Howard and Political Redlining
Howard defines “political redlining” as “the process of restricting our future supply of political information with assumptions about our demographics and present or past opinions” (132). He continues to describe three ways that redlining occurs over hypermedia: 1) from the politician’s standpoint, hypermedia campaigns can target specific constituencies; 2) internet technicians can target specific groups by funneling certain content to them; and 3) individuals can redline themselves by tweaking their use of political websites (132). The first redlining method parallels the definition of pre-hypermedia political redlining, so it seems like an unproblematic analogy to make with current internet campaigns. Howard spends almost the entire first half of the book proving the impact of the second redlining method. Further, the function of spyware, cookies, etc. in all hypermedia topics, not just politics, demonstrates that some form of redlining targets consumers of all information via the internet. However, since the problem of individual agency came up last week, it’s on my mind and makes we question the efficacy of Howard’s third method of redlining.
Howard’s first two methods of redlining place the targeted content-restricting or content-providing agency with the facilitators of political campaigns: politicians and their IT crews manage information dispersal. The choice of what content to provide and/or block lies wholly with the puppet masters, as the cover imagery of Howard’s book visualizes: a politician twitches his thumb, and targeted consumers of politics open (or delete without reading) the political email generated by the politician’s hypermedia machine. As Howard’s title suggests, politicians attempt to manage their citizen-constituents in a clear causal relationship.
In contrast, with Howard’s third method of individual political redlining, agency no longer lies with politicians and their webmasters, but with individual consumers of knowledge. The burden of proof is on Howard to prove that hypermedia somehow reverses the flow of power from consumer to politician. For example, Howard writes: “With hypermedia, though, many of these schema – and the tools themselves – are actually constructed by individuals, with or without their informed consent” (134). Or, in other words, “people assemble their own networks for conveying political information” (135). Certainly, individuals can choose, to an extent, how to navigate the internet, but how does an individual choosing between an infinite number of information providers and tools compare to politicians’ attempts to direct information according to class, race, and geographical voting record? The agential choice of the politician is to exclude people based on their assumed political stance whereas the agential choice of the individual includes or excludes information from their network. The first type of agency imposes information, or the lack thereof, on individuals. The second type of agency has no power over other people. Thus, the causal relationship in the second type of individual agency does not seem to compare to the top-down hierarchy of the first type. In other words, redlining implies some sort of power relationship between entities that an individual cannot exercise over him/herself.
Also, I don’t see how individuals choosing hypermedia content is any different than individuals choosing what information to encounter at any moment in an individual’s life. An implicit argument in Howard’s discussion of political redlining claims that individuals must politically redline themselves every time they choose one type or source of information over another, whether it be parking meter instructions or a jury’s verdict. At that point, the process of redlining is indistinguishable from the process of daily living. Our network of knowledge is always a constant choice, but surfing the internet in itself does not empower one person over another.