Untitled - socium.ge

The Internet and the political process 377individualized relationship. This mechanism works efficiently as long as theclients/citizens are satisfied. But when public affairs turn sour, there is no feedbacksystem until the next election. Furthermore, come the election, the offeris still articulated through the media, so that the actual ability to control andprocess the information is largely removed from the hands and minds of individualcitizens, with little access to the media on their own. At most, they canreact through opinion polls, if they are lucky enough to be sampled. When, forreasons linked to the process of broader structural transformation (for example,globalization), citizens feel lost and disfranchised, media politics does notoffer the possibility of readjusting the relationship between politicians andcitizens, except in the few instances when journalists place themselves in theposition of defenders of the public interest.The crisis of political legitimacy, associated to some extent with the practiceof media politics, is at the origin of new forms of politicization in our societies.While a substantial proportion of citizens give up hope in the politicalsystem, many others undertake alternative forms of political expression, sometimesin the form of social movements, at other times in the shape of insurgentpolitics within the political system, and often trying to connect civil society tonew leaders in the political process. This is the privileged terrain of theInternet as a political medium. As long as the Internet is used as a reproductionof top-down politics controlled by the political machines in a market-likerelationship to its citizens, its added value is limited and its ability to reach outto public opinion vastly inferior to the mass media. However, when, and if,individual citizens, grassroots organizations, and political entrepreneursengage in an autonomous project to redesign the political process, the Internetbecomes the platform of choice. This is because of its potential to build up,with little cost in resources, very large networks on the basis of individualconnections that are multidirectional. The network can expand endlessly, aslong as it has an open-ended program, which implies the lack of central controland the configuration of the network around some general themes whose specificationresults from the interactive, recurrent process inside the network.Such was the key mechanism, as we have seen, behind the unexpected successof the Dean campaign in 2003.However, these political networks are not chat rooms, they are not justexpressive: they are instrumental. They are geared toward accomplishingpolitical goals. This is why it is so important that their dynamics materializesin the two levers that move the political system: money and activists, whichboth lead to votes. The ability to generate tens of thousands of small, individualdonations was key in the Dean campaign. And Bimber’s (2003) datashowed, as we saw above, that one of the few variables of political behaviorthat was influenced by Internet use was the willingness to donate money to acandidate. Thus, while media politics costs money, networked politics is a