Masudul Biswas
The design of political campaigns cannot be separated from the digital interface in the age of digital media. Grassroots and elite political campaigns have gone online, built multimedia strategies and constructed complex relational databases. In such context, Philip N. Howard examined the effects of the use of new communication technologies in political campaigns. Howard should be given a credit for taking a lead to introduce this technological issue in new media research. Similarly, hypermedia campaign is relatively a new phenomenon in political communication. As online activisms and web-based political campaigns got popularity, hypermedia started to become a part of political culture in the United States. Howard exemplified the applications of hypermedia tools in organizing as well as consuming political campaigns online. However, we cannot keep hypermedia applications out of the ambit of criticisms when the issues like invasion to privacy or uninformed consents, the design of hypermedia tools and the commercialization of political campaigns appear before us.
Those who designed the hypermedia tools had commercial goals in mind. This reminds me about our previous discussion on cultural-inappropriate structure of communication technologies in digital divide context. Commercial vision of hypermedia has no difference with the concept of e-commerce. Online-based political data-mining agency (DataBank.com) and political information providers (Voting.com) collected information about individuals and sold them to political campaigners and other political clients for designing different types of strategic messages for different types of voters. It has changed the culture of political campaign. Voters traditionally look for information about candidates. But hypermedia tools help political campaigners to target voters with specific information.
Emergence of internet-based hypermedia tools gave a signal to traditional mass media like televisions that the Internet has powerful influence on public opinion. Hypermedia campaigns are different from mass media campaigns. Mass media campaigns rely on traditional surveys, television advertising, and elite political consultants, while hypermedia campaigns narrowcast messages designed for select citizens, “polls of narrowly tailored samples,” and “data mining” of relevant political and consumer information. Most importantly, these techniques of hypermedia campaigns are not something exclusive or elite-controlled; they have availability in the marketplace. Narrowly-focused campaign strategy of hypermedia allows both citizens and campaigners to engage in “redlining,” which means citizens encounter filtered and less information constantly. Hypermedia tools like spyware, avatar, opinionbots, spam or unsolicited commercial e-mails, and ‘spider’ (crawled over the web) can collect and store profile information and web activities of web users. By doing this, hypermedia tools have shrunk public sphere. In one of our discussions on digital divide, we pointed out that new media created segmented communities and enforced the real life segregations in virtual life.
On the other hand, hypermedia campaigns are not organized in a hierarchical manner like mass media. They rather followed “Epistemic heterarchy,” because participants are interdependent in hypermedia campaigns where information flows horizontally instead of vertically and with accountability. Such structure obviously does have democratic potentials. Mass media political campaigns develop policy positions to convey the opinion of the constituents or leaders while hypermedia campaigns present appealing features and conceal less appealing features. Political hypermedia itself does not segment citizens. But it gives campaign managers the power to segregate the public in terms of message dissemination. Political hypermedia can allow individuals to construct their own conduits for political information. People assemble their own networks for conveying political information. These are all meant for decentralizing control over mass communications by “increasing the control that information consumers have over what messages they receive and when, and increasing the control that producers have over which audiences receive which messages and when” (p. 125). Still political campaigners have the power to set the agenda or boundary for the web users. But the practice of data mining continually monitors citizens’ preferences without informed consent. Howard termed this an invasion to privacy and recommended government oversight of hypermedia campaign practices for a “safe digital democracy.”
Howard explained the act of political campaigning and the changing pattern of political campaigns during the elections from 1996 to 2004. Role of the Internet has changed from 1996 to 2000. In 1996, it played a publicity role. In 2000, it appeared as an organizational tool. By 2004, hypermedia became the part of political communication in the US. Hypermedia helped to develop “entrenched patterns of campaign strategy” in political communication. Like other web applications, hypermedia tools have democratic potentials but they are used for managing and controlling political culture. Online political campaign managers have still control over the framing of discussions on political issues.
#
No comments:
Post a Comment