Facebook Nation:

FACEBOOK NATION: HOW THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN USED ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS TO ATTRACT YOUNG VOTERS IN THE 2008 AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

By: Corey Benjamin Shefman

This dissertation is submitted to the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media & Cultural Studies, Cardiff University, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Political Communications.

August 2009

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Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, Jack B. Sklar of Calgary, Alberta, Canada for teaching me to always do the best I can and to get right back up when I fall down. I miss you Zaida.

Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the generous support and assistance of so many people who gave me their time and input over the course of the past year.

I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the teaching staff at JOMEC, especially my supervisor Stephen Cushion, who always had a helpful suggestion to point me in the right direction.

Of course, I would never have gotten this far without the unyielding support of my parents. My mom, who would never let me give up no matter how much I might complain: Mom, I know I sometimes give you a hard time but at the end of the day, you’re always right. It might have taken me a while, but I’ve finally learned that. And my dad, who infected me with the political bug in the first place: Dad, this is all your fault. I can never thank you enough.

Last but certainly not least, I need to express my sincere appreciation to Professor Eugene Orenstein of McGill University for teaching me the value of stories and the importance of storytelling. Professor Orenstein, you continue to inspire me.

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Abstract This dissertation seeks to begin to explain how the 2008 Barack Obama Presidential campaign used ‘new media’ and related digital communication technologies to attract the unprecedented support it enjoyed amongst young voters. Scholars and politicians alike have long sought to reverse the apparent trend of apathy among young citizens and with the dawn of the digital age, some believed the answer to be apparent. While the elections of 2000, 2004 and 2006 saw progressively more complex uses of the internet and related technologies, it was not until the 2008 Presidential election that the full potential of the Internet was harnessed. Through his self-contained activist network and extensive presence in online social networks, Barack Obama integrated his traditional political and networking skills as a community organizer with the realities of the digital generation. This dissertation makes use of semi-structured interviews with experts (both professional and academic) on the intersection of new media and politics, as well as visual and technical analyses of two aspects of the Obama campaign’s web presence. By attempting to understand the Obama campaign’s success in using new media and online social networks to attract youth support, this dissertation outlines how future political campaigns may begin to replicate that success and re-engage youth. This study draws on the concept of social capital and evidence given by experts to show that only by integrating the online and offline worlds can politicians engage youth in general in civil society.

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Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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ABSTRACT

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CONTENTS

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FIGURES

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CHAPTER 1 – RISE OF THE DIGITAL GENERATION

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CHAPTER 2 – YOUTH, POLITICS AND THE INTERNET: REVIEWING THE LITERATURE

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FACTS AND FIGURES

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YOUTH AND CIVIC ENGAGEMENT

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BUILDING SOCIAL CAPITAL

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LABELLING THE INTERNET

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THE AMERICAN DIGITAL DIVIDE

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WHEN POLITICS GO ONLINE

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WEB 3.0: THE NEXT GENERATION OF ONLINE POLITICS

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CHAPTER 3 – METHODOLOGY

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INTERVIEWS

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WEB ANALYSIS

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GOING FORWARD

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CHAPTER 4 - BRINGING THE DIGITAL WORLD OFFLINE: AN ANALYSIS OF MY.BARACKOBAMA.COM

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SEARCHABILITY

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TARGET AUDIENCES

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SUBSTANTIVE CONTENT

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NAVIGATION AND FUNCTIONALITY

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AESTHETIC DESIGN

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INTERACTIVITY

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CHAPTER 5 - ENGAGING ON THEIR TERMS: AN ANALYSIS OF BARACK OBAMA’S FACEBOOK PAGE

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INTERACTION SCENARIO

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CHAPTER 6 – THE ROLE OF SOCIAL NETWORKS: A DISCUSSION

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CHAPTER 7 – CONCLUSION

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Figures FIGURE 1: THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN’S HOME PAGE ON 16 FEBRUARY 2007

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FIGURE 2: ENTRY TO MYBO FROM THE CAMPAIGN SITE IN FEBRUARY 2008

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FIGURE 3: RETURNING USER’S ENTRY TO MYBO IN FEBRUARY 2008

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FIGURE 4: EXAMPLE OF THE PERSONALIZED ‘DASHBOARD’ OF MYBO

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FIGURE 5: ‘STUDENTS FOR BARACK OBAMA’ HOME PAGE

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FIGURE 6: EXCERPT FROM THE OBAMA CAMPAIGN’S TWITTER PAGE

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This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

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Chapter 1

Rise of the Digital Generation “It's been a long time coming, but...change has come to America” (Obama 2008). These words, from American President Barack Obama‟s victory speech on the evening of 5 November 2008 marked an important milestone in the changing political and social landscape of the United States of America. The US Presidential election of 2008 was significant for a number of reasons. It saw a woman and an African-American competing for a major party nomination. It saw the first woman on a Republican Presidential ticket and most significantly, it saw the election of the first black President of the United States. In many ways equally noteworthy however is the important role that young people played in this election; especially when compared to the role they played as a group in previous elections.

In the 2008 Presidential election, young people distinguished themselves not only from older voters, but also from past generations of young voters. With increased turnout amongst voters under 30 years of age it is both striking and curious to note that 68% of young voters cast their ballots for Barack Obama despite the fact that only 45% of that age group identifies themselves as Democrats (CIRCLE 2008).

What led young Americans to present such a united front in this election? What was it about Barack Obama and his campaign that led young voters to support the Democratic candidate in such disproportionate numbers?

There were undoubtedly many factors at play during the 2008 election that contributed to his success. Obama‟s message of hope and change, his oratorical skills, eight years of an unpopular Republican President, two wars and a worsening economic crisis would all have played a role. Yet from the start, Obama was at a disadvantage. A freshman Senator who had not even completed his first term, who had no executive experience and few

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meaningful political connections was to run against Hillary Clinton, a woman whose name recognition, money and connections were second to none. Yet by the end of the campaign, Obama had raised $5.5 Million online, more than had ever been raised before by a candidate on the internet. By the time the primary season had begun, supporters and activists were using the Obama Campaign‟s online social network, commonly called MyBO, to set up campaign organizations in their own states before the official campaign had even arrived (McGirt 2009 p.4). As his popularity grew, Obama‟s profiles on the most active social networking websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, also grew in popularity, as the primarily young users of those sites (Alexa.com) began taking an interest in the campaign.

As will be explored in this dissertation, it was no accident that young people took such an interest in Barack Obama and eventually voted for him in such large and unprecedented numbers. Using the internet and associated technologies, the Obama campaign reached out to young voters in a way no American campaign ever had before. By combining online social networks, a medium intimately familiar to many young Americans, with traditional community organizing techniques, the Obama campaign has potentially sparked the beginning of a series of important changes in how digital political campaigns are carried out.

As will be discussed in Chapter 2, scholars have long been concerned with the problem of „youth apathy‟. Around the world, voter turnout among youth has steadily declined and young people generally have significantly less „social capital‟ (Putnam 2000) than previous generations. This research is intended to shed light on one promising solution to this problem. By examining how Barack Obama secured the support that he did among young voters, other politicians in the United States and around the world will gain an insight into how they might replicate his success. While this research is a first step, future research will be required in order to paint a complete picture of Obama‟s success and how others can learn from his example. Nevertheless, understanding how his campaign was able to attract young activists and voters (many getting involved in a political campaign for the first time) will 2

undoubtedly contribute to our understanding of how apathy and disengagement amongst young people can be reversed. Thus, proceeding on the premise that the Obama campaign did enjoy unprecedented success among young voters, this dissertation will seek to answer the question; “How did the 2008 Barack Obama Presidential campaign use the internet and related digital communication technologies to attract young voters?” In answering that central question, this study will also explore the concept of “Web 3.0” – the intersection of online and offline networks – as a significant political model adopted by the Obama campaign.1 Before attempting to analyze the Obama campaign‟s success, Chapter 2 will review the literature relevant to this topic and demonstrate how this study relates to that which has already been written. In addition to discussing some academic thought relating to youth apathy, it will touch on the notion of „social capital‟ as well as survey past uses of the internet in political campaigns in order to facilitate a comparison with the Obama campaign‟s use of the technology. In Chapter 3, the methodology used for this dissertation will be explained. The use of interviews and website analysis allowed for a worthwhile depth of data which, I argue, makes up for the limited breadth. In Chapters 4 and 5 MyBO and Barack Obama‟s Facebook page are analyzed, incorporating commentary gathered from personal interviews with experts on digital campaign techniques. Finally, Chapter 6 and 7 begin a discussion of the importance of combining new and old organizing techniques while harnessing the digital communication technologies associated with the internet which form such an integral part of the daily lives of many young people. While organizations such as „Rock the Vote‟, academics and politicians have been working for many years to find a way to reverse the decline in voter turnout among young people, the success of the Obama campaign gives new hope that modern communication tools can be used to engage honestly with young citizens. This dissertation seeks to begin to understand how that 1

‘Web 3.0’ is defined and fully explained as a concept on pages 15 and 16.

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success was achieved and how it can be used keep these newly engaged young people within the public sphere.

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Chapter 2

Youth, Politics and the Internet: Reviewing the Literature A study such as this one, which is primarily concerned with the internet and related technologies, will inevitably need to face the challenges associated with any emerging field. As the internet and digital communication technologies continue to rapidly change and develop so does the scholarship surrounding them. While there has been little academic work published on the use of the internet in the 2008 American Presidential election (as of the time of writing), there is significant commentary on the use of the internet in previous elections. This chapter will begin by discussing data gathered by CIRCLE, a research centre at Tufts University concerned with the “civic and political engagement” of young Americans, relating to the youth vote in the 2008 election. It will then go on to examine literature pertaining to both youth engagement in politics in past elections and how politics has been practiced online in the 21st Century. By understanding these issues, we can better explain the hypothesized success of the Obama campaign. The questions of social capital and the public sphere will also be addressed in terms of the roles they play in relation to how the internet can engage young people in civic life. As well, a number of terms significant to subsequent chapters of this dissertation will be defined and explained.

Facts and Figures For the first time in nearly a generation, youth voter turnout (that is, voters under the age of 30) in the 2008 American election was above 50%. Even more significantly however, nearly 1 in every 5 voters was a young person, accounting for at least 60% of the overall increase in voter turnout. With an estimated 52%-53% of young people having voted, it is extremely important to understand why there has been an increase of over 10% in the youth vote as compared to the 2000 election and 5% since the 2004 election (CIRCLE 2008). All of these statistics become even more significant however when it is revealed that young voters, for the first time ever, voted for one candidate,

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Democrat Barack Obama, by a ratio of 2:1 (approximately 68% to 32%), while the overall vote difference between the two candidates was only 53% to 46%. This gap is startling when we realize that between 1976 and 2004 young people almost always voted the same way as older voters, never differing by more than 1.8 percentage points (Circle, 2008). As a final point of reference, while only 33% of young voters identify as „Democrats‟, 54 percent of all young voters voted for Democratic candidate Barack Obama (Circle, 2008). It is thus clear that youth had a significant impact on the outcome of the 2008 Presidential election. Yet on their own, these numbers do not explain whether young people supported Obama as a result of campaign tactics (online or otherwise), fatigue with the Republican Party or the candidate‟s personal charisma. However, combined with evidence comparing past campaigns‟ use of the internet as well as the analysis of two aspects of the Obama campaign‟s web presence which follows, a clearer picture begins to form of how the Obama campaign may have begun to make politics relevant to youth once again.

Youth and Civic Engagement In order to understand why a study of how youth may engage with politics is relevant, it is important to understand what (and when) youth itself „is‟. As a frame of reference, “Youth” is ambiguous. Sociologically; “youth is generally taken to denote a period of transition between the dependence of childhood and the... independence of adulthood” (Fahmy 2006 p.29). This period of transition however, is happening later in life and taking longer than ever before. Fahmy (2006) points to the fact that the number of 16 year olds in the UK remaining in full time education between 1987 and 1994 rose by 75% (p.32) and that only 9% of 16 year olds in Britain finishing their mandatory education went on to full time employment as evidence of this - young people are staying in school longer, in effect, extending their youth (p.31). While there is no commonly accepted definition of youth, CIRCLE, „The Centre for Information and Research on Civil Learning and Engagement‟, a research centre at Tufts University in Massachusetts and one of, if not the

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most important research centre on issues surrounding the civic and political engagement of young people in America, define youth as being between 15 and 25. CIRCLE‟s definition notwithstanding, the only reliable data (and CIRCLE‟s primary source of data) on voter turnout immediately following an election comes from exit polls compiled by the National Election Pool (NEP) which measures „young voters‟ as being 18-30. In practical terms, this means that a discussion of the impact youth had on the 2008 election must distinguish between impact during the campaign, which will rely on CIRCLE‟s own definition, and impact on voting and results, which will, out of necessity, rely on the NEP‟s statistics. „Youth Apathy‟ has long been seen as a societal ill and a plethora of organizations such as „Rock the Vote‟ in the United States and „Apathy is Boring‟ in Canada have established themselves in the past decade to combat this perceived threat to democracy. To a large extent, this perception of young people is accurate. As Putnam (2000) has shown, young people today are less likely to participate in community activities than their parents and grandparents. Livingstone, Couldry and Markham (2007) further demonstrate that young people are significantly less likely than their adult counterparts to express interest in political issues or „issues of the day‟ such as health care or the economy. However, Gerodimos and Ward (2007) argue that observers are too intent on relying on traditional measures of engagement. While youth may not vote or join political parties in numbers on par with previous generations; Young people are often at the core of rising alternative forms of civic engagement and voice expression: flash-mobbing and impromptu protests; virtual networks spilling over to offline communities; the rise of citizen-reporters through blogging, vlogs and podcasts; online petitions, charity sites and other causes such as natural disaster aid (Gerodimos and Ward 2007 p.116) While at first glance, this may seem to undermine the idea that youth are, as a group, unengaged in civic society, the fact remains that while these alternative political activities are beneficial to the public sphere and society as a whole, they are not a substitute for the most basic processes of democracy – voting and participation in the electoral process. Indeed, each of the activities

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identified by Gerodimos and Ward are indicative of disillusionment with existing structures and the belief that they cannot make progress by engaging directly with politicians and other elites. Thus, while participation in any form is no doubt a positive development, this fact, if anything, reinforces the need for youth to be reengaged with civil society and traditional democratic institutions.

As Dahlgren and Olsson (2007) and others (for example, Mesch and Coleman 2007; Livingstone et al 2007) demonstrate, it is a common perception among youth that their opinions do not matter, that politicians do not listen to what they have to say. As a result, it can be argued that traditional political participation is seen as a waste of time by many youth. This is especially significant in the context of the 2008 Presidential election given the historical context (8 years of a controversial Republican presidency) and Democratic Candidate Barack Obama‟s popular image as an underdog. It is important to note however that according to many academics „youth apathy‟ may in fact be more a result of action by elites than inaction by youth themselves. Fahmy (2006 p.16) quotes the British Youth Council as saying that; “Rather than young people being apathetic it is in fact the politicians and parties that are indifferent, uninterested and complacent...” A position further supported by Livingstone et al. (2007) among others. Indeed, Fahmy (2006, Pg. 34) points to the work of Catan and Lister who argue that the rhetoric of citizenship directed at youth has come at a time when youth are being structurally excluded from political participation. Continuing economic dependency, falling wages as a proportion of adult wages and rising youth unemployment all contribute to the impression among youth that politicians simply are not concerned with their issues. In addition, as Fahmy (2006) points out, with rising student debts, young people are out of necessity less interested in collective action – despite the benefits it might bring to them – and more concerned with alleviating their own hardships.

The debate surrounding the question of youth engagement (or lack thereof) can generally be split into two opposing theories concerning the lives and culture of young people today. According to Giddens (1991) and Castells 8

(1997) as cited by Loader (2007), many young people cannot relate to traditional political structures and methods of political communication in an era of Facebook, YouTube and instant messenger. A dearth of youth engagement is not due to any lack of interest on the part of young people, according to this view, but rather because the rigid structures of traditional politics do not conform to the lifeworld experienced and understood by this generation, an experience that is largely open-source and user generated – the exact opposite of traditional politics. Referred to by Loader (2007 p.2) as the “cultural displacement perspective”, proponents of this point of view argue that rather than signalling some kind of crisis of democracy, the coming of age of the „dotcommers‟ or „internet generation‟ may herald the beginning of a new kind of Western politics. In contrast, the Disaffected Citizen perspective proposed by Henn (2002) and Dalton (2004) as quoted by Loader (2007), sees the differences between today‟s youth and older generations as largely exaggerated. Rather than radically changing how politics is practiced, “the new media can be assimilated as a[n]... additional channel of political communication to young people” (Loader 2007 p.2). In other words, disaffected citizen theorists attempt to argue that all that is necessary to reengage youth in the political process is to use new communication technologies as a vehicle for communicating traditional politics as opposed to adapting traditional politics to the new generation.

Traditionally, civic engagement has been measured by voter turnout, party membership, campaigning activities and even union membership. By all of these measures, today‟s youth is the least engaged, most apathetic generation in over a hundred years, if not longer. Between the lack of social capital (Putnam, 2000) and politicians apparent disregard for „youth issues‟, young people have little direct incentive to become engaged. In discussing British electoral politics, Fahmy also explains that; “[t]he perception that electoral politics do not address the needs or interests of many young people has undoubtedly been exacerbated by [an] atmosphere of „sleaze‟” – a claim which could likely be equally applied to American politics (2007 p.44). A further factor significant in understanding the decline of engagement levels amongst young people is the notion of „social capital‟. 9

Building Social Capital The idea behind social capital, as expounded by Robert Putnam; ... is that social networks have value. Just as a screwdriver (physical capital) or a college education (human capital) can increase productivity (both individual and collective), so too social contacts affect the productivity of individuals and groups (2000 p.19). Specifically, Putnam‟s theory of social capital comments on the interconnectedness of Western society and how the social contacts and networks formed in our communities, clubs, teams and associations are essential to the long term health of American democracy. However, while Putnam quotes Alexis de Tocqueville commenting on how “Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations.” (2000 p.48) he argues that since the beginning of the 20th Century, Americans‟ social capital has steadily declined. As proof, Putnam points to the sharp drop off in the number of Americans who are members of community organizations as well as clear declines in traditional measures of political engagement – from voting to attending a rally. In short, Americans are spending more time on their own and as a result are less engaged in their community and civil society.

Putnam is ambiguous as to what effect the internet will have on social capital. According to his arguments, it is too early to tell (or at least, it was in 2000) whether the internet is a “niftier telephone or a niftier television” (2000 p.178) – whether it will become a tool for communication and community or entertainment and apathy. Anabel Quan-Haase and Barry Wellman (2002), building on Putnam‟s research, propose three conceptual frameworks through which the Internet‟s effect on social capital could be understood. First, the internet could transform social capital. It‟s low cost, easily accessible and widely dispersed nature could allow for the formation of brand new, previously inconceivable social networks. Second, the internet could diminish social capital. As a “niftier television”, the internet and its entertainment capabilities could increase the amount of time individuals spend on their own or alternatively, online networks could begin to replace in-person networks – equally detrimental to social capital. Finally, the internet could supplement

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social capital; adding value to existing networks by allowing for both deeper and broader connections between people who already connected. Not surprisingly, this last option is the framework most accepted by sociologists and media theorists. By pointing to the internet as a supplementary tool in the promotion of democracy and engagement, more recent analysts avoid the downfalls made by earlier Internet theorists, such as Manuel Castells (2001), who declared that the rise of the internet would bring with it a new age of logical, network politics.

A significant amount of research has looked at how young people use the internet (Xenos and Bennett 2007, Dahlgren and Olsson 2007, Vromen 2007, Dahlgren 2007, Montgomery et al. 2004), whether for celebrity news or coordinating the activities of a nongovernmental organizations they are involved in, youth are undoubtedly forming networks online. One important question however is who these young people are.

Labelling the Internet It should be no surprise that in an academic field developing and changing as quickly as the study of the Internet and its related technologies, there is no consensus term to describe the kind of technologies being discussed here. Some refer to ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) (Loader 2007) while others call them IDS (Internet, interactive, instant and digital and satellite) (Perlmutter 2008). In the traditional news media, they‟re often referred to as Web 2.0 and to many they‟re known collectively as simply „New Media‟ (as in the journal New Media & Society). While “new media” is likely the most popular term, it is also the most easily misused.

It is instructive to ask whether blogs, online social networks, video sharing sites like YouTube and digital music sharing (illegally or otherwise) can be considered „new media‟ when the people within the age groups with whom this study is concerned have never lived without these technologies (Perlmutter 2008a p.160). For the groups with which we are concerned, this „new media‟ is more accurately the popular media, as the television was to

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their parents and the radio to their grandparents. Yet a distinction certainly must be made between „old media‟ such as newspapers and television and, for example, communication technologies developed for the internet such as blogs and online social networks. While “digital communication technologies” is perhaps not as catchy as „new media‟ or „ICT‟, it is arguably a more informative description. All of the tools with which this study is concerned are fundamentally communicative technologies, and more specifically multidirectional channels of communication. In addition, they all owe their existence to the digital revolution of the late 1990s and the first decade of the 21st Century.

The American Digital Divide Any analysis of internet usage must take into account what is commonly called the „digital divide‟ (Putnam 2000, Calenda and Mosca 2007, Vromen 2007). In general, internet users are educated, young, middle class or better, white and male. Indeed, while most academics condemn the digital divide, Putnam goes so far as to call it “cyberapartheid” (Pg. 175). This phenomenon is even more concerning after one takes into account the data collected by CIRCLE on the portrait of an average voter in American presidential elections. CIRCLE (2008) points out that; “Although [only] 57% of U.S. citizens between ages of 18 and 29 have… attended college, 70% of the young voters had gone to college”. These discrepancies only increased as education decreased. While Americans without a high school diploma make up 14% of the population, only 6% of voters do not have a high school diploma. Given the extensive support President Obama received from all sections of American youth, it is important to examine the internet as a tool of citizenship for young people.

Gustavo S. Mesch and Stephen Coleman (2007) identify two theses concerning the effects that the internet has on political participation. The first, what they term „mobilization thesis‟ argues that the internet will transform the way we interact with each other and how politics is practiced. It emphasizes the many different outlets for engagement online as well as the new tools and

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features that the Internet brings to the table. Through all of these services, which are generally more egalitarian than traditional tools of political activism, mobilization thesis argues that the Internet facilitates new forms of political activism and will engage people (especially youth) who did not previously participate in political and activist activities. On the other hand, „reinforcement thesis‟, supported by research by Livingstone et al. (2007) argues that the internet “is strengthening rather than radically transforming existing patterns of political participation” (2007 p.38). In addition, because internet users are “self-selecting”, the internet does not broaden the field of activists, simply encourages and strengthens existing ones. This debate is especially important in the context of the 2008 Presidential election, when 64% of 18-24 year olds were first time voters and even more strikingly, in the 18-29 age group, 45% of Black voters and 61% of Latino voters voted for the first time, compared to only 37% of white voters in the same age group (CIRCLE 2008). Given the earlier figure that young voters supported Barack Obama by a factor of 2:1, these statistics are of significant importance for the present inquiry.

When Politics Go Online Despite the growing importance of the internet as a mode of communication, political parties have been slow to adopt web strategies reflective of the true capabilities of the internet. Instead, most often they have used websites as an online filing cabinet for campaign documents and endorsements (Xenos and Bennett 2007 p.63). Despite the fact that some estimates put regular web usage among 18-29 year olds at more than 80%, until the 2008 Presidential election, the only major candidate for high-level elected office in America to make more than cursory use of the internet was Howard Dean in the 2004 Presidential primaries (Xenos and Bennett 2007 p.50). Indeed, when Xenos and Bennett (2007 p.63) performed a detailed content analysis of House, Senate and Gubernatorial candidate websites in the 2002 and 2004 American elections, they found that candidates‟ websites were far less likely than youthoriented websites to be interactive, have material geared specifically towards young people and have any multimedia content whatsoever.

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Dean however, relied heavily on blogs and other forms of digital communication for many of the same reasons Obama would four years later. With less name recognition and little money, Dean seized upon the blogosphere (Gensemer 2009; Perlmutter 2008a; Chadwick 2006) to create excitement about his candidacy. In what was then heralded as a first, Dean also encouraged supporters to use Meetup.com, a website designed to bring together supporters first online and then in person – in some ways a much simpler version of MyBO. Despite this early version (perhaps in software terms, a „Beta version‟) of Web 3.0, as Andrew Chadwick points out; “It seems that a lot of talking and storytelling was going on at the Meetups but not all of it was focused on getting out the vote” (2006 p.165). No doubt Dean‟s digital campaign team learned from their mistakes, however, when they went on to form Blue State Digital, the firm that would a few years later create Obama‟s web presence (Gensemer 2009).

In an email sent out to young supporters on 2 November 2008, just three days before the election, the Obama campaign wrote; “For too long, the power of the young people in politics has been dismissed. But this is your election. Students have been the number one donors to this campaign, and young people are the driving force behind field and get out the vote operations” (Portnoy, 2008). Unlike what Xenos and Bennett (2007 p.62-63) found in 2002 when there was a negligible number of appeals to young people in online campaign material, the Obama campaign spent significant resources online capturing the youth vote; from announcing their Vice President nomination via „Twitter‟ and mobile phone text message to having dedicated micro-sites for both students and “Kids” under 12.

Finally, studies by David D. Perlmutter (2008a; 2008b) must be taken into account as some of the most recent accounts of the intersection between the internet and politics. Blogwars (2008a) examines the importance of the blogosphere – both blogs by politicians and news blogs. The second is a short article based on a roundtable moderated by Perlmutter in which prominent American bloggers discuss the Presidential primaries as of early 2008 (2008b). The roundtable will be discussed in Chapter 6. In Blogwars, 14

Perlmutter makes a number of interesting observations about how politicians use the blog medium. Interestingly, he identifies then-Senator Barack Obama‟s blog as being the most effective of national politicians in its balancing of the professional tone people expect from politicians and the personal nature of blogs as a form of communication (p. 152). One of the most important factors Perlmutter identifies for successful communication between politician and constituent, especially through blogs, is an ancient Roman concept known as “commilito” or “fellow soldiership” (2008a p.154). Commilito refers to the feeling of camaraderie that develops between a General and his soldiers on the battlefield, the sense that one‟s leaders care about each individual and speak directly to each individual. Similarly, the idea that “...successful mass political communication is that which best approximates successful personal communication” (2008a p. 153) emphasizes the importance of blogs and other forms of digital communication in connecting with a population normally accustomed to only seeing politicians on the news.

Web 3.0: The Next Generation of Online Politics In the context of this dissertation, Web 3.0 refers to the convergence of the internet with the offline world. Much of Obama‟s web presence is made up of what is commonly referred to as Web 2.0, what Darcy DiNucci, who coined the phrase, explains by arguing that; “The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens (1999 p.53). More simply, Web 2.0 is the interactive Web. It is hyperlinking and commenting, collaborative blogs and viral videos. Its name is derived from the software naming convention of giving the second version of a program (for example, following a major content upgrade) the designation “2.0” in contrast to the original release, which would normally be referred to as “1.0”. Similarly, I argue that Web 3.0 is the third major iteration of the Web. Where for much of the first decade of the 21st Century, the Web seemed to many to be, as Robert Putnam would call it, a “niftier television”, doing little more than entertaining and informing, recent

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events, especially the 2008 Presidential election, have demonstrated a new course being charted for the Web.

It was during the early years of Web 2.0, when the notion of interactivity was taking hold, that many argued that the internet is detrimental to the establishment of social capital by, like television, taking citizens away from their neighbours and spending more time on their own, forming loose and unreliable „virtual networks‟ (Davis and Owen 1998; Axford 2001; Moog and Sluyter-Beltrao 2001; Scheufele and Nisbet 2002). While this period may have seen the birth of interactivity, Steve Davis (2005) notes, in reference to the use of the Web by politicians, that “The recipients [of online communication from candidates] were not asked to do much in the offline world” (p.241). Davis thus observed that during this period, to borrow a phrase, „what happened on the web, stayed on the web‟ ensuring that digital campaigning techniques would remain for the time being little more than a sideshow. As Axford rightly points out, this use of the internet, Web 2.0; “privilege[s] instant gratification above reflection” (2001 p.20). Putnam, in discussing the impact that the proliferation of the television had on political engagement, similarly pointed out that; TV-based politics is to political action as watching ER is to saving someone in distress. Just as one cannot restart a heart with one‟s remote control, one cannot jump-start republican citizenship without direct, face-to-face participation. Citizenship is not a spectator sport” (2000 p.341). This argument can equally be applied to Web 2.0 and the political content of the Internet in the early years of the first decade of the 21st Century. In contrast to the „bystander politics‟ of Web 2.0, the core principle of Web 3.0 (and not coincidentally, the Obama campaign‟s web activities) is the importance of translating online interest and engagement into in-person participation and action. While small-scale experiments with this strategy were employed by the Dean and Bush campaigns in 2004, the 2008 Obama campaign saw this convergence put into practice for the first time on such a large scale. The significance of this notion cannot be understated. First, the 16

transferring of online networks to the „real world‟ ostensibly answers Putnam‟s question about the role of the internet. It points to the internet, using Putnam‟s analogy, as a „niftier telephone‟ – a two-way (in fact, multi-directional) communication tool able to bring people together to take direct action on the societal level – not just among a small core of radical activists. By enabling such collective action, Web 3.0 would seem to not only supplement social capital, but create it by facilitating the creation of new networks. Second, the advent of Web 3.0 resolves the conflict between the internet as a tool of engagement and Jurgen Habermas‟s conception of the public sphere (Sassi 2001). Some theorists have argued that the internet fragments the public sphere into digital „sphericules‟ (Gitlin 1998; Sassi 2001 p.90). Dahlgren argued in 2001 (p.75) that; “Cyberspace is… becoming a vital link and meeting ground for a civicly [sic] engaged and politically mobilized stratum of the polity. In this regard, it fosters the emergence of multiple mini-public spheres.” While neither Dahlgren nor Sassi (2001) speak to whether they believed the fracturing of the global public sphere into “mini-public spheres” was a positive or negative development, the creation of those „sub-networks‟ likely contributed to the theoretical framework of Web 3.0. Indeed, the philosophy of Web 3.0 as implemented and pioneered by the Obama campaign demonstrates that the internet can in fact develop the public sphere as a whole – bringing those who otherwise may remain on the outside into the community.

The inability of politicians, prior to the 2008 Presidential election, to make effective use of the internet to engage in a multidirectional dialogue as argued by Perlmutter (2008a), Xenos and Bennett (2007) and Livingstone (2007) may be an indication that what Loader (2007 p.2) refers to as the “cultural displacement perspective” is the more accurate understanding of why youth have generally resisted participating in traditional political activities. This claim that the lifeworld of young citizens does not generally conform to the traditional political structures of western democracy supports the idea that the use of Web 3.0, the convergence of the online and offline worlds may lead to “an emerging techno-social and political culture” (Loader 2007 p.2).

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This new perspective for the digital generation also has implications for their social capital. As youth, previously unengaged with traditional forms of political action, find politicians directing more resources to communicating directly with them in ways that their generation is familiar with, they may be mobilized to interact on an ongoing basis with civic society. The “mobilization thesis” identified by Mesch and Coleman (2007 p. 38) supports the idea, integral to Web 3.0 and the perceived success of the Obama campaign that by providing young people with a space to engage in a conversation with both their peers and elites in a manner with which they are accustomed and comfortable, they will in turn, translate their new engagement to the offline, „traditional‟ political arena.

The literature discussed in this chapter provides a context within which we can better understand more recent developments in the use of the Internet for political campaigns. By taking into account concepts such as the digital divide and social capital as well as past campaigns‟ successes and failures, this dissertation will seek to determine if and how the Obama campaign succeeded in using digital communication technologies to drive the youth vote within a rapidly changing and developing digital world.

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Chapter 3

Methodology Just as the literature concerning the use of the internet in political campaigns is constantly changing as practices evolve, the rapidly developing technologies being used to facilitate online communication between candidates and voters requires methods of analysis to develop at a similar pace. Through a variety of methods, some tested and with a long history of academic use – such as qualitative interviews, and others which are fairly raw and based on the developing technologies with which we are concerned, this dissertation will attempt to present an overview of what the Obama campaign did differently. This research will seek to explore why the campaign chose to use the resources they did and how the digital focus contributed to the campaign at the grassroots level, eventually directly leading to the unprecedented support Obama enjoyed from young voters at the ballot box.

As with any student-led research and indeed, any research at all, the scope of this study is limited primarily by two resources, time and money. An exhaustive study of the topic at hand, Obama‟s use of digital information and communication technologies in the 2008 Presidential campaign, would require the use of extensive surveys of young voters, focus groups, interviews and other research methods – both qualitative and quantitative, in order to determine the full effect of these new campaign tactics (Gerodimos and Ward 2007). Nevertheless, the groundwork laid by this study may lead to more in depth research of what effects the Obama campaign‟s digital tools had on the electorate and what that means for the future.

For the purposes of this study, I have used two qualitative research methods. The first method is “semi-structured élite interviews” (Gillham 2005). Interviews in this context will allow the research to, as Gillham (2005 p.3) points out; “achieve a depth of understanding...” While initially, the use of questionnaires as a primary research method was considered, it was determined that the data which could be garnered from a survey set would be

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useful in the context of this study only if the sample size was large enough to be representative of the entire „young voter‟ demographic. In addition, while supplementary data from organizations such as CIRCLE could have been used, the resources available for this study would have been insufficient to conduct a satisfactory analysis. Thus, by conducting interviews first, future research will be able to make use of the data gathered to better inform the creation of a large-scale questionnaire and other more extensive techniques. As well as interviews, this study makes use of an extensive website analysis – examining both aesthetic and technical elements of the MyBO campaign website and Barack Obama‟s Facebook „fan page‟. These two aspects of the Obama internet campaign can serve as exemplars of the networking aspect of the digital campaign as a whole (Reich personal interview). The analysis uses a synthesis of two web site research methods; the first suggested by Nina Wakeford (2004) is based on traditional techniques for visual analysis and relies heavily on production inquiry while also bringing semiotic analyses to play. The second aspect of the analysis places a stronger emphasis on the technical aspects of the websites. This aspect, proposed by Quentin Langley (2008) focuses on the more technological aspects of a website, such as interactivity and searchability.

Interviews Three distinct categories of people, all with a stake in the Obama campaign‟s use of digital technologies, have been identified and were to be interviewed individually, with questions that are equivalent for interviewees in the same category, a derivative of the interview process identified by Bill Gillham (2005, p.76). Significantly, the questions will not be derived from a questionnaire style interview, as suggested by Byrne (2004 p.181), but will be tailored to the individuals and the categories into which they fall to ensure that the greatest value is taken from the interviews. The three categories are „Decision Maker‟, „Implementer‟ and „External Expert‟. Subjects in the „Decision Maker‟ category all occupy (or occupied) positions of

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authority in the Obama Campaign or in similar organizations. The subjects in this category were to be Thomas Gensemer (the managing partner of Blue State Digital, the company behind the Obama web presence), Joe Rospars (the New Media Director of the Obama campaign), Chris Hughes (a cofounder of the Facebook website and in charge of Obama‟s online social networking) and Todd Herman (the current New Media Director for the Republican National Committee). The second category, „Implementers‟ was made up of subjects who used the digital media and new technologies on a day to day basis at the grassroots level, „implementing‟ the vision of the decision makers. Some of the subjects in the implementer category were known to the researcher beforehand while some were referred independently. The subjects in this category all occupied mid to high level positions within the Obama campaign in states such as California and Florida. All of the subjects in the „implementer‟ category who participated in the interviews requested that their participation remain anonymous and thus their names and job titles will not be referred to in this dissertation.2 Interview subjects in the second category were asked questions which dealt specifically with their experiences working for the campaign. Subjects were asked what use they made of MyBO, Facebook or YouTube in recruiting volunteers or planning campaign events. As well, they were asked to describe how their use of these technologies differed in their personal capacity as an Obama supporter and professional capacity as a campaign employee. Questions for this group of subjects focused on these issues and how the digital elements of the campaign made a difference. The final category, external experts, was included to allow for 3rd party „discussion‟ of the issues at hand. Experts on blogging and online campaigning were interviewed to discuss current academic thought on these issues as well as to make use of more objective viewpoints. The subjects in this third category are David Perlmutter (a Journalism and Communications Professor at the University of Iowa and author of the book „Blog Wars‟) and 2

When referenced in the body of this dissertation, these anonymous interview subjects will be referred to either as a “senior campaign official” or in an embedded citation as “(implementer personal interview).

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Brian Reich (a former aide to Vice President Al Gore and new media consultant working with a variety of American politicians). The inclusion of the third category could certainly be considered unorthodox for a primary research study of this nature. However, it is an inescapable reality of the digital age that no technological truth stays true for very long. What one day is the latest groundbreaking technology can a month later be considered antiquated and a waste of bandwidth. By consulting with third party experts, this study was better able to consolidate the latest research and thinking in this rapidly changing and as a result, under studied field. Subjects in this third category were asked different questions based on their different specific areas of expertise. Both subjects were asked to describe what demographic groups would have benefited most from these campaign strategies and more specifically, how significant of an impact they believed Obama‟s social networking presence will have had. These participants were then asked what role Obama‟s background as a „community organizer‟ may have played in his digital campaign and what direction they saw online politics going in the future. There were two major „stumbling blocks‟ in the conduct of the interviews. The first is that most of the interview subjects fall into categories such as “the specialist academic” and “the advanced practitioner” identified by Gillham (2005 p. 55-56) and as such require a specially formulated type of interview. As he points out; “Careers have been ruined by something as apparently simple as the construction of a sentence or an unfortunate choice of words” (2005 p.55). Further complicating matters was the likelihood that the subjects, especially those in the first (Decision Maker) category, are restricted both in what they can say by confidentiality agreements and in who they would be willing to speak to, given the intensely competitive nature of their industry. While these restrictions may have lead to the opportunity loss of significant data, Gillham does provide solutions for the other issues associated with elite interviews. These include the offer of anonymity in the final report, a chance for the subject to review both the interview transcript and the final report for accuracy and an agreement to destroy the original interview recording (2005 p.55). Along with the possibility of confidentiality agreements, the high profile of the subjects in the first category carried with it the possibility that they 22

would simply be unwilling to participate for corporate reasons or due to time constraints.

Unfortunately, none of the potential subjects in the first category were willing to participate in this research. While their unwillingness to take part in the interviews certainly made gathering data more difficult, substantial information was nonetheless collected from subjects in the other categories. It will be crucial for future studies to make note of the corporate reticence of the „decision makers‟ and plan accordingly.

The second major obstacle for the interviews was geographic distance. Given the subject matter of this study, it is not surprising that all of the subjects are based in the United States. Given both the researcher‟s location in the United Kingdom and the high profile (and by extension busy schedules) of the subjects, it was extremely unlikely that an opportunity would arise for the interviews to be conducted „in person‟. While effort was made to arrange faceto-face interviews, time constraints of the interview subjects led to the use of telephone interviews. There are certainly downsides to this method, chief among them the loss of non-verbal communication data such as facial expressions and body language. In addition, the impersonal and „distant‟ nature of telephonic communication as opposed to face-to-face communication is not insignificant, especially when trying to establish a rapport with the subject (Gillham 2005 p.103). However, despite the disadvantages which may accompany telephone interviews, the data gained will still be significantly more insightful and in-depth than any which could be garnered through surveys.

Web Analysis The second method which will be used in this study is „web analysis‟. While this is not a research method which has been put to use on a regular basis, it is invaluable to a study such as this which asks how digital (and primarily online) technologies impacted a group of people. The ever changing nature of digital media however has meant that no single method for studying the Web

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has developed from a technological standpoint (Wakeford 2004). In addition, the 2001 book „Handbook of Visual Analysis‟ (vanLeeuwen and Jewitt) makes no mention of the internet and only mentions digital technologies in the context of digital cameras. In her 2004 chapter „Developing Methodological Frameworks for Studying the World Wide Web‟, Nina Wakeford draws on some traditional visual analysis tools that allow the Web to be analysed both within visual culture and as a unique feature of the digital age (p 42). More directly, Quentin Langley, a public relations and new media expert, has produced what he calls a “Website Critique Toolkit” (2008). This toolkit identifies six important areas of analysis for critiquing websites; searchability, target audiences, substantive content, navigation/functionality, aesthetic design and interactivity. This study will synthesize Wakeford‟s checklist, which focuses on questions of production, aesthetics, audience and to a lesser extent, technology, with Langley‟s toolkit, while incorporating some traditional aspects of visual analysis theorized by Roland Barthes (1973) and expanded on by David Machin (2007). The analysis will focus on two web sites – first and most importantly, Barack Obama‟s campaign networking sub-site, referred to by campaign insiders as „MyBO‟ and secondly, the campaign‟s presence on the popular social networking site Facebook. By combining semiotic analysis with modern digital analysis techniques and complemented with the data collected from interviews, this study will seek to explain how the Obama campaign made use of digital communication technologies to attract young voters.

The primary risk inherent in this method is that it is relatively untested. The ever-changing world of technology means that any comprehensive technological analysis will be necessarily constantly adapting and evolving. The specific method being used here, for lack of any previously published method which meets the requirements of this study, exemplifies the problem of the digital age for researchers.

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Despite its potential pitfalls, this method has contributed significantly to the conclusions of this research. Simple semiotic analysis would be grossly insufficient to properly understand the impact of Obama‟s digital presence on the campaign, as it would omit entirely from its analysis uniquely digital qualities such as „searchability‟, hyperlinking, interactivity and indeed, the Web 3.0 characteristics which, I will argue, defined Obama‟s digital campaign. The internet is unlike any other form of media – it cannot be defined in terms of its text as newspapers are, its voice as radio is, nor its images as television is. Without the combination of the three (in addition to other important features, such as interactivity) the internet simply cannot be properly understood.

Going forward Future studies of this topic should seek to expand on the methods used here to develop a broader picture of the issues at hand. While this study focuses on depth of knowledge, a full understanding of the impact Obama‟s web campaign had both on his own electoral fortunes and future political campaigning must also explore the breadth of knowledge which can best be gained through focus group interviews and large-scale questionnaires. By establishing what „young voters‟ in America took away from Obama‟s digital campaign and how it affected them as a group, this and subsequent research will have important practical effects for practitioners of politics and for voters. Once this paper establishes causes, future research must examine the effects.

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Chapter 4

Bringing the Digital World Offline: An Analysis of My.BarackObama.com My.BarackObama.Com (MyBO), the brainchild of Chris Hughes, Facebook co-founder and one of the leading figures on the Obama Campaign‟s Internet team, (McGirt 2009 p.1) is, to this point in history according to many observers, the most elaborate and successful use of the Internet and digital communication technologies for a political campaign (Reich personal interview; implementer personal interview). By giving rise to Web 3.0 and making politics relevant to the everyday lives of today‟s youth, MyBO played an important role in the success of Barack Obama‟s presidential campaign and has left an indelible mark on the history of online political campaigning (Reich personal interview).

What follows is a visual and technical analysis of MyBO and some of its associated tools. Data for this analysis has been gathered from two places. The first is my.barackobama.com as it currently exists. Since it is by its nature a campaign microsite, it has been left mostly intact following the end of the campaign. Due to the highly interactive and personalized nature of the MyBO network, it is imperative for the analysis that it remains fully functional. The Internet Archive, an online library which regularly creates archived copies of much of the content on the World Wide Web, due to space and technological constraints, is not able to preserve the interactivity of MyBO3. It thus must be an acceptable compromise to use the site as it currently exists.

The second source of data for this analysis is archived versions of www.barackobama.com, the campaign‟s primary home on the web and gateway to the campaign‟s presence across the Internet. Two archives have been used for the purpose of comparison. The first, from February 16 th 2007, is the first archive made of the Obama campaign site following the 3

The full technical explanation for why the Internet Archive is unable to access MyBO can be found http://web.archive.org/collections/web/faqs.html#exclusions

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announcement of his candidacy on the 10th of February 2007. The second reference used is the archive from just over one year later, February 22 nd 2008, the final archived version of the site available as of this writing in July 2009.

Searchability The first measure of a website‟s potential success and the first area of analysis is how easily it can be found. Especially in a political campaign, if a resource cannot be easily found by its intended users it is not much use to the owner. Unlike most campaign tools however, (such as the main campaign website), MyBO is not meant to be „Googled‟. Where the main campaign site is targeted to „influencers‟ (such as journalists and party leaders) and ordinary, undecided voters and thus easily searchable on Google, Yahoo! or any other search engine, MyBO is designed specifically and exclusively for activists (implementer personal interview).

Figure 1 – The home page of the Obama campaign on 16 February 2007. Notice the “My.BarackObama.com” portal‟s prominent position and highlighted key words.

From the first week of the campaign, the main campaign site and primary portal to Obama on the Web featured a prominent „doorway‟ to MyBO (see Figure 1). Situated „above the fold‟, as it would be described in the terminology of print media, visitors are immediately drawn to the link by virtue 27

of its location, size and contrast with the rest of the site. The designers laid the „internal advertisement‟ on a differently coloured background from the rest of the site and very clearly told visitors why they should sign up for the service. Key words such as “supporters”, “network” and “fundraiser” are all highlighted and the language of the advertisement uses an active voice urging visitors to „do their part‟ for the campaign. In other words, visitors are told clearly what positive impact their participation would have.

Searchability in this context then does not refer to what one would normally expect – what could also be referred to as “googleability” – the ability to find the site using traditional Web search and index techniques. Rather, it refers to the ability of the target audiences to reach the site. The target audiences, as described below, would have reason to already be on the main campaign site and thus searchability could be described as being very high.

As the campaign progressed, the entry portal for MyBO became smaller and less prominent, with text replacing images. The site likely reached a point where it was no longer necessary to use valuable real estate on the site‟s main page to advertise for new sign ups, but rather word of mouth and other online social networks drove publicity. Indeed, as the activist base grew and MyBO became an everyday tool for supporters, it is not surprising that the campaign devoted more „real estate‟ on the home page to content geared towards non-activist visitors such as journalists or independent voters.

Also interesting to note is the change in tone of the home page portal to MyBO. Where at the beginning of the campaign the portal took on the form of an advertisement, explaining why visitors should sign up and presenting a broad picture of the site‟s benefits,

Figure 2 – Likely intended to engage with first-time visitors to the site, this portal is one of two objects „above the fold‟ on 22 February 2008.

later incarnations of the site were more specific in their requests to visitors and used space more economically. The later example (see Figure 2) offers visitors direct links to “Make Calls” or “Register 28

to Vote” among other activities, but notably, the section blends in with surrounding objects on the site in contrast to earlier iterations where the advertisement was clearly set apart. This specialization can also be attributed to the campaign‟s developing understanding of the value MyBO stood to bring, as the campaign progressed (McGirt p.3-4). By this point in the campaign, the new portal with links to specific activities would have been intended to serve as an entry point for first-time visitors to the site and new supporters – again by telling them how their help would support the campaign – while the general login link found at the bottom of the page (see Figure 3) would have been intended for those who had visited before and knew what they were looking for.

Target Audiences In a significant departure from how political campaigns used the internet in the past, the MyBO network is clearly intended for activists and Obama supporters rather than for the general public. Undecided voters would find little of interest, and journalists would similarly find little to report besides process stories. Unlike traditional campaign websites, MyBO is an

Figure 3 – This advertisement is found near the bottom of the Obama Campaign‟s home page on 22 February 2008.

intricate system designed to encourage and facilitate interaction and campaigning (Reich personal interview). The other groups which would normally be considered potential target audiences for politicians‟ websites; journalists and undecided voters, would have little to gain from this site.

The MyBO designers likely went even deeper than simply an activist orientation in designing the site however. While it could certainly be used by any activist, it is more likely to be used and appreciated by those who in other circumstances would better be classified as casual supporters than „activists‟ in the traditional „door-knocking‟ sense. Broad groups such as the elderly and young people, who either may not have the physical ability or the time and resources to volunteer at a local campaign office used MyBO to take action on

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their own time and in their own neighbourhoods (Gensemer 2009). Arguably equally importantly as one senior California campaign official has pointed out, MyBO takes a form with which young people are familiar and can understand (personal interview). The participants can focus on issues which concern them, make calls to people similar to them and interact with people who share their interests. Most importantly, these young users can do all of this in a way which would already be familiar to them thanks to popular social networks like Facebook and MySpace.

Brian Reich, in talking about the demographic groups which benefit from services such as MyBO points out that; ...open source, collaborative and more substantive [campaign] policies... particularly benefit those people who feel disillusioned by politics, people who don‟t agree with all the extremes on one side or the other, people who don‟t feel like politicians represent them, who don‟t feel like the issues that they have... are being addressed (personal interview). Given that, as explained in Chapter 2, it is young citizens who best fit this description outlined by Reich (Fahmy 2006; Livingstone et al 2007; Dahlgren and Olsson 2007; Mesch and Coleman 2007) it is clear that it is youth who, by extension, stand to gain the most from these types of campaign strategies.

Nina Wakeford, in her proposed methodological framework for web studies (2004), asks “What technologies does [the subject‟s] production depend on?” Likely purposefully, MyBO is a very simple website in terms of its technological requirements. It makes little use of technologies which require a high-bandwidth connection such as Flash and videos. This is especially important in a country like the United States where the „digital divide‟ is still a very prominent factor when discussing civic engagement. The simplicity of the site means that far more people would be able to access and make use of its features than on technology-heavy sites such as MySpace and YouTube. This is especially important given that much of Obama‟s support came from ethnic and inner city communities as well as from voters with relatively low levels of education (CIRCLE 2008). Indeed, besides the relatively graphics-heavy

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background of the site which is simply the standard branding of all of the Obama campaign‟s portals on the web, there is nothing that requires even a broadband connection, let alone special browsing capabilities.

Substantive content The „home page‟ (referred to internally as the „dashboard‟) of MyBO is unique for each person (see Figure 4). It includes direct links to the user‟s personal profile and blog, areas which borrow heavily from Facebook, as well as a

Figure 4 – The home page or „dashboard‟ of MyBO. Note the “Making a Difference” Activity Index, the “Connect with Facebook” link, the “Neighbor to Neighbor” section and the prominent “Donate Now” button at the top. Also of interest is the prominence of the “Community” section on the right-hand side of the screen which indicates the importance of drawing connections between the user‟s online network and their offline „community‟.

personalized resource titled “Neighbor to Neighbor” which collects information on campaigns in which the user can participate in their own neighbourhood. The „dashboard‟ also allows users to connect their MyBO account with their „Facebook‟ account, provides links to personal fundraising and event planning

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areas, and arguably most importantly, gives the user a „score‟ on an “Activity Index”. The activity index is designed as a personal motivation tool and through a fairly complex system allows users to gain points by performing „traditional‟ campaign tasks – from knocking on doors to raising money and then reporting those activities back to the campaign. Young people are used to being given scores. Whether it is as a member of a recreational sports team, as a student being given their grades at school or as a member of the digital generation getting their score in a video game, young people often expect to be scored and the urge to better one‟s record (or beat a friend) can be a powerful incentive. Simply, in many aspects of everyday life, young people expect to be given a score, a mark or a rating of some kind. How and why this practice exists is inconsequential for this study. What is significant however is that this tendency is motivational and especially as applied by MyBO, it is constructive.

The Activity Index is the most visible object on the MyBO dashboard and displayed under the heading; “Making a Difference”. It encourages users to do more for the campaign and spurs competition between friends and peers using the network in a way which, thanks again to Facebook and MySpace, young people are already familiar. For example, a volunteer may knock on one hundred doors or make two hundred phone calls during a campaign, but under normal circumstances, they are never given any indication what impact, if any, their actions had on the outcome of the election. MyBO and its activity index, however arbitrary, tell users exactly how beneficial their actions have been and how much of a difference they have made by assigning a numerical value to their activities. This fact also strengthens the evidence for the importance of Web 3.0 to the Obama campaign. The activity index, by serving as both a motivational tool and an online link to offline activities, reinforces the centrality to the campaign of bridging the gap between the two „worlds‟ (Moss and Phillips 2009). Rather than in the past, where a similar tool may have simply counted the number of emails sent in support of the candidate or at best, instructed the user to contact the campaign office for further instructions, the MyBO dashboard integrates seamlessly the offline and online worlds, exemplifying Web 3.0. This emergence of Web 3.0 has the additional effect of 32

further weakening the claim that the internet has a negative impact on the public sphere by creating numerous “public sphericules” (Gitlin 1998; Sassi 2001). Rather, MyBO and the philosophy of Web 3.0 demonstrate that the internet can in fact develop the public sphere – bringing those who otherwise may remain on the outside into the community and strengthening existing bonds between communities.

The site also makes use of the theory proposed by David Perlmutter that political blogs work best when they promote a sense of “commilito”. A prominent part of MyBO was the internal network of groups, events and blogs that brought together activists and supporters on a single street, a county, a state and indeed, the entire nation. Blogs written by campaign staff, ordinary supporters and celebrities were available for all members to see and comment on. Indeed, emulating that ideal of „fellow-soldiership‟ Brian Reich points out that “...there was essentially a top down message and the tools in the digital campaign were designed to facilitate as many different ways as possible for people to share that message” (Reich personal interview). This, coupled with blog posts and a Twitter account maintained in the candidate‟s name (though by campaign staff) gave young supporters and activists, the primary users of these services, the sense that they had the ear of the candidate – that Barack Obama was listening to, and cared about what they said. This is especially significant given the work done by Fahmy (2006) and Livingstone et al (2007) which demonstrated that one of the most compelling causes of apathy among youth is the belief that politicians and political elites do not listen to and do not care about the issues of young people. Despite the fact that, as Thomas Gensemer (2009), has pointed out, Obama doesn‟t personally use Twitter, users are still left with the impression that they‟re interacting directly with the „powers that be‟ (Perlmutter personal interview). This sense of camaraderie was amplified by personalized emails and text messages sent to activists‟ cell phones.

It is important to note that while MyBO was designed as a tool to expand on the activities and assist activists of all shapes and sizes that was not necessarily the end result. Indeed, one of the few positive aspects of the 33

digital divide is that the fact that internet users are generally younger means that young people were more likely to make use of this service. This combined with young people‟s familiarity with similar services such as Facebook and MySpace means that there is little doubt that it is young people who benefited the most from this innovative use of technology.

Navigation and Functionality Navigating through MyBO‟s interface is relatively straightforward, especially for people who have some familiarity with similar social networks such as Facebook. Indeed, Chris Hughes‟ involvement with Facebook undoubtedly played a significant role in the development of MyBO. It is important to note that MyBO is more than just a database of potential campaign calls and blogs. It is a social network in the vein of Web 2.0 which connects people through online friendships and common interest groups such as “Students for Barack Obama”, “Environmentalists for Obama”, “People of Faith for Obama” and over 28,000 others. This aspect of the service allowed activists to share best practices and to meet others with similar interests from all across the United States, not just in chat rooms but through phone calls and strategy sessions – certainly an example of Web 3.0 and the expansion of the public sphere.

The functionality of MyBO revolves around the Activity Index discussed above. Users are told how many events they hosted or attended, how many calls they have made, how many blog posts they have written, how much money they have raised for the campaign and other relevant statistics. These ratings direct users to how they can contribute most effectively to the campaign. For example, if a user does not have enough „points‟ in the “Number of blog posts” category, it is a simple matter for them to click on the “Write a Post” button under the “My Blog” heading. The same is true for the other important aspects of the digital campaign – from fundraising to event coordination.

Aesthetic Design In contrast to the main Barack Obama campaign site, MyBO is very simple in terms of aesthetic design. It is interesting, given the iconography that arose

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during the campaign around Obama and his campaign, that MyBO maintained little more (in visual terms) than the background and title banner of the main site. In contrast to the main campaign site, the functional areas of the MyBO dashboard and subsidiary areas of the site clearly put much more emphasis on efficiency and ease of use than on aesthetics. Despite the impressive use of graphics and images in other areas of his campaign, their relative scarcity on MyBO is not surprising given the site‟s purpose. Indeed, as Brian Reich points out, unlike Obama‟s YouTube videos and main campaign site, MyBO is not meant to change anyone‟s mind or convince potential voters, but rather to get a job done (personal interview). Indeed, MyBO could be likened to a corporate intranet in its design and layout. Where the main campaign site is predominantly blue with white and lighter blue typefaces, MyBO makes heavy use of white backgrounds with black and grey typefaces. This is significant as the blue and white motif of the main site is likely designed to evoke feelings of freedom and the notion that „the sky is the limit‟, an idea supported by the image of Obama gazing into the distance which is featured at the top of the site (Machin 2007). In contrast, the MyBO colour scheme is businesslike and professional, intended not to be associated with the inspirational imagery which usually follows Obama, but rather focussed on the seriousness of their endeavour.

The most important visual feature of MyBO however is its emphasis on community and cooperative effort. All of the most important features of MyBO in some way attempt to bridge the gap between the online network and „inperson networks‟ and every page has a link back to the “My Neighborhood” page which connects the user with people, groups and events in their area. Obama‟s campaign director for Maryland, Jeremy Bird, has pointed out that the campaign was surprised to discover that what they had originally thought was simply an online group of Obama supporters on MyBO actually turned out to be a serious campaign organization which, by the time the official campaign arrived, had already set up a fully functional campaign office in the state capital (McGirt p.4).

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Interactivity MyBO has set a new standard for interactivity in the use of the internet for political campaigns. Never before has such an extensive infrastructure been put to work for the sole purpose of engaging activists and directing campaign efforts. Every aspect of the site is interactive. Users can post their own blogs or comment on the blogs posted by campaign staff or other users. Activists are able to see a list of undecided voters who live near them or a list of undecided voters across the country who shared a common trait with them, such as their profession. They could send automated emails to friends and relatives requesting donations and start online groups based on any issue or personal characteristic and then create events to meet with others in their groups. MyBO allowed supporters to do from the comfort of their own homes more than they could have done at a local campaign office.

The establishment of MyBO allowed activists to interact both with each other and with campaign staff in a manner radically different from those tools which came before. Where past digital campaign interactions were usually one way, or involved limited and always moderated two-way communication in settings such as an online „town hall‟ meeting or simply blog posts, MyBO allowed serious conversations to take place between the grassroots and the backrooms. Where previous campaigns waited for supporters to come to them, MyBO brought the campaign to Obama‟s supporters and it did so in a language and method which young people understand and make use of on a daily basis. This appreciation for how modern technology can be put to use as a vehicle for tried and tested organizing techniques will undoubtedly have significant implications for future political campaigns

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Chapter 5

Engaging on Their Terms: An Analysis of Barack Obama’s Facebook Page On a technical level, Obama‟s Facebook page meets all of the criteria laid out by Langley and by Wakeford for a successful website. Indeed, his Facebook page is just as searchable as his primary web page (www.barackobama.com). When searching “Barack Obama” on Google, the Barack Obama Facebook page is the 5th result, with his MySpace profile as the 8th result. While the result does move further down on Yahoo Search, which uses a different method for indexing web pages, Obama‟s Facebook page is still found on the first page of search results. The high placement of these search results helps to indicate the ubiquity of the social networking sites and the importance of the candidate‟s profiles to the overall campaign effort. When young people spend an average of 20-30 minutes on a site like Facebook, it is not surprising that the campaign would place a high value on its importance (alexa.com; Perlmutter personal interview). Finally, using the internal Facebook search engine, “Barack Obama” brings up his main Facebook page as the first result and significantly, “Students for Barack Obama” is the third result, again indicating the importance of young people to the intersection of online social networks and politics.

The target audience of Facebook is best discerned by looking at who makes up its user base. According to data gathered by Alexa, which bills itself as “The Web Information Company,” Facebook users as a segment of the „internet population‟ very closely mirror the „internet population‟ as a segment of the population at large. Facebook users are typically young, male and well educated. This is reflected in the content posted by Obama staff on his page. The page makes heavy use of embedded YouTube videos, and often links to action items which direct activists to their personal MyBO page and which then allows them to make calls or send emails on a given issue. His Facebook page also embraced unofficial campaign resources, such as the well known „Yes We Can‟ video produced by popular musician Will.I.Am

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(Facebook.com/BarackObama). As Lynda Lee Kaid (2009) acknowledges, it was YouTube content such as the „Yes We Can‟ video which; “… honed Obama‟s „rock star‟ image,” another reason why the campaign made such a concerted effort to integrate these different aspects of the social media world into Obama‟s most popular social networking „home‟, Facebook. Brian Reich also emphasizes the importance of social networking sites such as Facebook by pointing out that what made the difference was how Obama had; “… an appreciation for the way that people get and share information and the way they form communities and how he can be a part of different communities… and empower people to carry his message forward…” (personal interview). Finally, Barack Obama‟s Facebook presence incorporates extensive interactive content. Besides being able to read informative blog-style posts on a variety of issues, users can post comments on news items. While this aspect is similar to previous incarnations of the internet campaign and differs little from traditional blogs, that changes rapidly when it becomes clear that users can post their own news and messages on the page almost in the style of a „group blog‟, a medium not normally associated with election campaigns. Further, users can watch videos of Obama or follow links to the interactive MyBO site, creating a campaign network within users‟ existing Facebook networks. Users can also see events that Obama is attending and indicate their own attendance. Finally, the Facebook page gives users a quick method to view and comment on the traditional Barack Obama blog, thus fully integrating the different aspects of the digital campaign. While all of these aspects of Obama‟s digital campaign may seem to be a rather quick shift from previous campaigns, it is far from an accident. Perlmutter points out that from the beginning; “…there was always a sense that the blogging people, the MySpace people, the YouTube people, the texting people and the cellphone people were part of the [organizational] conversation at the upper levels” (personal interview). While Facebook was arguably Obama‟s most significant presence on social media, it was hardly the only one. According to his website, Obama had a presence on; Facebook, MySpace, YouTube (a video sharing site – Alexa 38

rank 3), Flickr (a photo sharing site – Alexa rank 30), Twitter (a relatively new micro-blogging service– Alexa rank 31), LinkedIn (a social network for professionals – Alexa rank 91), Digg (a site which uses user feedback to rank news stories – Alexa rank 156), Eventful (an event tracking site– Alexa rank 4,248) and a number of „niche‟ social networks, including sites aimed at African Americans, Christians, Baby Boomers, Latinos and Asian Americans.. At the simplest level, it seems that the Obama campaign was striving for complete market saturation. Regardless which site was your favourite, which interest group you were part of or what issue you identified most closely with, Obama had at least one, if not two or three networks on the Web from which you could engage with the campaign. By apparently „choosing‟ online social networks over blogs and other static communication, young people have seemingly begun to answer Robert Putnam‟s question about the role of the internet in the creation of social capital. By choosing interactivity and community over pundits and static text (no matter how „hip‟ a blog may be), young people – and young voters in particular, have defined the internet clearly as a „niftier telephone‟ – bringing people together and building social capital, not further dividing them and maintaining existing divisions, as blogs would.

Interaction Scenario The different aspects of Obama‟s digital campaign described in this dissertation do not stand alone. Rather, they are all interlinked and rely on each other as much as they rely on „real world‟ engagement. (Kaid 2009; Moss and Phillips 2009) A hypothetical student‟s first contact with the Obama campaign may have come from seeing (by way of the activity tracker referred to as the “News Feed”) that a „friend‟ on Facebook had posted information or a news story about Barack Obama, established a connection with Barack Obama‟s page or linked to one of his YouTube videos. From there, the student would be directed Obama‟s own page where they might become a “Fan” (as page

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subscriber are referred to) and see on his page a link to the Facebook „group‟ “Students for Barack Obama”. That group may have then directed the student to www.barackobama.com/students (see Figure 5), a site containing resources geared specifically to student activists taking into account campus life and the specific policy concerns of supporters in the relevant age group. The student focussed site, like similar sites for other important religious, social and ethnic groups features a blog by Obama‟s student campaign director, videos by celebrities and links to events which would be of concern to students.

That site would likely have led the student to sign up for a personal MyBO account (if they had not already been led there from Obama‟s main Facebook page). After signing up at MyBO, the campaign would begin sending the student regular personalized email updates based on specific demographic information gathered from their activities on the site (Gensemer 2009). In one (and likely more than one) of those emails, the

Figure 5 – The home page of Students for Barack Obama (www.barackobama.com/students)

student would have been asked to provide their mobile phone number to the campaign – information which the campaign planned to use mainly to get out their vote in November but also, in what some called a stroke of genius, to announce the candidate‟s VicePresidential running mate by text message rather than the traditional press conference (Stelter 2008).

In addition to the obvious value of such an interconnected campaign presence, it is instructive to note the number of aspects of the above „roadmap‟ which to some extent establish or build on the sense of „commilito‟ which the campaign 40

no doubt hoped to develop. Indeed, it is present from first contact. By observing interaction on, for example, one‟s Facebook news feed, the student immediately establishes a personal connection with the candidate‟s imagined presence. This continues right to the student‟s visit to the Barack Obama campaign site and to MyBO, where he would receive messages, watch videos and read blog postings „from‟ Barack Obama. It is significant to note however, that while the page in question purports to be Barack Obama‟s, most people likely understand that the candidate himself does not actively engage with the site. Perlmutter points out that while in 2004, some activists were disappointed in this „3rd party effect‟; “…people… now know that social media and politics means you and I, not you and the candidate. That the candidate can‟t have a social media presence except to empower our social media presence” (personal interview). This again serves as an example of the importance of Web 3.0 both to the Obama campaign and to the future of digital politics. In the above quote, Perlmutter makes clear that the aspect of Obama‟s web presence which should be of note is the connections which Facebook, MyBO and similar tools create between activists and supporters. Connections which, by design, are most useful when transformed from digital to physical (Moss and Phillips 2009).

In his speech at Grant Park in Chicago on election night, Obama reminded listeners of a recurring theme from the campaign, that the Obama campaign had done things differently from the start. “We didn‟t start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington; it began in the backyards of Des

Figure 6 – A sample of Barack Obama‟s Twitter posts.

Moines and the living rooms of Concord... It grew strength from the young 41

people who rejected the myth of their generation‟s apathy...” (Obama 2008). For the first time, a major political campaign embraced the internet on its own terms and for the benefit of its users, not simply as an extension of the traditional campaign. While in other circumstances these words may be taken as little more than populist rhetoric, Perlmutter (personal interview) observes that; …it‟s interesting to me that this Senator from Illinois, only two years into his term, was able to become President of the United States. And I think most people agree that four years earlier it wouldn‟t have happened…. Social media served as a force multiplier that made it possible to break through the wall of money and political connections that Clinton had…. Given the heavy traffic which Facebook and similar social networking sites enjoy, especially among youth (alexa.com), it should not be a surprise that the Obama campaign, which began the election very much the underdog, made extensive use of this essentially free media. As one senior campaign organizer pointed out (personal interview), social media such as Facebook is one of the few constants in an otherwise “transient” lifestyle for the college students who make up a significant percentage of young voters (CIRCLE). This means that by maintaining such an active presence on the site, the campaign could engage with youth on a level and through a medium which they appreciate. By then connecting the campaign‟s social media presence with resources such as MyBO designed to motivate activists, the campaign demonstrated that it is indeed possible to combine traditional and proven campaign tactics with effective and innovative digital participation.

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Chapter 6

The Role of Social Networks: A Discussion While MyBO was a tool for activists and committed supporters, the Obama campaign was well aware that the digital generation, as far as American politics is concerned, is a large, diverse and relatively untapped population (Perlmutter 2008; Mesch and Coleman 2007; Xenos and Bennett 2007). The 2008 Obama campaign took advantage of the explosive growth of social networking and Web 2.0 and oversaw a transition from blog-based politics back to network-based politics – only this time, moving to online networks. This is a transition that has the potential to define online politics for the foreseeable future. This chapter will discuss the results of the website analyses while asking why the Obama campaign succeeded where past campaigns had failed.

Prior to the 2008 Presidential election cycle, blogs were arguably the most prominent example of digital politics. As Perlmutter has pointed out, many politicians have attempted to blog, though only a few managed to do so successfully. Indeed, Perlmutter has explained that; “I don‟t think that blogging by politicians is… a powerful medium of expression within politics at this point” (personal interview). Successful political bloggers, according to Perlmutter (2008a), must relate to their readers and be able to write in a manner which balances the personal nature of blogs with their professional role as a politician – a synthesis which is unfamiliar to most politicians and unique to the blog form. It is thus not surprising that in 2008 the emphasis of the digital campaign shifted to social networks.

In a roundtable moderated by Perlmutter during the 2008 Presidential primary campaign, Joan McCarter of the prominent blog DailyKos argued that Obama was at that point (in January 2008) last among the top three Democratic candidates (Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards) in terms of his use of political blogs. However; “In terms of using social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, Obama has taken the lead” (Perlmutter 2008b

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p.162). This is especially significant considering Obama‟s success with young voters, both in the primaries and general election. In the general election, as mentioned earlier, young voters chose one candidate (Obama) in greater numbers than their adult counterparts for the first time since 1976 (CIRCLE 2008). Perlmutter points to the Iowa caucus as a similar situation. He reports that a record percentage of Democratic voters in Iowa (22 percent) were under thirty years old and that Obama won a startling 57 percent of that youth vote (Perlmutter 2008b p.163). McCarter and others (Kaid 2009, Ord 2008), attribute this unprecedented success to “his MySpace and Facebook outreach efforts.” Perlmutter agrees that; “the social media is where the real action is going on” (personal interview). Just as importantly, Perlmutter explains that the target of Obama‟s outreach efforts to social media such as Facebook and MySpace was what he calls “the social media generation”, “20-somethings and [the] millennial generation” (personal interview). Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta (2008) agree, noting the unprecedented levels of support Obama received from what they refer to as “the Facebook generation” – Americans under 25. In this, Brian Reich also agrees, pointing out that by speaking to young people in a language and in a form which they are familiar with, he integrated politics into their everyday lives, in effect, bringing politics to them rather than asking them to come to the campaign (personal interview).

Perlmutter (2008a p.72; personal interview) and others such as Joan McCarter (Perlmutter 2008b p.163) point to the rapid demise of Howard Dean‟s 2004 primary campaign as an example of the failure of blogs. In the run up to that campaign, much was made in the traditional media of the blog „hype‟ being accorded to Dean. His campaign was seen as being driven by the blogs and indeed that ended up being the campaign‟s downfall. Blogs, like any traditional form of media, can shape opinion and influence others, but on their own, cannot increase participation, win more than a handful of votes or do any meaningful campaigning. Perlmutter explains that; “With Obama there was an integration of the technology and the message which fit very well, it felt authentic” (personal interview). He goes on to compare Obama‟s relationship with digital media to John F. Kennedy‟s relationship to television. Similarly, Brian Reich notes that the difference came from the fact that the 44

Obama campaign used an important aspect of the everyday lives of many young people (Facebook) and; “insert[ed] politics into the information stream of their day” rather than attempting to “get a whole bunch of people to disconnect from whatever patterns they have in their existing lives and tune in to politics” of their own accord (personal interview).

Interestingly, it is exactly this tactic of inserting the desired message into the ordinary routine of a person‟s day that was the hallmark of the „agitation‟-style community organizing in which Obama‟s campaign politics are based (Gensemer 2009; Lizza 2007). Finally, Joan McCarter, pointed out that while; “...bloggers can by very influential in their own circles[,] I think that we‟re not yet at the point where [bloggers] are extensively shaping a larger media narrative” (Perlmutter 2008b p. 168). Rather, it is the combination of the technology and traditional campaign methods, in other words, Web 3.0, which lead to success. It should not be surprising then that Obama‟s success came on the backs not of the blogs but of the social networks and Web 3.0. In many ways, the interactivity of blogs – the exchange of ideas, primarily through the „commenting‟ feature – is an old media kind of interactivity not unlike sending a letter to the editor of a newspaper. The most important example of this is that blogs are often one way forms of communication, where the blogs‟ comments are only read by other commenters rather than the person who initiated the „conversation‟. This is particularly true when the purported author is more prominent (though there are cases when blog authors respond to comments, making the conversation 2-way). In addition, the content itself is generally static (v-logs – video logs, excepted), which, to many young people today, is already outdated in comparison to other Web technologies. Finally, blogs are a closed form of communication. Especially when it is obvious that the purported author of the blog, in this case Barack Obama, is no more writing his own blog posts than he is writing his own speeches, blogs, no matter how familiar a tone they may be written in, may seem to young people to be simple one more way for elites to dictate to them (Xenos and Bennett 2007, Reich personal interview). 45

Social networks on the other hand, such as Facebook and MySpace, offer exactly the opposite to users. Facebook, on which Obama‟s own MyBO is based, allows users the opportunity to build their own social networks by joining shared interest groups, planning common events, comparing cultural interests and a nearly unlimited number of other interactive possibilities. New media consultant Brian Reich takes this even further by arguing that it is up to the politicians to make politics and government accessible to young people in a manner with which they are most comfortable: I think what Obama realized is that people are not that interested in politics. So the likelihood that you‟re going to get a whole bunch of people to disconnect from whatever patterns they have in their existing lives and tune in to politics at the level and depth that political junkies like myself and other people do is unrealistic. So a much better strategy is to take something that relates to their lives and to insert politics into the information stream of their day (personal interview). Thus, Obama, no doubt in large part thanks to his experience with traditional organizing and „agitation‟ techniques, understood that dictating to and patronizing young people – a demographic he would have to carry if he was to win the election, would simply not be enough (Perlmutter personal interview; Reich personal interview; Williams and Gulati 2007). Indeed, according to Thomas Gensemer, from the very beginning of the campaign, it was made clear that; “…the model of politics was going to be based on traditional community organizing. So the challenge was to layer technology on that…” (2009). While according to Perlmutter, the McCain campaign; “decided campaign strategy just like in 1996 and then they realized „Oh ya we better do some blog stuff on this‟” (personal interview), the Obama campaign clearly understood that they needed to „inject‟ the candidate into the everyday lives of young Americans. To Chris Hughes and Obama‟s „new media‟ team, this meant social networking (McGirt 2009).

Why young people have flocked to these sites in such numbers is not the subject of this study, but it is undeniable that they have. According to Alexa (www.alexa.com), one of the most prominent sources of information about Web usage, Facebook is the 4th busiest website on the internet, as calculated by a combination of average daily visitors and monthly page view information. 46

This translates into 20% of all Web users making use of Facebook. Significantly for this study; as a proportion of the “general internet population” users in the 18-24 years old and 25-34 years old age groups are significantly over-represented in visits to Facebook.com. While the average traffic to MySpace is slightly lower than to Facebook, users which this study considers „young voters‟ are again over-represented. These statistics are especially significant given that they take the digital divide into account. In these cases, young people are not over-represented in terms of their place in the overall population, but rather in terms of their numbers compared to the total „connected population‟, what Alexa describes as “the general internet population.” (alexa.com)

The importance of online social networks to the campaign is evidenced by the fact that with more than two million supporters during the election (compared to John McCain‟s 600,000), Obama‟s Facebook page was one of the most popular on the site. Obama‟s numbers on Twitter are no less staggering – with 112,000 „followers‟ to McCain‟s paltry 4,600 (Fraser and Dutta 2008). Indeed, the popular blog “Mashable”, billed as “The Social Media Blog” claims that “Barack Obama made history with his Facebook usage” (Parr 2009). Perhaps most staggering however is the fact that the 1,800 videos added to Obama‟s YouTube „channel‟ were watched 97 Million times during the campaign, beating the McCain campaign by 4 to 1 (Fraser and Dutta 2008). Yet it was not simply the technology that permitted the Obama campaign to make such significant inroads with young voters. Rather, according to Brian Reich, it was; “his appreciation for the way that people get and share information, the way they form communities and how he could... empower people to carry his message forward” (personal interview) that led to his success, a position echoed by Perlmutter (personal interview) and by Thomas Gensemer, managing partner of Blue State Digital, the company tasked with designing Obama‟s online presence (Moss and Phillips 2009).

Indeed, this understanding of how young people today process information in some ways bring Obama‟s career full circle, back to his lessons in „agitation‟ and his experience in traditional community organizing (Gensemer 2009). 47

Perlmutter explains that; “He got a political education in a very traditional way, but he was able to marry all the new stuff to that traditional political education. He wasn‟t a prisoner of his past” (personal interview). Rather than focussing on the mainstream media and polling data as his opponents did, his understanding of, as Brian Reich puts it; “old-school grassroots politics” (personal interview) and his ability to relate to people on their own terms meant that his social networking presence empowered young people to contribute in their own way and on their own terms – a completely new experience for many, if not most of them. As Perlmutter explains it; “You could say that Obama was the iPhone and McCain was the landline” (personal interview).

As a result of that traditional political education, Obama understood, as Thomas Gensemer explained; “that you as my neighbour knocking on my door meant more than a paid organiser or even [Obama] himself knocking on the door” (Moss and Phillips 2009). While many candidates in 2008 at all levels of government have their own Facebook profiles, Williams and Gulati (2007), writing after the 2006 mid-term congressional elections, observed that while Facebook had the potential to “[play] an important role and… [has] the capability of affecting the electoral process” politicians‟ inability to translate online enthusiasm into offline action was the primary stumbling block to that much anticipated success.

It is interesting to note that Williams and Gulati list as the most important reasons for Facebook being held back as a political tool; the relatively low turnout of young voters and candidates inability to use Facebook to “facilitate off-line political activities” (2007 p.18). Yet one election later, Moss and Phillips, in an interview with Thomas Gensemer (2009) point out that; “Rather than merely join this network, passively clicking a button to donate or express an allegiance to Obama, members were encouraged to go out into the real world to knock on doors, hand out leaflets and spread the word.” This, in concert with the marked increase in voter turnout among young people, have in effect proved Williams and Gulati right and in the process, demonstrated the existence and importance of Web 3.0. 48

As testified to by Thomas Gensemer, the candidate understood the need to bring the campaign to young people on their own terms and subsequently bring young people back to the campaign in a more traditional manner. This synthesis led to unprecedented support from young voters and in all likelihood, a new paradigm for online politics (Moss and Phillips 2009). The Obama campaign‟s successful use of online social networks is the result of many different factors coming together to produce a meaningful digital conversation between the campaign and its supporters. Certainly the importance of online social networks to the campaign would have been greatly diminished were they not such a pervasive aspect of young Americans‟ daily routines. Yet even with such high usage rates among young voters, other candidates such as John McCain and Hillary Clinton failed to even come close to the success enjoyed by the Obama campaign. Certainly, the candidate‟s personal charisma and image was not insignificant, but the key factor was Obama‟s synthesis of the new realities of the American network society and the traditional organizing techniques that has elected politicians and brought communities together for decades. Neither aspect could have succeeded without the other. This then is Web 3.0 and it is this „next generation‟ of the internet – an upgrade of methods rather than technology – that made the difference.

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Chapter 7

Conclusion The 2008 American Presidential election was no doubt an election of firsts. The first time a woman and African American competed for a major party nomination and the first time an African American was elected President. Based on the evidence in this dissertation, it is also the first time that the internet played a critical role in the outcome of the election and the first time that young voters, as a group, cast their vote differently than voters over 30 years old (CIRCLE 2008). While concluding definitively how Barack Obama won the election and why youth voted for him in such large numbers would require extensive surveys and ethnography, Perlmutter leaves no room for doubt when he argues that; Barack Obama would not be President of the United States if the internet didn‟t exist. I don‟t think he‟d be President of the United States if he‟d run in 2004, I think this was the time and this was the technology and these were the venues and this was the political and economic situation. The nodes and the stars aligned (personal interview). Through the use of Web 3.0, the synthesis of digital communication technologies with traditional offline political action, Barack Obama mobilized thousands of supporters, many of whom had never voted or been politically active before (Gensemer 2009). This dissertation has discussed the Obama campaign‟s web presence through the lens of two of the most prominent and politically significant aspects of that presence – the activist portal MyBO and Obama‟s page on the social networking site Facebook. While MyBO and Facebook arguably had the most impact, the importance of the other facets of the campaign‟s online presence, especially YouTube, the launching pad of the „viral videos‟ that contributed significantly to knowledge among youth of his campaign, must also be acknowledged. While the question of how young people accessed Obama‟s YouTube videos may be the subject of another study, their regular

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presence embedded on his Facebook page meant that it was more efficient, and indeed a more accurate representation of the interlinked Web for this study to analyze his Facebook presence. That analysis of Barack Obama‟s Facebook page found that it incorporated an appreciation for how young people, in general, operate that had previously been lacking from major political campaigns. By placing the candidate within the normal daily routines and conversations of the millions of youth who use Facebook (and similar sites) on a daily basis, the Obama campaign brought politics to those who many otherwise believe have no interest political participation (Livingstone et al 2007). It is interesting to note Loader‟s (2007 p.2) argument in support of the “cultural displacement perspective” as explained in Chapter 2; Parliamentary and congressional forums, voting booths and the restrictions of social class-based party allegiance contrast strongly with the self-expression induced communication spaces of MySpace, MSN, Flickr4 and mobile texting as a potential means to enable young people‟s political efficacy. Writing in 2007, it apparently seemed to Loader that there was essentially no way to bridge the gap between the multi-directional, “many to many” (Livingstone 2007 p.103) style of communication which the digital generation was used to and the traditional understanding of political engagement. However, by fundamentally changing how a political campaign interacted with youth, by injecting itself into the day-to-day lives of young people and in effect, bringing the campaign to them, the Obama campaign seemingly bridged that gap. Indeed, by coming to them, rather than expecting young people to come to the campaign on their own accord, it is likely that Obama began to dispel the notion common among many young people that their leaders have little interest in their concerns (Dahlgren and Olsson 2007).

Once engaged, the Obama campaign still did not expect supporters and activists to come to the campaign, as had always been the norm. Rather, with the establishment of the MyBO activist network, the campaign harnessed the

4

Italics in original

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idea that, as Perlmutter notes; “the smallest unit of people is a group, not an individual” (personal interview). The Obama campaign took a major step forward, both in politics and in use of the internet, by embracing Web 3.0 and encouraging supporters to build their own social capital. By knocking on their neighbours‟ doors and making calls to people with whom they shared a profession or other trait; by building new offline networks and strengthening existing communities the Obama campaign demonstrated not only that the internet has the potential to play a role in civic life in ways scarcely imagined previously, but also that it was possible, indeed, beneficial to engage even the least interested groups of people in civic life.

Social capital was not the only societal good that the campaign demonstrated the internet could strengthen. While some (Gitlin 1998, Dahlgren 2001; Sassi 2001) have argued that the internet fragments the global public sphere, Web 3.0, as used by the Obama campaign, can in fact strengthen the public sphere by bringing those who otherwise may remain on the outside into the community. The cooperation and shared values discovered by many through tools like MyBO enabled the creation of new public spaces and forums; spaces in which the media, politicians and voters operated side by side.

Unlike the generations of their parents and grandparents, it can be argued that today‟s youth are not interested in “hiring a leader” so that that person can “take care of things for us.” Rather, as Brian Reich points out; …the digital approach and playing into the expectations that [young] people have that they could take ownership over the campaign and that they could take ownership of the problems we have in our society… absolutely contributed to younger people finally being engaged in politics (personal interview). Thus, it would seem that it is no longer sufficient to simply ask people to vote for a certain candidate. Youth today, a far more significant voting bloc than previously thought as a result of years of low voter turnout, will not be content to be spoken at and preached to. Rather, if the Obama campaign is any indication, they will demand to play an active role at all levels and to do so in a

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manner familiar to them. In other words, if politicians want to engage young voters, they must do so on young people‟s terms.

As the Obama campaign found, this notion of engaging with young people on their own terms is not something which should be a struggle for future campaigns. Indeed, by simply providing them with the tools – such as those on MyBO – to engage with the issues and with others in a manner with which they are familiar, young people, in general, will not hesitate to contribute. Through incentives such as the Activity Index, connections to their regular routine such as blogs, YouTube videos and Facebook links and connections with issues that are of concern to them and in their power to affect change, young people will contribute to and indeed, take ownership of the campaign. This dissertation has shown what the Obama campaign‟s use of digital communication technologies could accomplish and has extrapolated what their likely impact was. However, it is important that future research examine the other side of this issue, what young people themselves experienced and appreciated and how their understanding of these new campaign techniques affected their participation in the election. Both questions, the one answered here and that which is still to be answered, are important to appreciating the future role young people will play in politics and civil society more generally. By achieving a greater understanding of these issues, politicians and governments will be better able to engage young citizens in civil society.

Academics, when claiming to forecast the direction the internet will take, have a fairly regular tendency to be wrong. However, one thing that the Obama campaign‟s harnessing of Web 3.0 to engage youth will almost certainly ensure is that politicians can no longer afford to risk taking the youth vote for granted, as has too often happened in the past. Rather, by inserting politics and civic life into the regular day-to-day routines and conversations of young people, politicians and indeed, society in general, stands to gain a great deal.

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