Constructing Skeptical Citizens: How Campaign Microsites Foster New Ways of Engaging Political Information and Understanding Citizenship

ABSTRACT

Digitally mediated campaign messages contain normative expectations of citizens' political and civic behaviors that users must navigate routinely. This analysis of microsites (smaller Web sites containing a different address than the organization producing the site) from the 2010 election argues that these tools’ content reflects an account of how citizens should approach information. Differing from traditional campaign communications, microsites highlight “hidden” content and complicate notions of what counts as “fact.” In doing so, they perform a skeptical encounter with political information, and construct a normative model of citizens who ought to use similar measures to discern valid from invalid information.

Keywords:

• Campaign advertising
• campaigns
• citizenship
• elections
• Web sites

Notes

1. New Media Director, personal communication, June 9, 2011; New Media Consultant, personal communication, July 5, 2011; New Media Consultant, personal communication, June 18, 2011, respectively. Participants in the interview-based and ethnographic portion of this research were undertaken with conditions of anonymity in order to assure that viewpoints and information not dominated by concern for previous or ongoing clients/candidates.

2. While Nielsen puts campaign Web sites in the category of “specialized tools,” he acknowledges that designations will likely change over time. I argue that, due to widespread use within campaigns and by voters, we can rightfully call campaign Web sites “mundane” in the context of the 2010 election cycle.

3. Politics and technology writer Kate Kaye (2010) assembled a list of typical sites during the election in 2010. Her piece includes microsites built by campaigns as well as third-party groups, and covers a variety of races across the country, for instance, CallMeBarbara.com (about Sen. Barbara Boxer), AlbanyTom.com (about NY comptroller Tom DiNapoli), JerryFails.com (about CA gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown), and many more: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/news/1741926/attack-candidates-mudslinging-sites-2010.

4. I use the term “affordances” to account for the fact that there are material components to microsites that constrain (or enable) certain actions. In doing so, I use the term in a way that is coherent with a Science and Technology Studies perspective and indicates “functional and relational aspects which frame, while not determining, the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an objects” (Hutchby, 2001,p. 444).

5. Rackaway's assessment is likely significantly overvalued (she only uses the phrase “microsites/grassroots mobilization/outreach sites). Still, the fact that microsites are even listed in 2006 as a possible text, and one worth measuring, implies they must have been present.

6. New Media consultant, personal communication, July 5, 2011.

7. Microsites are an especially difficult new media text to sample (their releases are often made public through supporter e-mail lists, most do not gain much publicity, and they are often temporary sites that are taken offline after a short amount of time). Illinois-based sites were found through e-mail updates from campaigns, news and blog coverage of races, and inquiring about known microsites in interviews, and were subsequently saved before the election ended and many were taken down. By narrowing the sample to election-based, campaign-produced microsites, it is likely that other contexts will breed other content and implications for citizenship. Issue-advocacy microsites in particular are likely to have various content and norms that can be different from campaign sites, due to the fact that their goals are often less specific, and the timeline for their undertaking can be either very quick, or prolonged, and does not adhere to a structured electoral clock.

8. WhoIsMarkKirk was retrieved on July 15, 2010. All other microsites were retrieved on October 31, 2010. All microsites are available through the Wayback Machine Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php) using the URLs listed in Table 1.

9. Of the nine microsites archived, one—StopPlayingGolf.com—was discovered in an interview and was therefore archived after the election. Sites were archived using SiteSucker.

10. Communications Director, personal communication, January 19, 2011.

11. New Media consultant, personal communication, July 5, 2011; New Media consultant, personal communication, June 27, 2011; Communications Director, personal communication, January 19, 2011, respectively.

12. Fieldwork, September 10, 2010.

13. Though no domain name was purchased, the working titles of the microsite all hinged on “Get The Truth … ” and “DoubleTalk,” which would have both highlighted the “real” versus perceived truth.

14. For instance, Gov. Quinn's campaign had a series of well-received television spots that also questioned his opponent, Bill Brady's, fitness for governing and asked, “Who is this guy?” The traditional ads, while popular, had materially less content due to the restrictions of the medium at hand.

15. It should also be noted that in the grand scheme of political Web sites, microsites—despite their in-depth information—are fractions of the size of campaign Web sites, which have dozens if not close to 100 pages of content devoted to a wealth of topics.

16. Fieldwork, September 26, 2010.

17. Communications Director, personal communication, January 17, 2011 and Communications Director, personal communication, April 7, 2011, respectively.

18. Fieldwork, October 14, 2010.

19. New Media Consultant, personal communication, June 10, 2011.

20. New Media Consultant, personal communication, July 5, 2011.