Web Campaigning

Citation

Bar‐Ilan, J. (2007), "Web Campaigning", Online Information Review, Vol. 31 No. 6, pp. 911-912. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520710841892

The web has become an important information and communication source in almost all areas of our lives. This book concentrates on one specific area: elections. It analyses the ways the web was utilised in the 2000, 2002 and 2004 presidential, house and senate and gubernatorial elections in the USA, and provides a basic framework for analysing the use of web for political campaigns. The authors define web campaigning as “those activities with political objectives that are manifested in, inscribed on, and enabled through the World Wide Web”.

The first step in studying web campaigning is to define the specific “web sphere” – a set of dynamically defined digital resources relevant to the central event or concept under study. Defining such a set of resources for an election campaign is relatively easy, because the major players and themes are rather well‐known in advance; however, dynamic changes in the scenery over time have to be taken into account as well. The authors not only analysed the campaign web sites but used additional methods including focus groups, interviews and surveys of both web site producers and citizens. Web campaigning cannot be detached from other forms of election campaigning; thus the different web campaigning practices are analysed within the general context of the elections and information disseminated through other media sources.

The authors define four major web campaigning practices: informing, involving, connecting and mobilising. Almost all studied web sites in this study engaged in informing. Sometimes the sole aim of the web site is to provide information, but informing is foundational to the three additional practices as well. Involving is facilitating interaction between site visitors and the campaign organisation. The infrastructure for interacting is facilitated through the provision of contact information published by the site producers and through gathering contact information from the visitors, mainly through asking for their e‐mail address. Specific involving activities include asking site visitors to sign up for campaign updates, to contribute and to sign up for volunteering. Connecting is the provision of bridges on or to the web between two or more political actors, e.g. a candidate site mentioning or linking to the political party the candidate belongs to. Mobilising is defined as using the web to persuade and equip campaign supporters to promote the candidate to others both online and offline. For each of the above‐mentioned web practices the authors discuss the tensions related to the practice.

The major techniques for implementing the above‐mentioned practices are linking, convergence and co‐production. Convergence interweaves the online and offline campaigns either by mentioning the campaign web sites in other media or referring to offline events on the web sites. Co‐production is defined as the “production of web objects jointly between actors who are organizationally independent”. Additional techniques are documentation, position taking and issue dialogue, association, empowerment and transaction.

An integral part of this book is the web site associated with it at http://mitpress.mit.edu/webcampaigning. The site provides access to the archived web pages mentioned in the book, allows for a non‐linear view of the book's contents and serves as a pedagogical aid as well, as explained in the section entitled “Several aims guided the creation of the digital supplement”. This freely accessible online supplement also contains the full text of several chapters in the book. I highly recommend the use of the web site is conjunction with the book. The book and the web site remind me (in terms of the relation between the printed version and the digital supplement) of the pioneering book entitled Hypertext Hands on by Ben Shneiderman and Greg Kearsley, that was available both as a printed book and as a hypertext system.

I highly recommend this book both as a source for studying web campaigning and for its clever use of the web as a means to supplement the information available in the book. I personally believe that the web's role in political campaigning will continue to grow, additional web practices will emerge and the sites will become more interactive. The theory and methods developed in this book provide the framework for analysing future political campaigns as well.