Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from
Howard Dean to Barack Obama and the 2012 Elections
/Liberation Technology Seminar Series
/
Date and Time
September 27, 2012
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required
Speaker
*Daniel Kreiss* - Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and
Mass Communication at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Hi Jillian- It is suppose to be a poster for the upcoming Liberation
Technology seminar- I will send one out each week. It turns out last
year half could not read the"just type" so this year I bet half will not
be able to read "the poster"- Apologies for the "tech glitch" ( I also
am working off of 2003 system)
*Abstract
*Drawing on open-ended interviews with more than sixty political
staffers, accounts of practitioners, and fieldwork, in this talk I
present the previously untold history of the uptake of new media in
Democratic electoral campaigning from 2000 to 2012. I follow a group of
technically-skilled Internet staffers who came together on the Howard
Dean campaign and created a series of innovations in campaign
organization, tools, and practice. After the election, these individuals
founded an array of consulting firms and training organizations and
staffed a number of prominent Democratic campaigns. In the process, they
carried their innovations across Democratic politics and contributed to
a number of electoral victories, including Barack Obama's historic bid
for the presidency, and currently occupy senior leadership positions in
the president's re-election campaign. This history provides a lens for
understanding the organizations, tools, and practices that are shaping
the 2012 electoral cycle.
In detailing this history, I analyze the role of innovation,
infrastructure, and organization in electoral politics. I show how the
technical and organizational innovations of the Dean and Obama campaigns
were the product of the movement of staffers between fields,
organizational structures that provided spaces for technical
development, and incentives for experimentation. I reveal how Dean's
former staffers created an infrastructure for Democratic new media
campaigning after the 2004 elections that helped transfer knowledge,
practice, and tools across electoral cycles and campaigns. Finally, I
detail how organizational contexts shaped the uptake of tools by the
Obama campaign in 2008 and 2012, analyze the emergence of data systems
and managerial practices that coordinate collective action, and show how
digital cultural work mobilizes supporters and shapes the meaning of
electoral participation.
I conclude by discussing the relationship between technological change
and democratic practice, showing how from Howard Dean to Barack Obama,
new media have provided campaigns with new ways to find and engage
supporters, to run their internal operations, and to translate the
energy and enthusiasm generated by candidates and political
opportunities into the staple resources of American electioneering.
While these tools have facilitated a resurgence in political activity
among the electorate, this participation has come in long
institutionalized domains: fundraising, volunteer canvassing, and voter
mobilization. Meanwhile, participation is premised on sophisticated
forms of data profiling, targeted persuasive communications, and
computational managerial practices that coordinate collective action. As
such, I argue that the uptake of new media in electoral campaigning is a
hybrid form of organizing politics that combines both management and
empowerment.
*Daniel Kreiss* is Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism and
Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Kreiss's research explores the impact of technological change on the
public sphere and political practice. In /Taking Our Country Back: The
Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama /(Oxford
University Press, 2012)/, /Kreiss presents the history of new media and
Democratic Party political campaigning over the last decade. Kreiss is
an affiliated fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law
School and received a Ph.D. in Communication from Stanford University.
Kreiss's work has appeared in /New Media and Society/, /Critical Studies
in Media Communication/, /The Journal of Information Technology and
Politics/, and /The International Journal of Communication/, in addition
to other academic journals.
Location
Wallenberg Theater
Wallenberg Hall
450 Serra Mall, Building 160
Stanford, Ca 94305-2055
On 9/27/2012 11:23 AM, Jillian C. York wrote:
That just looks like (see attached screenshot) to me. What's it
supposed to say?
On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 9:15 AM, Yosem Companys <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
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site: jilliancyork.com <http://jilliancyork.com/>*|
*twitter: @jilliancyork**
"We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want
the seemingly impossible to become a reality" - /Vaclav Havel/
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