Pundits and scholars laud online campaigning for its potential to democratize politics and praise the 2008 Barack Obama campaign for using new information technologies to mobilize voters. Underneath these extraordinary forms of technologically-enabled political participation, however, is an infrastructure and industry for political data that has received far less attention. […]
Many new media technologies, such as the internet, serve both as a tool for organizing public commons and as a tool for surveilling private lives. This paper addresses the manner in which such technological innovations have enabled a dramatically expanded market for public policy opinion data, and explores the potential […]
Campaigns are complex exercises in the creation, transmission, and mutation of significant political symbols. However, there are important differences between political communication through new media and political communication through traditional media. I argue that the most interesting change in patterns of political communication is in the way political culture is produced, not in […]
Social scientists are increasingly interested in innovative organizational forms made possible with new media, known as epistemic communities, knowledge networks, or communities of practice, depending on the discipline. Some organizational forms can be difficult to study qualitatively because human, social, cultural, or symbolic capital is transmitted over significant distances with […]
