Untitled - socium.ge

The Internet and the political process 375absolute priority to the global war on terror, a conservative specialty.However, since our purpose is analytical, the study of the first phase of theDean campaign, up to December 2003, provides useful lessons to understand,in general terms, the relationship between the political process and thenetworks of interaction constructed around the Internet.Power dynamics tends to limit the democratization of politics. Politiciansexpect uncontrolled citizen participation to lead to problematic campaigns andprocesses. However, the experience of the Dean campaign shows that this isnot necessarily the case. The Internet does not by itself create an effectivepolitical campaign or increase civic-mindedness. Rather than causing radicaltransformation, its impact on politics is incremental, contextual, and amplifying(Agre, 2002; Katz and Rice, 2002), working with factors such as thenature, motivations, and message of candidates and the desires of citizens,with access to the Internet, to produce different outcomes (Anderson, 2003;Johnson, 2003; Levine, 2003). Thus, the key to using the Internet in politics isnot the technology per se, but the use of the technology to promote, as theDean campaign did, a message and a style of political participation thatresonate with the electorate.THE RISE OF NETWORKED POLITICSIn the past decades, the mass media have become the main political space.Citizens receive most of their information from the media, particularly fromtelevision, and they largely form their opinion, and enact their political behavior,with the materials provided by the media (Dahlgren and Sparks, 1997;Davis and Owen, 1998). This is not to say that people follow blindly what themedia say. For one thing, the media are relatively diverse, although currenttrends toward concentration of ownership are restricting their plurality. But,more importantly, communication scholars established long ago that mediaaudiences are not passive recipients of messages. Rather, people react andcounter-react to the images, sounds, and text that they access through themedia. And they do it on the basis of their own perceptions, values, interests,and projects (Neuman, 1991; Norris, 2000). This complex process of communicationis largely undetermined, and any politician or ideologue trying to ridethe tiger of manipulation of public opinion ends up confronting unforeseensurprises. However, the fact that the media frame the political debate hassubstantial consequences on the political process. Messages or faces that arenot present in the mainstream media have little chance of reaching a significantproportion of citizens, so that they become structurally marginalized.Media politics has its own language and rules: simplification of themessage, image-making, the personalization of politics, and story-telling and