The Internet is becoming more and more important as a technology of speech. This holds for all kinds of speech, but one of the more interesting is political speech on the Internet, and how this new medium can be used to further political agendas. Carol Darr is one of the academics leading the study of this subject area, and I had the pleasure of meeting borth with her and her assistent director Julie Barko Germany today. Professor Darr heads the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at GWU and she is often quoted in media. Her work includes as diverse issues as fundraising on the Internet, mobile technology use in campaign and the role of bloggers in elections (check the web site for publications!).
The Institute has studied campaign elections and contributions, and as former campaign law expert, Darr is amazed at the opportunities this would open for anyone who wants to circumvent the existing campaign finance law. It is only a matter of time before foreign interests realize this and start to finance different Internet initiatives that coincide with their own. The opportunities are endless: a fundamentalist muslim might finance a democrat that promises to withdraw from Iraq, a foreign oil potentate might finance a republican who promises not to drill in Alaska...And the candidates might not even know this.
The interesting thing about online fundraising is that it reaches an entirely new clientel. More than 50 percent, Barko Germany points out, of the people who contributed online in the 2004 elections were people who had not contributed at all before to a political campaign. And of the 10 percent that were below 30, almost all choose the web as their contribution channel. It is expected that they will keep doing so, and that this will change the pattern of all campaign contributions.
When it comes to bloggers and their impact on politics, the question becomes even more complicated. One issue is whether or not they should be regarded as contributing to a campaign they are supporting or not. This has now been partly resolved, Darr says, and it seems as if bloggers can invest their own time and money in blogging for a candidate without this being seen as a contribution. But the perhaps most interesting question is what impact bloggers have on the polarization of politics. As has been mentioned before, the Pew Internet and American Life project has shown that bloggers are better at accurately representing the opposing view, but the question is if this extends to their surfing habits. What is the proportion of left-wing/right-wing blog in a right-wing-readers RSS-stream? Recent studies suggest, but this is not finalized or published yet, that it is 70 pro/30 against the point of view that the individual has. At first sight this may seem depressing, but compare with newspapers! How many people read editorials they do not agree with? I would guess that 80/20 would be more accurate in that case.
The Institute is also developing an interesting body of work on what they call e-fluentials - influential people who decide what way others actully vote. The theory builds on a work, Influentials, that claims that one of every ten americans decide how the rest vote. (This theory is shaky at best, but if it is true it would mean that the capacity for change in the political system is far greater than is usually expected. Change the mind of one of the influentials and you change an enormous amount of actual votes.
The candidate controlling the influentials/e-fluentials will win out, if this is true. The rise of the e-fluentials is more evident with blogs and other forms of new media - and perhaps the power of this subset of people can be leveraged more effectively in the digital world. We will see a lot more evidence for either development in this years election as well as in 2008, says Darr.
Julie Barko Germany says that the technology is not only used to communicate message. Besides being used to float ideas and form policy, it is also used to spread scurrilous rumours and more interestingly, for logistic purposes. The Bush-campaign, in the last election, had portable devices outside most polling places, and asked the people exiting where they lived, if they had been contacted or not prior to coming. With this information they could in real-time decide what areas to call to mobilize their voters. Mapping areas that had not been subject of recent contact sweeps, they could maximize voter turnout. That kind of technology use - use for political logistics - is extremely interesting and promising.
What will the Swedish parties do?