From Interpellation to New Media Campaigns
In his book, New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen, Philip Howard suggests that new information technologies in the political sphere are different from older technologies. Before proceeding further, it is important to note that Howard focuses his comparison on the relationship between new technology campaigns and the mass media campaigns that existed immediately prior to these developments. However, one should remember that prior to 1950, campaigns were not centralized and the media was generally characterized by partisanship (145), two ideas that correlate with the Howard’s new media campaigns. While contrasts and comparisons between these earlier forms of political campaigns and new media campaigns exist, this is not the focus of Howard’s book. Therefore, I will also focus my attention on the differences between post-1950 media campaigns and new media campaigns, rather than the pre-1950 campaign form, which I suspect provides a weaker contrast for new media campaigns than post-1950 mass media campaigns.
Howard contends that the new information technology campaigns are different from mass media campaigns because they operate at greater speeds and with more content than traditional media. Also, communications technology make symbols transient by allowing for simulations of offline interaction, quick circulation of signs and meanings, and allow messages to be rapidly transformed. These changes are qualified, because new media campaigns are structured “over and above” traditional media (207).
These changes are the result of technological and political developments that no longer require the self-reporting of data. Information is collected from data that has not necessarily been freely given and the individual is placed into a very specific and discrete identity category (128). This demographic analysis, similar to the rhetorical concept of interpellation, attempts to activate identities that the citizen is asked to recognize as already in his or her possession (141). Unlike mass campaigns, modern political campaigns activate existing identity traits rather than attempt to persuade the masses to adopt a particular position or support a particular candidate. In some ways, the connection to interpellation troubles Howard’s argument. For example, Maurice Charland, inspired by Louis Althusser, before the invention of many of the technologies explored in Howard’s book, was already exploring some of Howard’s ideas under the heading of interpellation in the development of Quebecois identity in Canada in the 1980’s.
However, Howard’s argument differs from or at least expands Charland’s idea because new technologies “make it less necessary for us to be attentive to our political lives” (176) whereas Charland’s argument is based on individual attention and connection to a public identity. Likewise, Howard’s argument is based on the idea of individualized, private consumption, rather than a form of mass consumption (184). Charland’s work recognized in the 1980’s that identity could be constructed through hailing rather than persuasion, by telling an individual, “You already support this position because you already have this identity.” Howard’s work suggests than by the 2000’s, individuals need to engage in even less “interpretive labor” and no longer need to be fully informed. Through data profiles, citizens do not even need to be aware that they are being represented or possess a specific identity (187), a distinct contrast from what Charland observed in the 1980’s. As Howard notes, “in an implanted campaign, lobbyists and politicians select voters to represent them (189); at times an identity need not even be activated.
Likewise, identity is much more transient than it appears in Charland’s work. Campaigns are evolutionary and “ [r]epresentation is no longer a singular event occurring in the act of electing a representative on election data but a continuous process of feeding data, sometimes unwittingly, to organizations that claim to represent us” (195). Unlike the political identity of the Quebecois as explored by Charland, modern political identity is easily changed and ephemeral. These technologies have led to decreased citizen agency because individuals have little choice in determining who can claim to represent them (197) whereas from Charland’s perspective, at least in the 1980’s, citizens had to recognize a pre-formulated identity as their own.
Furthermore, there are aspects of Howard’s argument that expand far beyond the role of identity creation. Unlike older forms of organization, new forms of communication technologies through their implementation by campaign participants have resulted in an epistemic heterarchic form of organization, (164-165) that contains some common elements with the forms of social organization associated with open source coding. These new technologies and the individuals who possess the skills to use them have led to a form of political campaign that is quite different from the hierarchic mass media campaign.
Finally, new technologies, and the manner in which they were implemented by campaign managers and coders contain normative values. The technology itself has been imbedded with normative assumptions related to ideas connected not only to how a campaign should be managed but to other normative beliefs, such as the importance of direct democracy (203). Communication technologies “embody value choices of their designers” and these value choices that have become embedded in technology have led to campaigns that are more individualistic and less mass-oriented.