How Technology Has Transformed American Politics Over Time

Introduction

It is not immediately obvious, especially since politics sometimes lags behind the private sector in modernization, but politics takes advantage of every technological advance available — and will continue to do so in the future. In the founding era, Alexander Hamilton, among others, used the printing press to issue the Federalist Papers almost anonymously (Teal, n.d.). That was just the beginning of a road that has progressed from candidates literally shouting at crowds to move them to action, to the present-day world of Twitter.

Over the years, radio and television have changed politics in many ways. Before FDR's fireside chats, almost nobody knew what Herbert Hoover sounded like. One could seek out a message from him in a newspaper, but he could not reach people proactively. The famous Kennedy-Nixon debate illustrates this vividly: the radio audience felt that Nixon had handily won, while the television audience saw Nixon sweating and without makeup, and concluded he had collapsed miserably in comparison with the polished Senator Kennedy. Many believe that television got JFK elected. As observers have noted, in an age of television, voters would almost certainly not elect a man as awkward as Abraham Lincoln or as portly as William Howard Taft (Teal, n.d.).

In America, people have almost always had the right to express their political opinions. This freedom of expression is what sets the country apart from many others. Yet it was not until the rise of the Internet that people were able to have such remarkable platforms for political expression. Fifty years ago, one might share a political opinion during dinner conversations, by writing a letter to a newspaper editor, or by giving speeches in public or semi-private settings. Now, however, people can express their political opinions in far more ways. Many simply share their views on Facebook, where a single comment can reach hundreds of people. Others who are more engaged in political thinking start blogs that can be read by millions of people over time (How Technology Changed Politics, 2011).

These days, it is easy to take technology for granted and to forget how radically it has changed people's lives over the past decade. Developing Internet and cell phone technology has had an impact on nearly every aspect of life, from the way people communicate with friends to the way they conduct business. Increasingly, it is clear that technology has even altered the longstanding political institution of the United States (How Technology Changed Politics, 2011). Although technology has already changed politics in countless ways, the promise of many more changes to come remains.

History of Technology in Politics

According to Housley (2011), American politics has seen several revolutions since the one that gave the nation its independence. George Washington remains the only president to be voted into office by near-universal consensus, and since his time politicians have been obliged to win the hearts and minds of the people. Getting one's message out has therefore been the enduring challenge of the presidential candidate. Originally, office-seekers relied on stump speeches and the press. Abraham Lincoln won over his supporters through a series of live debates. When radio arrived in the 1920s, candidates extended their reach into the very homes of Americans, and voter turnout increased. The advent of television in the late 1940s transformed politics once again, shifting the focus of the nation toward camera presence, message control, and the perfect sound bite.

Types of Media

The American political system has entered a new era of high-tech politics in which the behavior of citizens and policymakers, as well as the political agenda itself, is increasingly shaped by technology. The mass media are a central part of that technology. Television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and other means of popular communication are called mass media because they reach out and overwhelmingly influence not only political elites but the general public (The Mass Media and the Political Agenda, 2010).

Academics distinguish between two kinds of media. First, there is print media, which includes newspapers and magazines; second, there is broadcast media, consisting of television, radio, and the Internet. Each has reshaped political communication at different points in American history (The Mass Media and the Political Agenda, 2010). The daily newspaper emerged in the late nineteenth century, while radio and television have existed only since the first half of the twentieth century. As recently as the presidency of Herbert Hoover (1929–1933), reporters submitted their questions to the president in writing, and he responded in writing, if at all. Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945) was the first president to use the media effectively. Roosevelt held about one thousand press conferences during his twelve years in the White House and broadcast a series of fireside chats over the radio to reassure the nation during the Great Depression (The Mass Media and the Political Agenda, 2010).

Broadcast media have progressively displaced print media as Americans' primary source of news and information. As a form of technology, television is almost as old as radio, since the first television station appeared in 1931. Nevertheless, the 1950s and 1960s were the formative decades for American television. The first televised presidential debates were the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debates. Poll results from that debate demonstrate the visual power of television in American politics: those who watched on TV favored Kennedy, while those listening on the radio gave the edge to Nixon (The Mass Media and the Political Agenda, 2010).

Television brought the nation to the war in Vietnam during the 1960s, and TV exposed governmental deception about the progress of the war. With the growth of cable TV — particularly the Cable News Network (CNN) — television entered a new era of delivering news to people and political leaders as events unfolded. Since 1963, surveys have consistently shown that people relied on TV for news more than on any other medium, and by a two-to-one margin, people viewed television reports as more credible than newspaper stories. Young people were especially likely to rely on television rather than newspapers for news (The Mass Media and the Political Agenda, 2010).

In 1934, Congress created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to regulate the use of the airwaves. Today, the FCC regulates communications via radio, television, telephone, cable, and satellite. Although the FCC is nominally an independent regulatory body, in practice it is subject to considerable political pressure. The FCC has regulated the airwaves in three important ways. First, to prevent near-monopoly control over a broadcast market, it has implemented rules restricting the number of stations owned or controlled by one company. Second, the FCC conducts periodic reviews of the goals and performance of stations as part of its licensing authority. Third, the FCC has issued a number of fairness regulations regarding access to the airwaves for political candidates and officeholders (The Mass Media and the Political Agenda, 2010).

During Roosevelt's administration, the press had not yet begun to scrutinize a politician's private life. The conduct of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal turned the press against government. Today's journalists work in an atmosphere of cynicism; the press views its job as exposing the truth, operating on the assumption that politicians rarely tell the full story (The Mass Media and the Political Agenda, 2010). Investigative journalism employs detective-like reporting methods to uncover scandals, placing reporters in an adversarial relationship with political leaders. There is evidence that television's appetite for investigative journalism has contributed to growing public pessimism and negativism about politics.

Modern political success often depends on control of the mass media. Image management does not end with the campaign — it is also a critical element of day-to-day governance, since politicians' media images are seen as reliable indicators of their power. Politicians have learned that one effective way to shape media coverage is to restrict reporters to carefully scripted events. A media event is staged primarily to attract coverage. A major component of this is the slickly produced TV commercial. Few, if any, administrations devoted as much effort to the president's media image as Ronald Reagan's. The Reagan White House operated on seven principles: plan ahead; stay on the offensive; control the flow of information; limit reporters' access to the president; talk about the issues you want to discuss; speak in one voice; and repeat the same message many times (The Mass Media and the Political Agenda, 2010).

The outbound telephone marketing industry gave political campaigns the ability to reach large groups of targeted voters quickly and quietly, operating just below the radar. This concept went well beyond the small volunteer call centers that had existed for over forty years. Political campaigns could not have produced a full industry of diverse companies, large and small, with thousands of telephone stations in call centers without the necessary technology being in place and widely used. This was a revolution: campaigns could target voters using any criteria, from gender, age, vote propensity, and income to level of education and the presence of children in the household. Campaigns could tailor the message even within a single calling program — calling all women, for example, but using a different script for younger women than for older women. Perhaps most importantly, campaigns could collect information. If a candidate asked each voter what issue was most important to them, the campaign could not only gather answers corresponding to 100,000 individual voters but could then adjust the way it communicated with those voters based on their responses (Teal, n.d.).

In September 1998, two California-based entrepreneurs, Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, became frustrated with the political turmoil they observed in Washington, D.C. Feeling motivated, they decided to act and launched an online petition. Within a few days they had gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures. What they discovered was that people needed a sense of empowerment — a way to have their voices heard. Blades and Boyd went on to form the MoveOn.org Political Action Committee, an online organization that now boasts over 3.3 million members (Housley, 2011). Almost by accident, Blades and Boyd caught the attention of the media and campaign organizers, who sent out bulk emails and created elaborate fundraising websites. The effect of this development is still being felt today.

With the increase in cable channels and Internet usage, a recent trend has been the rise of broadcast channels geared toward particularly narrow audiences, frequently referred to as narrowcasting. With so many readily available sources of information catering to specific interests, it will also be easy for those who are not very interested in politics to avoid news and public affairs entirely (The Mass Media and the Political Agenda, 2010). The result could well be a growing inequality of political information, with the politically engaged becoming more knowledgeable while the rest of the public drifts further into political apathy. Only a relatively small number of TV stations are publicly owned in America, and PBS stations play a minimal role in the news business, attracting low ratings. By contrast, in many other countries major TV networks are government-owned.

Many now argue that politics is in the midst of an Internet revolution. Politics is said to be facing a parallel migration from place to space. "From the places visited by President Truman in his whistle-stop tour, campaigns have moved to the space of mybarackobama.com" (Wattal, Schuff, Mandviwalla, & Williams, 2010). While some portions of political campaigns will remain unchanged, others are being transformed in the Internet space. Traditional election politics featured speeches, handshakes, fundraising dinners, billboards, TV ads, and campaign offices in small retail storefronts. In the virtual space of the Internet, e-politics centers on new delivery channels, including websites and blogs that extend the reach of television and print, and create new forms of personalized content in which the message is textual as well as oral (Wattal et al., 2010).

In this virtual space, campaign workers are likely to spend as much or more time canvassing their electronic neighborhoods as they do their physical ones — soliciting and managing friendship requests on Facebook, releasing campaign videos through YouTube, or organizing meetings through Meetup.com. These online tools allow nearly immediate and continuous cycles of content distribution and engagement at very low cost (Wattal et al., 2010). Future candidates and campaigns that ignore these changes are likely to find themselves at a significant disadvantage and risk becoming irrelevant to the next generation of voters.

The nature and extent of the Internet revolution in politics remains a subject of debate. Proponents view the Internet's interactive potential as transformational, while skeptics foresee no fundamental change in the underlying political inequalities of the current system. Cornfield (2005) sees potential for a reconfiguration of the most public aspects of the American political process in one of three ways: one approach to campaigning may come to dominate; several models may contend over time; or each election cycle and political situation may generate its own unique arrangement. West (2005) suggests a transitional position whereby slow but steady incremental changes become significant as they accumulate over time. Bimber and Davis (2003) characterize the Internet's role as supplemental rather than replacing traditional media — an extremely effective niche communication tool for specific audiences and purposes, such as mobilizing political activists.

Although the American media is free and independent when it comes to journalistic content, it is entirely dependent on advertising revenues to sustain operations. Thus, news reporting in America is a business in which commercial pressures shape how journalists define what is newsworthy, where they gather their information, and how they present it. To a large extent, TV networks define news as what is most interesting to the average viewer (The Mass Media and the Political Agenda, 2010).

A significant proportion of news originates from established institutional sources. Most news organizations assign their best reporters to specific locations where news normally originates. Very little news results from spontaneous events or a reporter's own independent investigation. Most stories are drawn from circumstances that newsmakers can substantially control. Those who make news rely on the media to broadcast specific information and ideas to the public. Sometimes they feed stories to reporters in the form of trial balloons — information that is leaked in order to gauge the political reaction. As the text notes, "TV news is little more than a headline service. With exceptions like the Newshour (PBS) and Nightline (ABC), analysis of news events rarely lasts more than a minute. At the same time, complex issues — like nuclear power, the nation's money supply, and pollution — are difficult to treat in short news clips" (The Mass Media and the Political Agenda, 2010).

Oddly enough, as technology has enabled the media to disseminate information more rapidly, news coverage has become less comprehensive. Newspapers once routinely reprinted the full text of important political speeches; today the New York Times is nearly the only paper that does so, and even the Times has substantially cut back on this practice. In place of full speeches, Americans now hear sound bites of fewer than ten seconds on television. The notion that the media harbor a liberal bias has become a familiar one in American politics, and there is some limited evidence to support it. Reporters are more likely to identify themselves as liberal than the general public, and more journalists classify themselves as Democrats than Republicans. However, there is little reason to believe that journalists' personal views significantly color their reporting. Most stories are presented in a point-counterpoint format in which two contrasting perspectives are offered (The Mass Media and the Political Agenda, 2010).

The conclusion that news reporting contains little explicit partisan or ideological bias does not mean it fails to distort reality in other ways. In an ideal world, the news would reflect reality accurately. In practice, the sheer volume of potential stories makes this impossible. Journalists must choose which stories to cover and to what depth. Due to economic pressures, the media are biased toward stories with high drama that will capture public interest, rather than thorough analyses of complex issues. Television is especially biased toward stories that yield compelling visuals. As one source notes, "Seeing a shot of a person's face talking directly to the camera is boring; viewers will switch channels in search of more interesting visual stimulus" (The Mass Media and the Political Agenda, 2010).

For many years, scholars tended to doubt that the media had more than a marginal effect on public opinion. This minimal effects hypothesis stemmed from the fact that early researchers were looking for direct impacts — for example, whether the media affected how people voted. When attention shifted to how the media influence what Americans think about, more significant findings emerged. The decision to cover or ignore certain issues can meaningfully affect public opinion (The Mass Media and the Political Agenda, 2010). By directing public attention to particular concerns, the media influence the criteria by which the public evaluates political leaders and ultimately shape who gets elected.

People are constantly trying to influence the government's policy agenda when they bring problems to government officials and expect them to be resolved. Interest groups, political parties, politicians, public relations firms, and government agencies are all competing to have their priorities placed ahead of others. Political activists — often called policy entrepreneurs, people who invest their political capital in an issue — depend heavily on the media to advance their ideas onto the governmental agenda (The Mass Media and the Political Agenda, 2010).

Over the years, politics — and particularly elections — have evolved into big business. This is most evident in countries such as the United States, where more than $2.1 billion was spent on the 2008 presidential campaign (Mosk, 2008). A notable recent development is the rise of the Internet as a medium for political communication. The Pew Institute has reported that more than fifty-five percent of the adult population in the United States gets news and information from the Internet. Eighteen percent of Internet users have been reported to have posted to an online election forum (Smith, 2009). It is no wonder that political campaigns have embraced this channel to distribute campaign messages. The Obama campaign's sophisticated use of the Internet in the 2008 elections, particularly in the Democratic primaries and caucuses, is widely cited as a factor in his success. Likewise, the Internet played a major role in Republican candidate Ron Paul's ability to raise millions of dollars despite being relatively unknown nationally at the time. The widespread use of the Internet in campaigns is evident from the fact that all major candidates in the 2008 U.S. presidential elections routinely released their television ads on YouTube as well as on their own websites, and they all established a presence on social media sites such as MySpace and Facebook (Wattal et al., 2010).

The staging of political events to attract media attention has become a political art form. Important political events are often coordinated minute by minute with an eye on the television audience. Moreover, it is not only the powerful who have successfully used the media. Many civil rights groups in the 1960s relied heavily on media coverage to tell their stories of unjust treatment (The Mass Media and the Political Agenda, 2010). Many believe that the introduction of television helped to accelerate the civil rights movement by graphically showing Americans the realities of racial injustice.

The media serve as key intermediary institutions between the people and policymakers and exert a powerful influence on the political agenda. The watchdog function of the media helps to keep government accountable. Many observers feel that the press tends to be critical of whoever holds office, and that reporters seek to expose wrongdoing. With every new proposal met with skepticism, this creates a regular check on the expansion of government. On the other hand, when the media focus on injustice in society, they inevitably encourage government action to address it (The Mass Media and the Political Agenda, 2010). The media portray government as responsible for addressing nearly every major crisis. The rise of television also advanced individualism in the American political process. Candidates are now far more capable of running for office independently by appealing directly to people through television and the Internet. Because television naturally centers on individuals rather than institutions, political parties have declined in influence, and candidate character has become more important than ever.

Conclusion

The rise of the information society has not brought about a parallel rise of an informed society. With the media's shallow handling of important policy issues, it is not surprising that the incredible amount of information available to Americans today has not noticeably increased their political awareness or participation. The media's justification is that this is what the people want — since they are in business to make money, they must appeal to the largest possible audience (The Mass Media and the Political Agenda, 2010).

Nearly three-quarters of American Internet users went online in 2010 for news or information about the midterm elections, or to communicate with others about the campaigns. This group of online adults includes anyone who did one or more of the following in the months leading up to the 2010 elections:

Fifty-eight percent of online adults looked online for news about politics or the 2010 campaigns, with thirty-two percent getting most of their 2010 campaign news from online sources. For Americans under the age of 50, the Internet ranked ahead of newspapers as a source of campaign news. Fifty-three percent of online adults went online to participate in specific campaign-related activities, such as watching political videos, sharing election-related content, or fact-checking political claims. The audience for online political videos grew substantially since the most recent midterm election: thirty-one percent of Internet users watched online political videos in the months leading up to the 2010 elections, compared with nineteen percent in 2006 (Internet Playing Bigger Role in American Politics, 2011).

One in five adults used Twitter or social networking sites for political purposes in 2010. As the Internet has developed as a tool for political engagement and information-seeking, the audiences for online political content have also shifted. These online spaces serve as gathering places where politically engaged Americans of all types — young and old, conservative and liberal — can catch up on the latest events, share their thoughts on the political news of the day, and see what their peers have to say about the issues that matter to them (Internet Playing Bigger Role in American Politics, 2011).

Americans hold a wide range of views about the impact of the Internet on politics. Fifty-four percent say the Internet makes it easier to connect with others who share their political views. At the same time, fifty-five percent of all Internet users feel that the Internet increases the influence of those with extreme political views, compared with thirty percent who believe it decreases their influence by giving all people a chance to be heard. Sixty-one percent of online adults agree that the Internet exposes people to a wider range of political views than they can access through traditional news media (Internet Playing Bigger Role in American Politics, 2011).

At the same time, fifty-six percent of Internet users say it is typically difficult to determine what is true from what is not true when it comes to the political information they find online. When it comes to online political engagement and information-seeking, Americans appreciate the Internet's benefits but also feel uneasy about its broader societal impacts. Even as they use online tools to connect with fellow activists and discover political information, they tend to worry about the influence of extreme viewpoints and the overall accuracy of political discourse online (Internet Playing Bigger Role in American Politics, 2011).

It has suddenly become possible to open a dialogue with the entire country without even picking up the telephone. Unlike many tools used by politicians, social networking is inexpensive and simple enough for the average American teenager to use. Perhaps most significantly, it has opened up a new demographic of voters — the technology-savvy youth — who were previously difficult to reach. On the Internet, power rests in the hands of ordinary Americans: the housewife in her living room, the student in his dorm room. Rather than crafting the perfect ten-second sound bite, candidates must let go and have real conversations, up close and personal. As candidates are forced back to earth and voters gain a stake in the process, America may finally become a voice for the unschooled as well as the educated, the poor as well as the rich, men and women of all ages and every background. After all, that is what democracy is supposed to be about (Housley, 2011).