FRIDAY IN FOCUS
US hopefuls go online in search of votes
09-02-2007
by Emmet Ryan
US presidential hopefuls are speaking to voters via the internet, but is the electorate listening?
Hillary Clinton has begun "a conversation" through online video, fellow Democrat Barack Obama has a social network page, while the website of Democratic candidate Chris Dodd, a Connecticut senator, allows visitors to choose music for his iPod.
In an approach that is expected to be followed in this year's general election in Ireland, candidates for the 2008 US Presidential election are manipulating 'new media' to enagage with an internet-savvy public.
"They want to reach younger voters," said Kate Fitzgerald, chairperson of Democrats Abroad's Irish branch.
Fitzgerald says candidates using new media attempt to project an image that they are cutting edge and embrace new technology.
"Media has been redefined and they are picking up on that," she said. "What comes with new media are things that are user-generated -- people have their say."
A recent Pew study found the number of American voters using the internet as their primary source of political campaign information has doubled in the past four years, and the front runners for the Democratic party's candidacy have recognised this important shift.
Both Clinton and Obama launched their campaigns through self-produced online videos, while Dodd and John Edwards used Google's YouTube video site to announce their candidacy.
"A launch like this is much more likely to have been conceived as a media event, to be reported elsewhere," says John O'Sullivan, communications lecturer at DCU.
"The message here is that the candidate is modern and progressive, but that message is primarily communicated via television and press," said O'Sullivan.
O'Sullivan believes candidates are adapting their traditional media skills to reach out to new media users.
"Clinton is a brilliant TV performer, as evidenced in this video, which doesn't actually vary that much from standard TV fare.
"She stresses the role of the technology in allowing her to have her 'conversation' with the people, but that's simplistic".
Despite the tools at their disposal, O'Sullivan doubts whether any technology can truly allow dialogue between politicians and voters.
"I doubt if politicians are communicating directly with voters in more than a token fashion," he says. "It's good to be seen to be interactive; it's much more challenging to achieve that, certainly at national leadership level."
Chatting with 300 million Americans may be overly ambitious, but politicians are using new media to generate support.
Social networking sites such as Bebo and MySpace are places where friends can connect online. Barack Obama is using his social network to generate an army of supporters. The Illinois senator is using the Facebook network to interact with more than 150,000 of his supporters.
Online campaigning can build a politician's image, and it has helped relative unknown Howard Dean strengthen his hand in the presidential race.
However new forms of image-building may be a double-edged sword as user generated content can convince voters a candidate's chances are fairly slim.
Dodd, a dark horse in the Democratic race, is asking voters to pick songs for him to play on his iPod, or DoddPod as he calls it. He lists the most recently selected songs on his website along with the reason the voter chose the song.
'Even the losers get lucky sometimes' by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers was probably not the type of track the Connecticut senator was hoping for. Likewise, 'Don't stop believing' by Journey hardly screams "Winner" to the e-electorate.
Candidates are not the only group making political noise online. Voters are posting their own opinions in blogs and are sharing the views of other internet commentators with their friends -- often across constituency borders.
Pew found that during the 2006 mid-term elections 23 percent of people who used the internet to gather political information had either posted their own views online, or forwarded someone else's commentary to others.
Despite this interaction, the sheer number of people posting online makes it difficult to see if any one blogger can get the public's attention, or even influence policy.
"A lot of blogs are introspective vanity projects. Just as in other media, there's a hierarchy, with most of the traffic going to a select few 'star' bloggers," says O'Sullivan
"The net is a great way to propagate a message, but not necessarily directly to users or voters," he said. "Clearly, it remains the case that messages will be filtered, mediated and processed -- just like so-called old media."
Irish politicians remain behind their counterparts across the pond in engaging with new media. While many TDs and senators purport to maintain blogs -- even video blogs -- we are unlikely to see the Taoiseach start 'a conversation' with the Irish people ahead of this year's general election.
"We're light years behind in using new media," says Damien Mulley, founder of the Irish Blog Awards. "They [the US] had it at the last election and they will be experienced by the time the next one comes around."
The Irish Labour party may be ahead of the game in this respect as it has hired US political blogger Zack Exley to work on its online campaign. His approach is to use politically evangelised bloggers to sway opinion. It will be interesting to note how successful these new communication channels will be for Irish parties when the decidedly low-tech ballots are counted at the election.
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