Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics

Andrew Chadwick, Philip N. Howard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134087532
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: International Law
• Index: Law

The politics of the internet has entered the social science mainstream. From debates about its impact on parties and election campaigns following momentous presidential contests in the United States, to concerns over international security, privacy and surveillance in the post-9/11, post-7/7 environment; from the rise of blogging as a threat to the traditional model of journalism, to controversies at the international level over how and if the internet should be governed by an entity such as the United Nations; from the new repertoires of collective action open to citizens, to the massive programs of public management reform taking place in the name of e-government, internet politics and policy are continually in the headlines.

The Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics is a collection of over thirty chapters dealing with the most significant scholarly debates in this rapidly growing field of study. Organized in four broad sections: Institutions, Behavior, Identities, and Law and Policy, the Handbook summarizes and criticizes contemporary debates while pointing out new departures. A comprehensive set of resources, it provides linkages to established theories of media and politics, political communication, governance, deliberative democracy and social movements, all within an interdisciplinary context. The contributors form a strong international cast of established and junior scholars.

This is the first publication of its kind in this field; a helpful companion to students and scholars of politics, international relations, communication studies and sociology.

Introduction New directions in internet politics research

Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard

DOI: 10.4324/9780203962541-1

The politics of the internet has entered the social science mainstream. From debates about its impact on parties and election campaigns following momentous presidential contests in the United States, to concerns over international security, privacy and surveillance in the post-9/11, post-7/7 environment; from the rise of blogging as a threat to the traditional model of journalism, to controversies at the international level over how and if the internet should be governed by an entity such as the United Nations; from the new repertoires of collective action open to citizens, to the massive programs of public management reform taking place in the name of e-government, internet politics and policy are continually in the headlines. Welcome to the Handbook of Internet Politics: a collection of 31 chapters dealing with the most significant scholarly debates in this rapidly growing field of study.

About this book

This volume is concerned with the contemporary expression of voice and citizenship, political institutions and practices, and how the internet creates new policy problems or reinforces old ones. The volume is pluralistic in content but coherent in its thematic structure. Chapters are organized in four broad parts: Institutions, Behavior, Identities, and Law and Policy. This is the first publication of its kind to focus on the politics of (and on) the internet.

A handbook provides an excellent means of summarizing and criticizing contemporary debates but it should also point out new departures from the established literature. First, this collection provides a thematically organized overview of as many important areas of internet politics and policy as possible. Second, it presents readers with a survey of the state of the art in this field. Third, it functions as a means of punctuating the field’s development—a chance to take stock and reflect on developments to date and future challenges for research. Fourth, it provides linkages to established theories of media and politics, political communication, governance, deliberative democracy and social movements, all within a context that is both interdisciplinary and focused on political phenomena. Finally, the contributors form a strong international cast and a mix of established and junior scholars.

The process of producing the book was designed to foster a blend of editorial guidance and author autonomy. As editors, we first defined the broad contours of the areas to be covered. We then approached authors for submissions. Once the final list of contributors had been established, we proceeded through a four-stage review process. Authors were invited to submit abstracts, and these were the subject of editorial feedback and suggestions. Next, first drafts were submitted. These received detailed editorial commentary, not only involving us as editors but also colleagues in our respective departments at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the University of Washington. Following this, authors submitted complete drafts. A final editorial exercise shortly before completion of the whole manuscript led to further alterations in the case of some of the chapters.

Our approach throughout has been to encourage authors to reflect upon the existing literature in their chosen area but also to advance their own arguments and analyses. An ideal handbook will push ahead with distinctive, original arguments and the discovery and manipulation of new data. In such a fast-moving area, it is essential to provide readers with a scholarly context but also a sense of how developments are unfolding and undermining received wisdom. Indeed, there is very little received wisdom in this field, and this is arguably what makes it so exciting.

The growth of a field of study

Over the last decade or so, scholarly analyses of the relationship between the internet and politics have grown at a remarkable rate. Figure 1.1 shows the results of a simple Boolean search against text contained in titles, abstracts or indexing keywords in the world’s most important scholarly article database—the

Figure 1.1 Published scholarly articles on political communication, 1995–2006 Source: Authors’ calculations from Boolean searches of article title, abstract and keywords: TS = (Internet OR web) AND TS = (politic* OR govern*); TS = (television OR newspaper* OR radio) AND TS = (politic* OR govern*); TS = (television) AND TS = (politic* OR govern*) in ISI Web of Science scholarly article database 1995–2006, November 8, 2007.

ISI web of science index. The chart shows the number of articles whose subject matter is the internet or web and politic* or govern*. For comparison, results are also shown for the number of articles on television or newspapers or radio and politic* or govern*, and for television and politic* or govern*. The truncated words politic* and govern* are used to capture the range of words that have these as their root, such as politics, political, government, governance, and so on.

The first point here is that these are the results of tightly controlled searches against a highly specialized database of published articles in mainstream academic journals. Leaving aside the fact that many journals are not covered by the ISI, the index also does not include the thousands of books, book chapters, reports, working papers, and conference presentations that have been produced in this area over the last decade. Similarly explosive growth can be seen in searches of the press and periodicals database LexisNexis, as well as open search engine results, but these are not reported here because we cannot control for companies’ decisions to change their indexing coverage.

The second point about Figure 1.1 relates to the comparator of new information and communications media: broadcast media and the press. While scholarship in these fields is vibrant, the rate of overall growth has been substantially slower than for the internet. The number of articles on the internet and politics exceeded those on broadcasting, the press, and politics for the first time in 2000. By 2006, the overall difference was substantial and continues to grow. The middle line represents article counts for three different media (television, newspapers, and radio) combined. Focusing on television alone, the contrast is even greater. In 2006, 113 articles dealt with television and politics, while 424 were concerned with the internet and politics. Opinion surveys still report television as the most popular political medium, but it is not the most popular medium of study for scholars.

This is, of course, only a rough-and-ready analysis. But overall, the message for those working in this field is clear: you are part of a rapidly expanding area of scholarly endeavor, in absolute and relative terms.

New directions in internet politics research

Despite this huge growth in scholarship, when the internet first emerged as a popular communication medium (in the developed world) few seemed to take it seriously. It was often dismissed as a passing fad, a minority pursuit too dependent upon specialist forms of technical knowledge, of far less importance than television and the press, or a simple manifestation of irrational exuberance in the financial markets. Many commentators were intrigued by the new medium’s capacity for self-expression and its potential for disrupting social, political, and economic relations, but there was a palpable “let’s wait and see” quality to the academic discourse of the mid-1990s. Some scholars dismissed this domain of research as seemingly without effect on the traditional evidence of political science such as campaign spending, voter turnout, and public opinion formation.

But over the course of a decade, this context has arguably changed, as appreciation has grown of deeply rooted changes in social, economic, cultural, and political life in the advanced democracies. Many of these changes are now rippling out to the less wealthy regions of the globe, albeit in highly uneven patterns.

In the developed countries, particularly the Anglo-American world, important subterranean shifts occurred as the internet continued to diffuse at a remarkable rate in the early 2000s. People started to conduct important aspects of their lives online, as internet shopping, social support networks, and public services began to proliferate. All of this was underpinned by a reduction in the costs of computers and other networked devices and an increase in the capacity of broadband telecommunications.

The first inkling that the political role of the internet had been underestimated came in late 2002 and early 2003. This awareness was not caused by but coincided with the increasing frequency of the word blog, both online and in the traditional media. While the roots of the blog format date back to Dave Winer’s Radio UserLand self-publishing platform launched in 1997, it was not until 2002 that blogging started to grow under the influence of new platforms such as WordPress and Moveable Type.

The spectacular growth of blogging and its associated offshoots soon led to the invention of another term: Web 2.0. Looking back over the last five years it seems clear that there have been significant shifts in political uses of the internet. Some may recoil at the adoption of a term conceived by the entrepreneurial and technology community of Silicon Valley, but even if they do not consciously use the label, there is little doubt in the minds of the majority of contributors to this volume that Web 2.0 does have substantive meaning and serves as a useful term for a number of significant developments.

Politics: Web 2.0

Space limits preclude a full discussion of Web 2.0 here, but this section highlights its central features by building upon Tim O’Reilly’s (2005) seminal approach. For good or ill, this is arguably the most influential discussion of the term to date.

O’Reilly is regarded as the first to publicly coin the term Web 2.0 in 2003. This primarily technology-focused approach defines it in terms of seven key principles or themes. Some of these are more relevant to internet politics than others, and some require extra theoretical work to render them amenable to social science investigation. Nevertheless, the seven principles are: the internet as a platform for political discourse; the collective intelligence emergent from political web use; the importance of data over particular software and hardware applications; perpetual experimentalism in the public domain; the creation of small-scale forms of political engagement through consumerism; the propagation of political content over multiple applications; and rich user experiences on political websites.¹ How might these principles work as a means—both literal and metaphorical—of sketching out a first take on new directions in the realm of internet politics research?

First, the internet as a platform for political discourse. In essence, this theme relates to the idea that the web has moved from the older model of static pages toward a means of enabling a wide range of goals to be achieved through networked software services. The archetypal Web 2.0 web-as-platform service is of course Google, whose value depends almost entirely on its ability to create wealth from the interface of its distributed advertising network, its search algorithm, and its huge database of crawled pages. Two key features of this aspect of Web 2.0 are particularly salient: first, the power of easily scalable networks and second, the “long tail.” Easily scalable networking involves an organization being able to flexibly adapt to sudden growth surges and ad hoc events that increase demand for its services.

The theory of the long tail (Anderson, 2006) is that online commerce and distribution is changing the economics of content creation and distribution. Traditionally, movie studios, publishers, and record companies tend to try to create small numbers of big-hit products because the sunk costs of developing a film, book, or album can be more quickly and predictably recouped. Similarly, real-space retail outlets (cinemas, city-center record stores, booksellers) can only afford to sell “hit” products because the relatively high cost of providing shelf or screen space for low-selling niche products makes it risky. Online distribution significantly reduces these costs, resulting in a sales/products curve with a large “head” and a long “tail” of niches. The internet thus contributes to a more diverse and pluralistic media landscape.

These web-as-platform principles can be seen at work in a range of political arenas. Elsewhere it has been argued that the 2004 primary and presidential campaign in the United States saw the emergence of a model of campaigning that relied upon a range of online venues loosely meshed together through automated linking technologies, particularly blogs, as well as face-to-face meetings coordinated via the user-generated Meetup site (Chadwick, 2007; Hindman, 2005). However, nowhere is the idea more strongly embodied than in the recent shift towards online social networking on platforms such as Facebook and MySpace. The symbolic moment came in January 2007, when John Edwards announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination via a brief and informal video posting on YouTube, but the U.S. midterms of November 2006 had already witnessed an explosion of political activity on social networking sites as well as the intensification of blogging by candidates and the long tail of amateur pundits.

The second theme of Web 2.0 is collective intelligence. The core idea here is that a distributed network of creators and contributors, the majority of them amateurs, can, using simple tools, produce information goods that may outperform those produced by so-called authoritative, concentrated sources. Examples of this abound, but two stand out as having caught the political imagination: free and open source software projects and user-generated content sites. The underlying model of online collaboration that produces these vast collections of human intelligence has been much debated. Opinions differ, for instance, over the extent to which hierarchy matters in these environments. Some, such as Weber (2004) suggest that it accounts for a great deal, while others, such as Weinberger (2007), downplay its importance. These debates aside, this theme points to the growth of a deeply voluntarist model of content creation and knowledge aggregation.

At a basic level, many of the most interesting and significant developments in online collective action have been enabled by free and open source software creations. This provides a perfect example of the elective affinity between political values and technological tools. Wikipedia itself has become a political battleground, as supporters of candidates, causes, groups, movements, even regimes, engage in incessant “edit wars” over entries. Beyond this, the principle animates politics in a variety of arenas. The blogosphere has enabled ongoing citizen vigilance on a grand scale. Political actors and media elites now exist in an always-on environment in which it is impossible to escape the “little brother” surveillant gaze of citizen-reporters. From Flickr photo-streams of marches and demonstrations ignored by the mainstream media to bloggers such as Connecticut Bob, who took to the streets with his home movie camera to film Senator Joseph Lieberman’s off-the-cuff remarks in the 2006 U.S. midterms, the media environment for politics has shifted.

The third principle of Web 2.0 concerns the importance of data. The central claim here is that the Web 2.0 era is characterized by the aggregation of huge amounts of information, and those who can successfully mine, refine, and subsequently protect it are likely to emerge as dominant. Most of these data have been created from the concentrated labor of volunteers (Andrejevic, 2002) or they may simply be the by-products of countless, coincidental interactions. But the key point is that informational value emerges from the confluence of distributed user-generated content and its centralized exploitation.

When used as an analytical lens for internet politics, this principle points to the ongoing importance of longstanding controversies surrounding privacy, surveil-lance, and the commercial and political use of personal information (Howard, 2006). The irony is that the celebrated freedom of political expression via self-publishing and the ease of connection facilitated in the social networking environments of Web 2.0 also offer a multitude of possibilities for automated gathering, sorting, and targeting. In the early days of the web political actors would often be heard complaining that they had “no control” over the online environment or that they did not know how to target particular groups or supporters (Stromer-Galley, 2000). The applications of Web 2.0 arguably render these tasks much more manageable, as individuals willingly produce and reveal the most elaborate information about their tastes and preferences within enclosed, proprietary technological frameworks. In the realm of political campaigns, social networking sites thus offer many advantages over the open web. For governments seeking to filter or control internet content, the advantages are also plain.

The fourth theme is perpetual experimentalism in the public domain. As indicated above, the attraction of O’Reilly’s model is that it captures literal, quite narrow developments in technological practice but it can also be used at a metaphorical level to capture social and political behavior. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction New directions in internet politics research
• Part I: Institutions
• Behavior
• Identities
• Law and policy
• reference
• Index