Political redlining in Howard's New Mieda Campaign & the Managed Citizen
Redlining refers to “the organizational practice of identifying the parts of the community that are difficult or problematic to serve.” (p. 132) Most often it happens when organizations offer “lower standards of service and indenturing obligations” (p. 13) to some people who are usually identified by virtue of neighborhood attributes and perceptions. Political redlining is the process of restricting future supply of political information with assumptions about demographics and present or past opinions.
Political redlining is another kind of information segregation. Howard (2006) identified three ways it can happen over hypermedia. First, the population is segregated as likely voters and less-likely voters, and only the likely voters are attended to and served with information while the less-likely voters are neglected. Second, political redlining can occur when someone filters political information for Web site users who have signed up for content. Third, it can also happen when an individual chooses to privilege some information sources over others by “relying on Web rings for content or by setting topical preferences with news portals.” (p. 132)
This concept is analytically useful, because it points out the potential harms that the e-politics practices can produce. Though it seems reasonable, productive or maybe even natural to campaign managers, political redlining is being discriminatory and can do harm to the whole citizenry. It is obvious that the neglected parts of population are harmed by being excluded from social participation, and therefore gaining no attention from the government or policy makers and losing their voice. However, even the parts of population that attracted enough attention from e-politics managers do not benefit from the segregation either. The more segregated the population and the more tailored information each sub-population is fed with (if they are at all), the more fragmented the social perception, experience and ideology. The “less active” people may become even more less active, with little information stimulus, while the “active” people are only active with very narrow and limited views. It would become harder and harder to have conversation across these segregations, because there is less and less common ground.
One critical assumption that is not explicitly stated here is that the population heavily relies on the e-politics managers for information delivery: The neglected sub-populations receive no political information and the targets ones only consume what they are fed with. It is a relatively passive view of the citizens. The neglected subpopulation may have their own information channels and the targeted subpopulations may have options between different information sources and channels. They are definitely affected by the information segregation but their information behaviors will not be completely determined by it. They can also exert some impact on the whole society including the e-politics managers. Especially the under-served subpopulations, feeling being neglected too long, they may burst out and make clear their existence in a radical way. According to the systems theory, they are all interdependent parts of the systems, and will all exert influence on the whole system. I don’t perceive an explicit statement of the causal relationship. And with the impacts in both directions, I don’t consider it is best to be call a causal relationship.