Search results

A continuum model helps us understand contemporary information politics. One end describes authority-centric approaches, including governments and digital corporations, while the other focuses on teaching individual skills and the understanding needed to grapple productively with the digital information ecosystem. The extremes represent opposed views of human agency, current information enterprises, and the nature of media. We apply this continuum to two examples, QAnon and COVID-19. Two instances attempt to connect the model's two poles. We conclude with a forecast of the continuum's viability and then project its application forward in education.

Reports on Reuters Business Information research which reveals that few British businesses have an information policy and most heard information at senior levels.

A number of recent research papers have suggested that the contingencies surrounding marketing decision making in organisations are such that marketing management may usefully be analysed as a political process. In this, the key to evaluating the power and politics of marketing is marketing information — as a source of formal organisational power and as a resource which can be manipulated politically to gain desired outcomes. This article examines briefly the basis for this style of analysis, but focuses mainly on the implications for the management of marketing in organisations, where a political analysis suggests that the management of marketing should concentrate not on techniques — of marketing research, or of rational, scientific decision making — but on structure and process, i.e. on power and political systems, to influence and control outcomes. To the familiar risks of “marketing myopia” may be added the danger of “political myopia”.

This study examines the roles of the Internet and other types of media use in explaining the support for direct democracy and further investigates the mediation of political trust in the relationship between media use and the attitude toward direct democracy.

Using data drawn from Taiwan Social Change Survey 2014 and the approach of structural equation model framework, this study identifies the indirect effects of the Internet and other types of media use on the attitude toward referendums.

The results of this study show that the frustration resulting from the process of representative politics dominated by political elites is associated with the support for direct democracy as an effective alternative to generate political influences in the formation of public policies.

The advances in the Internet and information technology have expanded the possible platforms of obtaining political information and enabled people to rapidly access political information at lower costs. It is expected that Internet use has altered the relationships among citizens, political parties and the government, potentially influencing citizens' political trust and their attitude toward direct democracy.

A major thrust in public service computing in the late 1990s is the building of electronic bridges between the large‐scale computer systems which have been embedded into the complex bureaucratic structures of late twentieth‐century government. This process includes the development of electronic links between government functions, across departmental boundaries and, even, across tiers of government. Increasingly, it also involves electronic data exchange with customers and suppliers. Contextualizes these changes in the managerialist agendas of contemporary government, and explores the significance of informational politics in institutional and managerial change, by examining a particularly ambitious and sensitive case, the co‐ordination of computerization in the criminal justice system. In this way, it contributes to the critique of technicist accounts of technology‐induced change, by proposing and developing a theoretical perspective on the interaction of technology, information and institutional dynamics in the “information polity”.

Growing interest in the use of digital technologies and a Putnam-inspired debate about youth engagement has drawn researchers from outside of the study of social movements into research on the topic. This interest in youth protest participation has, in turn, developed into a substantial area of research of its own. While offering important research contributions, we argue that these areas of scholarship are often not well grounded in classic social movement theory and research, instead focusing on new media and/or the relationship between activism and other forms of youth engagement. This chapter seeks to correct this by drawing on interviews with 40 high school and college students from a moderately sized southwestern city to examine whether traditional paths to youth activism (i.e., family, friends, and institutions) have changed or eroded as online technology use and extra-institutional engagement among youth has risen. We find that youth continue to be mobilized by supportive family, friends, and institutional opportunities, and that the students who were least engaged are missing these vital support networks. Thus, it is not so much that the process driving youth activism has changed, but that some youth are not receiving support that has been traditionally necessary to spur activism. This offers an important reminder for scholars studying youth and digital activism and youth participation more broadly that existing theory and research about traditional pathways to activism needs to be evaluated in contemporary research.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the use of Facebook by Israeli party leaders during an election period by examining four elements: the type of Aristotelian language of persuasion; the level of online engagement measured by three different types of feedback: likes, comments and shares; the use of personalization elements as engagement strategies; and the vividness features used in the post (text, photographs and video).

All of the posts from the Facebook pages of ten Israeli party leaders were collected for 45 days prior to the 2015 general elections. The number of posts, likes, comments and shares in each post were captured and the data were analyzed looking for elements of Aristotelian persuasion and of online engagement with the users.

The dominance of pathos was a salient element in the data demonstrating the politicians’ need to create an affective alliance with the public and it was the element that resulted in a higher number of likes, shares and comments. Only a few relationships were found and these do not point to a clear relationship between multimedia use and social media engagement. The interactive, open and free nature of social networking sites contributes to their development as a new type of political podia that allow politicians to produce a different kind of political communication. Instead of using these sites as platforms to disseminate their ideas, plans and strategies, politicians focus their interactions with the audience on the creation and maintenance of affective alliances.

The study contributes to the existing literature on the subject by examining four characteristics of the politicians’ personal profiles on social networks simultaneously while most of the past studies have focused on only one or two of these characteristics.

I am going to talk about ‘the politics of information’, which is not the same thing as ‘information of politics’, but they are often related. This paper is seen from the perspective of a campaigning organisation — Aims of Industry — which is concerned with industry and business and its political issues.

Although information technology has been at the centre of attention of political branding for some time, research has traditionally focused mainly on its role in the facilitation of communication. This paper aims to unpack the role of information technology in the emergence of new cyber political brands.

This research uses a dual case study approach that focuses on the relationship between branding, politics and information technology. The analysis focuses on two successful political cyber brands: the Italian Five Star Movement and the Czech Pirate Party. Data collection covering the time frame between their emergence and their political success occurs through netnographic methods.

Cyber political brands emerge and materialize in different forms. The present analysis allows for a delineation of three conceptual elements that characterize the constitutive interrelationship of information technology in the emergence of cyber political brands. The first conceptual element, organization, refers to how political brands become structured around linked activities. The second conceptual element, orientation, describes how the activities of a political brand are directed to build a specific path and legitimize courses of action. The third conceptual element, operation, delineates the processes that anchor and stabilize the political brands in its “own” culture, establishing specific base activities.

Information technology and the techno-culture emerging around the two cyber party brands can be seen as the possible delineations of new “cleavages” in the form of “information technology-culture” which enables potential electoral success.

The present study by offering the conceptualization of the cyber political brand shows how political brands can reflect a type of performative cultural branding where they become able, as a networked-medium, to assemble a specific techno-culture. In terms of political brand development, the current analysis offers a framework that allows us to consider the process of political party development in a new fashion.

Early information technology scholarship centered on the internet’s potential to be a democratizing force was often framed using an equalization/normalization lens arguing that either the internet was going to be an equalizing force bringing power to the masses, or it was going to be normalized into the existing power structure. The purpose of this paper is to argue that considered over time the equalization/normalization lens still sheds light on our understanding of how social media (SM) strategy can shape electoral success asking if SM are an equalizing force balancing the resource gap between candidates or are being normalized into the modern campaign.

SM metrics and electoral data were collected for US congressional candidates in 2012 and 2016. A series of additive and interactive models are employed to test whether the effects of SM reach on electoral success are conditional on levels of campaign spending.

The results suggest that those candidates who spend more actually get more utility for their SM campaign than those who spend less in 2012. However, by 2016, spending inversely correlates with SM campaign utility.

The findings indicate that SM appeared to be normalizing into the modern congressional campaign in 2012. However, with higher rates of penetration and greater levels of usage in 2016, the SM campaign utility was not a result of higher spending. SM may be a greater equalizing force now.

Campaigns that initially integrate digital and traditional strategies increase the effectiveness of the SM campaign because the non-digital strategy both complements and draws attention to the SM campaign. However, by 2016 the SM campaign was not driven by its relation to traditional campaign spending.

This is the first large N study to examine the interactive effects of SM reach and campaign spending on electoral success.