidate lifting a finger. In the UK, Alan Johnson updates supporters on his whereabouts via Twitter.
The Australian Labor Party sought to migrate onto the internet in the leadup to the 2007 federal election. The ALP called for a series of three debates between the party leaders – one to involve online participaqtion via YouTube, another on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and a third to be live, ‘in the round’, with all debates webcast live (Sydney Morning Herald, 17 Sept., 2007, p4).
The main advantage of the internet is the way it is empowering people. Organising is swifter and easier. Electronic mobilisation is said to have swung elections in Spain, South Korea and the Philippines. In the US, the Howard Dean presidential campaign of 2004 saw the birth of ‘netroots’ activism, collecting enough donations from individuals to match the megabucks of big corporate givers and lobby groups (The Guardian, 30 May, 2007).
Technology could also help to bypass traditional government institutions. For example, MoveOn.org put together 30,000 evacuees from Hurricane Katrina and 10,000 volunteers ready to give them a bed. Kiva.org matches people with cash in the developed world to entrepreneurs in developing countries who need a loan.
Currently, the internet indicates a shift towards bottom-up politics, instead of the traditional top-down model. And the internet is now an important check and balance against politicians who think of media only in terms of the staged ten second grab. The internet is a 24/7 search engine with bloggers and witnesses with video cameras who will help to keep the candidates honest. But most importantly, it is giving more people a voice because the internet has lowered the barriers that once excluded all but the elite from taking part.
The jury is still out on whether the internet is capable of swinging political campaigns. Mainstream media is still the platform that politicians covet and depend on most.
However, the 2008 US Presidential election is already a touchstone concerning the shift from conventional media to the internet, and this election will define the importance or otherwise of online demographics.
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