Inventing the Election: Civic Participation and Presidential Candidates' Websites"

Kate Crane

I realize this seems a bit different from the rest of your focus on articles for the week, but I thought it would be interesting to look at how Technical Communication contributes to the study of informal/civic discourse (one of my interests).

Dadas, Caroline E. “Inventing the Election: Civic Participation and Presidential Candidates’ Websites.” Computers and Compositions. 25.4 (2008): 416-431.

Dadas looks at the extent to which websites from the 2008 presidential election helped to engage voters in civic discourse. She examines each website by the level of participation each allows its users. She breaks these levels down into three categories: Robust, Moderate, and Superficial. Dadas examines three websites from April 15, 2007 to January 6, 2008: Barack Obama’s presidential campaign website, John McCain’s presidential campaign website, and Mitt Romney’s campaign website. Her findings are as follows. Barack Obama’s website was robust in that it allowed users to be “creator, planners, producers, and designers” (424). Participants could create their own webpages from the site, plan events, and connect to social networking tools, thus giving them agency within the campaign. John McCain’s site was evaluated as moderate. Users of the site were given opportunity to take surveys and post questions/responses to the campaign thus giving the campaign feedback from constituents; however, the site did not provide users with the same control over the technology as Obama’s site did. Mitt Romney’s website was evaluated as superficial. User’s did not have the opportunity to create or personalize the site to meet their needs; rather “the Romney website seems more focused on maintaining a carefully crafted image” (428). This analysis provides a leading discussion not only to how digital rhetoric and electronic media can create agency in civic discourse, but Dadas also concludes that having students use such a schema prepares them to begin engaging in civic discourse.

Originally, I worried about the objectivity of this analysis; however, Dadas does a nice job of defining the criteria for which she would evaluate the website. This article inspires me to think about and look for other ways that we could engage people in public discourse using these new tools. Many people have claimed that one of the reasons Obama won the presidency was because of his ability to use the web, social networking, etc., to build a support base from younger generations. By using the web, a new demographic was reached and inspired. How might we use technology to bring more people back into the realm of civic discourse to discuss important issues in our society?