Politics: Web 2.0 – VulnerableSpace: A Comparison of 2008 Official Campaign Websites and MySpace

Apr 18 2008 Published by under Politics, The Internet

(cross posted at TechPresident)

I’m in the second morning session at Politics: We 2.0. Paul Zube from Michigan State is walking us through an analysis of candidate use of MySpace versus their own websites. His assumption was the campaigns, which are control/image oriented would be able to serve less interactive content via MySpace (limited primarily by the platform) and would have less control of the content than their campaign site provides.

Zube identified 5 Types of Comments left on candidate MySpace pages.

  • Thanks – for adding me as a friend
  • Support – I’m glad you’re running
  • Intention to Act – I’ll be voting for you in the primary
  • Challenge – Questioning policy or personality
  • Spam

His study indicates that spam started low and increased dramatically; the challenge comments were infrequent, generally personal in nature, and rarely policy related; and none of the challenge comments were answered by the campaigns. Challenge comments were also rarely addressed by others in the community.

Zube explores the motivations for participating. He identifies the risk of exposure, image challenges and Spam/harassment as the key negatives. Rewards he identified are minimal and suggests candidates are using social networks simply to appear trendy.

There was no direct comparison of message or mobilization tactics on candidate sites versus MySpace.

Interestingly, he is the first person here that I have heard give specific recognition to the fact that candidates do not engage in these activities with an altruistic goal of making Democracy better, but rather to win elections. I think most of the audience on this site would recognize that as a universal truth.

Following Zube, Rebecca Hayes addressed the ways candidates used these social networks and began with an explanation that her further studies revealed under 18 audiences were not engaging before coming of election age, and typically did not engage at 18 because they felt candidates were ignoring them and not speaking to their issues.

While studies show adult web users are more likely than their peers to vote, the youth who are very engaged online, are less likely to vote. Hayes explores central route and peripheral route decision making. Central route relies on rational decision making while peripheral route relies on external cues to spur decisions. She suggests that her study indicates young voters are more inclined to peripheral decision making.

This dovetails into a discussion of political information efficacy or the individuals belief that they have the knowledge to make an informed vote. Young voters typically have low PIE and thus don’t vote. Older voters are more comfortable in their knowledge opinion.

Hayes asks whether candidates did any focus grouping with younger voters to determine what should appear on their network sites. Speaking only for Thompson, I can’t imagine that happened in most campaigns, but it’s an interesting idea.

The interesting research in her project was the polling of SocNet users pre- and post- exposure to candidate sites. 411 undergrad students across 4 majors. The respondents were gauged on intention to vote before and after exposure. Measures of site credibility were also studied.

Study respondents indicated candidate websites and Facebook were much more credible than MySpace, but even they were only moderately credible. 50% stated that they did not like candidates being online. They considered it an invasion of their space and 30% explicitly stated they would not vote based on their SocNet participation.

Interestingly, pre-testing indicated 93% intended to vote, so post-testing wouldn’t have been productive. Since this age group has never exceeded slightly better than 50% in actual turnout, the study indicates many say they intend to vote despite actual performance and results are skewed.

Conclusions drawn from the study indicated that students felt sites were superficial and didn’t offer meaningful content, but paid lip service to them.

the first two portions of this panel were very interesting. The final speaker presented the topic “I Became Facebook Friends with the Prime Minister” which discussed Danish elections of 2007. The speaker began by requesting that his presentation not be quoted without his prior approval.

This reflects a larger trend that Micah and I have discussed here. This is a conference about web 2.0, that attempts to explore web 2.0 use by political actors, but completely fails to recognize the encroachment of the Internet and Web 2.0 on its own world.

Almost none of the participants here are blogging. Before the first session Micah asked if anyone present knew of a tag being used for blogging the conference. To a person, everyone in the room stared at him as if a third arm had suddenly sprung from his forehead.

For a web 2.0 conference, the participants are remarkably web 1.0 (perhaps even web 0.5).

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Politics: Web 2.0 – Visibility Reach, Participation, & Peer Production

Apr 17 2008 Published by under Politics, The Internet

(cross posted at TechPresident.com)

Micah Sifry is busy covering the session focused almost entirely on the 2004 Dean campaign, so I decided to pop into a session focused, at least in theory, on analyses of practical applications of technology.

Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon explored the ways in which web sites – primarily blogs in her analysis – draw an audience and gain importance. She starts with the assumption that the wealth of information creates a commodification of attention forcing people to choose between competing sources of information (something most agree happens). Further, she looks at the visibility of a site as an indicator of which sites are more likely to be chosen.

The presentation really seems to take a contrary view of the Long Tail with the argument that sites with small audiences have little impact and a difficult road to gain an audience. Bailon analyzed traffic drivers as a function of five factors:

  • Reciprocity
  • Homophily
  • Budget
  • Visibility News Media
  • Age

She finds that two factors have the most influence on reach and visibility – budget and recognition by traditional media. She sems to argue for a self-sustaining cycle where news media mentions drive visitors and incoming links which drive more visitors which build site reputation and drive recognition by the news media.

She acknowledges that the more links a site receives, the more attention it gets from search engines, but argues the traditional media is a bigger driver. She also argues there is no democratization of sites without visibility, and visibility is a scarce resource not distributed evenly.

I’m not sure that I agree with her research (which seemed to be primarily anecdotal) as it tends to ignore factors like the Long Tail as well as the role of influentials. It’s possible to have a site with less traffic viewed by a relatively influential audience.

Take, for instance, TechPresident. While it’s traffic is not great, and its budget is certainly not large, the unique perspective it applies to a specific realm of content has earned it a lot of recognition, and notice by the media. It achieved success as an outlet purely through content. That’s not a factor in Bailon’s research.

Also on the agenda is Jonah Bossewitch and the Zyprexa Kills campaign.

By way of background Jonah introduces Zyprexa, and the basic communications tool kit of blogs, wikis, e-mail lists, etc.

A doctor who discovered internal Lily memos indicating some cover-up of medical problems and marketing tactics surrounding the anti-psychotic drug contacted a journalist. The journalist directed the doctor to a lawyer who won legal release of the documents and distributed them to the media. An ad hoc community of contributors created a common tag (ZyprexaKills) and used wikis, blogs, Tor, BitTorrent, freenet and UseNet to disseminate the documents.

Efforts by Lily to get the documents back led to EFF’s first wiki case and lawyer Fred Von Lohmann making the argument that enjoining pbwiki would be an attempt to effectively enjoin the world.

The Internet won, but for the wrong reasons. The case was not on its merits but rather because the information had become so widely be distributed that it was simply not possible to unring the bell.

The dissemination of the content led to ongoing Investigations by 10 attorneys general, the FDA, and a Congressional Oversight Committee.

He makes few claims regarding the reasons for the success if this effort other than to say that without the effort it is possible the injunction on the information would have prevented the public from knowing the truth.

He also indicates that the real story is how the ad hoc community came together and acted in unison to distribute the information.

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Clustering of Ideological Types on Facebook

Apr 17 2008 Published by under Politics, Technology, The Internet

(cross posted at TechPresident.com)

Gaines & Mondak: The Friend of My Friend is My Friend? Ideological Clustering on Facebook

Session 1 of the Politics: Web 2.0 Conference brings us to an examination of Facebook and clustering of ideological types and research done by Brian Gaines and Jeff Mondak at the University of Illinois. One of the fears about the growing rise of the Internet is it fosters a <strike>cognitive dissonance</strike> selective exposure (sorry, brain synapse misfire) and allows individuals to ignore information with which they disagree. It also allows them to congregate together with only those who align with their views and self-reinforce.

Gaines and Mondak looked at whether friend networks had commonality of belief systems or whether there were significant variations. One interesting aspect they explored was whether the urge to add more friends – ths raising their social capital – would lead people to connecting with more divergent networks and therefore exposing themselves to more diverse opinions.

One interesting slide in the presentation covered the ideology by Big Ten Schools. It’s on page 26 of the paper linked above (I’ll try to go back and add a grab later. What’s interesting in that slide is the fact that the number of people who chose “very liberal” and “very conservative” remain largely unchanged across universities (as do the number of moderates, though with greater swing). Micah’s take is that is probably consistent with the percentage of American’s who are firmly ensconced in the wings of the two parties.

Only the number of “liberal” and “conservative” identifiers change dramatically with Northwestern proving to be the most liberal and Purdue the most conservative.

Interestingly, the study found that conservatives are slightly more likely than liberals to surround themselves with other conservatives. The change was fairly minor and when only “Top Friends” were explored, there was no indication that Top Friends were more alike politically.

One interesting notion they introduced is the idea of “the stealth conservative”. Essentially the theory is (especially among college students) that conservatives would not want to out themselves and be somehow denigrated as conservatives by their more liberal friends. Since liberalism is more prevalent at college campuses, these conservatives may otherwise go uncounted. It’s an interesting concept, but one that may become less and less meaningful as Facebook’s population grows older.

I asked during Q&A whether they had considered looking only at those who had added a political application or otherwise indicated a level of political activism to see if they were more likely to select only friends with whom they share political beliefs. They indicated they had begun with a purely random sample, but have considered going back to do some subsampling based on political involvement (both online and to the extent possible off) and other factors.

The paper is an interesting read if you’re interested in the study of selective exposure and the web.

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