Does the Internet Change Politics?
Does the Internet Change Politics?
Does the Web Change Politics? McKenzie Wark Responds
POLITICS IS always a matter of persuasive media images and coordinating communications. For there to be politics, somebody needs to persuade someone else that a certain power is legitimate, that a certain course of action is in their interests, that a certain policy is just, or that a certain leader is worthy. But persuasion is not enough. Political actors and their actions require coordination. People need to be brought together to act in concert. And so the question arises as to what effect changes in media form—the rise of the internet, for example—have on the possibilities for political action.
One way to understand the impact of the internet is to compare it to the relation of previous media regimes with politics. Modern politics takes place in three successive media regimes. The first regime is the postal service and print media. The second regime is telephony and broadcast media (radio, then television). The third regime is the cellphone and the internet. This is of course rather crude. Media and communication cannot be so neatly periodized. New media do not replace but rather displace old media. One could enter many other caveats.
Nevertheless certain tendencies are at work. Take the successive coordinating communication forms: post, telephone, cellphone. The speed increases, as does the “bandwidth.” More can be conveyed faster. But between the telephone and the cellphone is a significant break. Communication is no longer between fixed points but mobile points. It is no longer between households but individuals. It no longer makes any sense to list a “home” phone and an “office” phone. The cellphone is both—and neither. It breaks down the distinction between public and private space.
With the successive forms of persuasive media, there is a different story. Between the print form and the broadcast form is a massive consolidation and centralization of senders and a corresponding expansion of receivers to cover pretty much the whole of the United States. This starts to break down not with the internet but with an intermediate form: cable television. Cable starts a segmentation of audiences that the internet only accelerates. In this respect it is a partial return to the kind of media form of the pre-broadcast era.
The distinction between media (newspaper, television) and communication (post, telephone) becomes less clear in the era of the internet and the cellphone. Both have the flexible point-to-point routing of the post, but can also support the many communication characteristics of mass print or broadcast media. The means of motivating and of mobilizing are no longer quite so separate.
All else being equal, political power will be in the hands of those best able to exploit this distinctive envelope of possibilities. This has always been the case. There is no politics prior to media or outside of communication. All that changes in each media regime is the available strategies. It’s true enough that these days it is hard to get elected if you don’t look good on TV, but in a previous century it would have been impossible to get elected without looking good riding a horse down main street. But if looking good on TV was all there was to it, Mitt Romney would be president.
Using the available media and communication forms to best effect is a mark of political genius. FDR did not resort to the fireside chat via radio very often, but when he did he showed a real understanding of the fact that radio was a domestic and household form. Where most politicians still used radio as if shouting to a crowded hall, FDR knew that to be on radio was to be a guest in people’s homes. Reagan extended this sensibility to television. It sounds obvious, but watch Ted Kennedy shout at you from the screen as if addressing a union hall and try to resist the temptation to turn down the volume.
Reagan had a personal genius for the television medium, honed through his years as pitchman for General Electric. The Reagan-era Republican Party possessed a quite different advantage in computerized direct mail campaigning. It used the old media of the post to good effect by gathering detailed data on the habits of households and tailoring direct-mail campaigns accordingly. Got a subscription to Guns and Ammo? Here’s a message from your friends at the NRA.
It’s possible that recent wins by the Democrats are enabled at least in part by a canny use of the internet and the cellphone. The Dems’ internet strategy dates back to the Howard Dean campaign and its use of meetup.org to bring Democrats together socially as a modest secular alternative to the ability of the Republicans to mobilize via the conservative churches. It is also well known that the Obama campaign took care to harvest cellphone numbers at rallies, so that the cellphone could be used as a broadcast platform. While the Republican robocalls languished unheard on obsolete landline answering machines, Democratic text messages encouraged voters, wherever they happened to be on the day, to go to the polls.
Long before the electoral tide turned in Obama’s run for president, the media tide had turned. The Republican domination of talk radio and the ubiquity of Fox News, obliged the Democrats to take a different tack: blogs. Of course there is a right-wing as well as a left-wing blogosphere. But where the right-wing blogs cannibalized attention for existing right-wing media, the left-wing blogs filled a real vacuum in a way that Al Gore’s cable network and Air America failed to do.
The key rhetorical move has to do with affect. Put simply, the right has a monopoly on angry derision. One can’t compete with Rush and O’Reilly on that terrain. Ironic distance, despite the best efforts of Jon Stewart, never quite worked as counter-affect, nor did parody, although one might plausibly date the endgame for the Bush junta to Stephen Colbert’s scorcher of a roast at the correspondent’s dinner. As my New School colleague Simon Critchley has pointed out, the rhetorical genius of the Obama campaign was to co-opt faith and color it with hope rather than anger. But this strategy required a harnessing of new and old media that, while it had its precedents in Dean’s failed primary bid, was relatively new.
Part of it was a judicious filtering and enabling of more or less spontaneous propaganda efforts. The Shepard Fairey HOPE poster and will.i.am’s “Yes we can” song and video are key examples. While not exactly “roots” media—both are by media professionals—they are not top-down productions blasted into people’s awareness with strategic ad buys. Rather, they were circulated laterally, via email, blogs, Youtube. Of the thousands of media productions, both amateur and professional, official and unofficial, these were selected by popular internet filtering to become the iconic markers of the campaign.
But good media is worthless without the means of communication to mobilize voters. This is where the cellphone and the internet come into play. The Obama campaign was able to mobilize secular people with secular means. The cellphone, in particular, is worth examining in this context. The internet is still something of a household or organization-bound device. It’s as useful to the religious right as to anyone else. But the cellphone is different. It is ideal for mobilizing young voters, or those whose identities are not defined by the home or the authority of church.
Like many other industries, politics has replaced labor with capital where it is cheaper to do so. Digital-era campaigning does away with the need for some of the local knowledge once carefully guarded by local political machines. The votes that carried Obama into the White House came from the exurbs, the edge cities, where the network of social organization is not dense and the megachurch looms as the only solution to this social deficit. You can blast these places with broadcast ads, but what probably had the most effect was the door-to-door “get out the vote” effort, the logistics of which is best handled by internet and cellphone.
All this is expensive. Hence the significance of Howard Dean’s emphasis on the internet as a fundraising tool. It is probably still easier to raise money in big chunks from wealthy donors, but anything that reduces the cost of raising money in small amounts from a wide base is to be welcomed. It changes, if only slightly, the class composition of influence within the party. The internet is the political weapon of choice of the educated, white collar working class.
Every media form creates a space of possibilities for political action. Political actors discover them by trial and error. The effects are often subtle and complicated. The media’s discourse about itself favors stories in which new media forms are always revolutionary, which prompts counter-narratives which conclude that there is nothing new under the sun. The real story is always more interesting. The study of politics is necessarily the study of how it is mediated.
Read Michael Walzer’s Response
McKenzie Wark is associate professor of media studies at Eugene Lang College and the New School for Social Research.
