Back to the Masses?
Today's Question: Assess one of the following concepts in light of either Howard's own examples or other material from this semester: (1) epistemic heterarchy, (2) political redlining, (3) political culture. You might consider one or more of the questions: How does Howard define the concept? How is it used? Is it analytically useful? Does it depend on important assumptions that are not stated? Given what you know about communication technology, does the definition imply a causal relationship that you find credible?
My Response: In Phillip N. Howard’s book New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen he outlines the transition from mass media campaigns to hypermedia campaigns. One of the concepts he uses to illustrate this transition is “political redlining.” Howard defines this as “the process of restricting our future supply of political information with assumptions about our demographics and present or past opinions. Overall he observes a trend away from the organizations themselves doing the majority of the redlining to a more citizen powered redlining where your self identifying hypermedia networks determine what kind of information you received. It becomes in some senses a self selecting and empowering version of political redlining. Hypermedia professionals seem to be of the mindset that whatever they can do to make government more responsive to the people will make government better. This seems to be a good idea on the surface. But not everyone agrees that government officials should be 100% responsive to their constituencies. Many reason that they should be following a trustee model. Where officials do what is better for the people, even if that disagrees with what the people want. Furthermore this self selecting system also has many potential consequences. There are undesired implications for individuals becoming too specialized in political issues. Single issue voters are often viewed as being narrow minded and short sighted. While I won’t go into these issues too much more, I think they are important debates which should be discussed in reference to hypermedia campaigns. After all, making the assumption that our goal should be to get as close to direct democracy as possible, may not be the safest assumption.