University Wire
02-27-2008
(The Good Five Cent Cigar) (UWIRE) KINGSTON, R.I. -- Typing in the name of any presidential candidate on Facebook.com can yield some unusual results. Senators John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have their own personal profiles run by their campaigns, which list interests and work experience in the same way that any college student's profile would.
There is a twist, of course, as each candidate's job history is a bit more colorful than those of the college students who normally populate Facebook. For example, each candidate's current employer is listed as the United States Senate.
Professor Brian Krueger of the University of Rhode Island political science department sees these unusual Facebook profiles as just part of a larger and relatively new phenomenon: political campaigning over the Internet.
Krueger said that college students are in a unique position in regard to online campaigning. Having grown up with the technology, young voters are particularly Internet-savvy. But they are also more cynical about the political process, he said.
Krueger said that when young people are inspired by a candidate, their motivation meets an affinity for computers that older people may not have.
"That's one of the reasons young people have been so involved on the Internet," he said.
This presents a problem for political campaigns: How can they reach that audience? At first the answer seems obvious given the mass appeal of the Internet and how inexpensive it is compared to traditional political mailings and phone drives.
Krueger said that campaigns first tried sending out mass "spam" e-mails, but quickly found that this is ineffective.
"People treated it like spam, and what do you do when you see a spam e-mail? You delete it," Krueger said.
He added that campaigns even experienced a negative backlash from potential voters angered by the spam e-mails. To prevent this, modern campaigns only contact people who have signed up to receive Internet messages.
But this presents a new problem. If campaigns are only contacting people who sign up to receive messages, then those are people who already support the candidate. The campaign is essentially preaching to the choir.
Even more troubling, Krueger said, is the fact that no new voters are engaged in the political process this way. His research found that political campaigns tend to exclusively contact people who are already politically active, well-educated and involved in their communities.
Krueger said that while campaigns are not usually successful in recruiting voters directly over the Internet, they have come to rely on a peer-to-peer network. Members of a campaign's mailing list are encouraged to send information along to their friends and family about a certain candidate. The logic is that people are more apt to listen to a friend or family member than an anonymous political booster.
"This peer-to-peer mobilization is almost a two-step process," Krueger said. "You encourage the hardcore supporters to encourage their friends and you bring people in that way."
Krueger said that the Internet has proven its effectiveness at reaching young voters. He said that the YouTube debates on CNN, in which citizens submitted video questions to the candidates through the movie-sharing Web site YouTube.com, was the most watched debate by people under 30 years old.
He credited this to the user control that comes from being able to submit questions, but he pointed out that CNN's moderators chose which questions to accept.
"There's a certain illusion of user control," Krueger said. "Cultivation is important but parties and candidates don't want to lose control of their message."
Some political commentators feel that Internet interest will not necessarily correlate to votes in November. But Krueger pointed out that the 2006 elections saw a large increase in the number of young voters.
"I would expect that trend to continue," he said. "I don't think that this phenomenon will crash ... it has legs to last at least until November."
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