Tamara Small

politics and the internet

In political science departments at Canadian universities there has only recently been a push to pay attention to the role that the Internet plays in our politics. The desire for greater emphasis on the subject is coming from students. They feel comfortable using new communication technologies and are eager to study them as part of their education. The result is an interesting dynamic in which some professors do not think that the study of online politics is really a serious part of political science. It may be a shortsighted position to take. There is a need to examine the use of new technologies by politicians to determine the significance of this online activity to our political culture.

Dr. Tamara A. Small, a professor of political science at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, has written several essays exploring the subject of online politics, including pieces comparing the websites of major and minor political parties in Canada, the impact of the Internet on election campaigns, and the significance of a politician maintaining a blog. Her approach is cautious. She suggests that it is easy to be convinced by the media that social networking websites and other online tools are dramatically changing our political culture.

Interest in how politicians use the Internet increased significantly with the 2008 election of Barack Obama as President of the United States. His success seemed to confirm the potential benefit of engaging citizens online. Young people who were deeply frustrated by the excesses of the Bush administration found themselves drawn to the message of hope and renewal that Obama articulated. Shrewdly the Obama campaign reached young potential voters via their preferred websites, namely Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. During the campaign and afterwards, a myth of sorts developed fixed on the way in which Obama was able to employ the new technology to his benefit. This belief in his masterful use of the technology developed from facts on the ground but nevertheless requires some examination.

Recently Dr. Small sat down for an interview to discuss the Obama campaign, as well as the manner in which political parties and individual politicians in Canada are using the Internet. In Canada, as in many other countries, there has been a rush by politicians to generate the perception that they are open to exploring the potential of online communications. This prompts a number of questions. How interactive are the websites maintained by our political parties? Are political leaders in Canada willing to embrace the openness that the Internet allows? Is the idea of public service broadening to include the need to connect with people through the Internet? Dr. Small addresses these questions and many more.

CI: In the essay that you wrote called ‘Equal Access, Unequal Success’, you talk about the different ways that major and minor political parties are using the Internet to reach out to their constituents, to citizens in general, and to do public relations work. At one point you say that ‘Canadian political scientists have been slow to document and understand e-politics’. Is this trend continuing, or are you starting to find that more academics are paying attention to what is happening online?

TS: The reason I think it is slow is simply because the people who are doing this work are graduate students. I would say that in the next ten years there are going to be people who did their PhD on this in 2008, and there are going to be people who did Master’s dissertations. The work will be published later. When I started in 2004, even in my Master’s thesis, there just wasn’t this type of thing going on. Still to this day we have two published books in Canada dedicated to this topic by political scientists, but I can name a handful of scholars just off the top of my head in the U.S. and a handful of scholars in the U.K. There are good reasons for that, especially in the United States because of the election industry that exists there. But I think that the Canadian political scientist is quite conservative. … There is a gap, but there are more and more people who are interested in it. There are more and more people who have PhDs who study this who are going to train graduate students. It is going to take a little time, but I still think we are not at a place where Canadian political scientists really see this as a serious part of political science.

CI: I imagine that, over the next fifteen or twenty years, there is going to be an interesting dynamic in political science departments where you have the people who did not grow up on this technology, and then you have the people who did grow up with it and really think it is one of the more crucial parts of politics. Do you see any difficulty for students entering that situation where you have older professors not emphasizing the technology and also younger professors very much driving this?

TS: I think the students are driving it. There is a greater interest. When I teach my courses on technology, people want to take it because this is their technology and they are very interested in it. I also think that there is a lot of media hype about this type of thing. People have these opinions that they draw from the media that they want to explore. Students want to use technology. There is a lot of literature about how professors should start using different types of technology as part of their teaching, and not just in terms of their discipline. I mean, could you use ‘Second Life’ to teach a course? I am not sure that I am ever going to be using ‘Second Life’ to teach a course, but I have seen serious articles about Twitter and Facebook. … I think that people are recognizing the importance of technology. Students are so adept in it that they are going to want to use it as part of their education but also to learn about it as part of their education. At Mount Allison we have a course on the sociology of cyberspace. They look at broader issues than I look at, and these are huge classes and people are really interested.

CI: In your examination of the way that different parties made use of the Internet during the 2004 election, you noted that some of the websites for the minor parties were more interactive than the websites for the major parties. This must be a tricky area to study. Life moves pretty fast online, and just a brief look in the past few days shows that Michael Ignatieff is on Twitter, Bob Rae is on Facebook, Stephen Harper is on Twitter, and Jack Layton as well. Have the major parties started to work better with the interactivity of the Internet, or is there still a gap?

TS: It depends on how you define interactivity. Yes, they are on these sites that give the impression of interactivity, but in the 2008 election, for instance, Stephen Harper turned off the wall on his Facebook page and turned off the comments on his YouTube page. Stephane Dion, Jack Layton, and Stephen Harper did not allow the ‘at replies’ on Twitter. So there is no interactivity. The interactivity that does exist on Facebook, which could be fine, is between citizens. I might leave a comment, someone might respond to me, and I might respond back. There might be that type of stuff. I think the exception might be Elizabeth May. She went through her site and actually responded, not to a lot but to a handful of comments that people had left. But the idea that the leaders themselves or the parties themselves are using these web 2.0 technologies, the Facebooks, Twitters and YouTubes, to engage with people – I still think it is pretty limited. … People criticized Stephen Harper for turning off the wall because is that not an important part of Facebook? What is Facebook if it does not have a wall? Great, thanks for your status update where you say, ‘Stephen Harper is at a campaign stop in New Brunswick’. Well, that’s really interesting!

I am not too sure that the parties have embraced interactivity; rather the technology has become so interactive that they want to use the technology to seem a part of it. I do not think that the parties are any more interactive on a one-to-one or one-to-many level than they used to be. That would be different from someone like Barack Obama who had these few moments where he did do these things in which he actually said ‘I’m here, I’m actually going to answer questions’. It doesn’t happen all the time, but people flock to these types of things. Even Howard Dean in 2004 did these. They were rare, but every once in a while. … I do not think that is happening [in Canada]. I would stick with the conclusion. Canadian parties are not any more interactive. Their pages are more interactive. People can be more interactive if they want to be with other citizens, but I don’t think with the parties themselves.

CI: You mention the Obama campaign, and obviously in 2008 we had this perhaps once-in-a-lifetime event of young people in the United States being drawn into politics in a large way. In your article on Garth Turner, one of the things he mentions is that politicians are ignoring the technology at their peril because there is this massive group of young people who are expecting this connection online with their politicians. Do you think that, in Canada, there is a growing expectation for that connection with our politicians?

TS: I’m a bit torn by that question. I’ll give you a couple answers. I think the Obama situation, his use of the technology, has created an expectation that all other politicians in all countries, especially Western countries, are going to have to address. He has created a standard of how you communicate. Certainly I think that there is going to be an expectation that grows out of that. At the same time, as a political scientist, I read the studies that show that the amount of young people who vote is not increasing at extensive levels, the amount of young people that are interested in politics is not increasing. … If you have this huge group of people who are not interested in politics, the technology can’t change that. One of the reasons that Canadian parties can get away with using the technology as conservatively as they do is that not a lot of people are paying that much attention to what they are doing. Therefore it is not that big a deal that they are not using it. They are well aware of who their demographics are. My mother, your mother, they are not running on to have a Twitter conversation with Jack Layton, so why would the parties spend all this time and effort? These are very savvy parties. They spend a lot of time polling and data-mining. They know who they’re talking to.

I am a bit torn by how to answer. There might be an expectation, but until Canadian politics becomes more interesting to Canadian young people, there is going to be a disjunction. As you said in the way that you gave the question, there was so much about Obama. He was this person who drew in young people, and then there was this technology. There was so much going on that he was able to capitalize on. I think, also with him, he knew who these people were. There is not a lot of scholarly information about it, but I suspect that it was not spontaneous. He didn’t wake up one day and say, ‘Hey, I’m going to use Twitter’. He knew that there were all these people on Twitter. Who did he hire to run his online campaign? Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Facebook. This did not happen serendipitously. There is a sort of mythology about how Obama used the technology that takes out the idea that elections are very organized and very detailed: who are they going to target and how are they going to target them? How can any of the mediums be used to be part of that? I think the Canadian parties can get away with their limited technological use because the people that pay the bills and come to the rallies are of a certain age, of a certain demographic, and aren’t that upset that they are not able to comment on Stephen Harper’s Facebook page.

CI: I guess how it falls out is that you need a personality to drive it, top-down almost, that political personality …

TS: You need a lot of things to drive it. One of the interesting things about the Internet is this mythology that somehow this activity can happen on its own. No, it needs television. You need Barack Obama to be on the television, commercials that say you should go to his website, and news reporters who go to the website and talk about YouTube videos. People would not be going to some of these things. I’m not sure if you know the ‘Vote Different’ ad, the one where they were not sure if the Obama campaign had put it out. Where did I hear about it? CNN. What did I do? I went to find it. I would suspect that millions of the people that went to see that video – it has been seen by five or six million people – I don’t have any numbers, but I would suspect that a good portion of those people heard about this video in the traditional media. There is always this assumption that it is going to happen independently on the Internet. It is part of the media system. It is one more tool in that arsenal. The only way that television goes away for me is if television integrates with the Internet, right? As long as they are separate technologies, television will be an important factor in driving the Internet campaigns.

CI: In one of your essays you mention that one main function for politicians in updating their websites is just to communicate with journalists. It seems counter-intuitive at first to think that you need a journalist to tell people about a page that everyone can access. Do you think we are in a transitional phase where the need for the journalist will be diminished, or do we need them there always to pull people’s attention to these things?

TS: It is a constant debate. Early thoughts about the Internet were that the Internet was going to get rid of intermediaries. It was going to create this politics in which intermediaries did not exist. What happened was intermediaries were really savvy at using the technology, for newspapers almost too savvy to the point where they are getting rid of their hard copy. They didn’t really think about the model very well, but they became so good at using the Internet to deliver news that they have excelled in it. For a very long time, what was the number one followed Twitter site? CNN! I mean, what? … As I said before, one of the issues for politics and the Internet is that it is a pull communication. You have to go there.

That function for people to tell you what is going on in the world still exists. I think the Internet certainly provides for people to go out there and to look at things, but I think that, because it is a pull communication, people have to be interested and have to want to go there in the first place. People need intermediaries. As much as there is still a distrust of media, the big, really important websites online, especially in terms of politics, are still the main ones.

CI: The CBC, the Globe and Mail …

TS: Absolutely. People do need context, and there is always this distrust of politicians. Don Newman’s commercial on CBC says ‘Keeping them Honest’. This is what it says. There is the sense that, if I go to the Liberal party website, I can only read so much before I have to be like, ‘well, I need some context for this’. So I don’t think it is going to get rid of intermediaries. Again, there is certainly a viral thing, certain types of videos and things will happen that will be passed around via other means, but they are rare.

CI: Earlier you mentioned Elizabeth May, her blog, and the slightly more interactive approach that the Green Party takes with their website. Reading your work, the Green Party is actually an interesting case. In one of your earlier essays you classify them as a minor party, but it is the one minor party that has been able to make a bit of a leap. Obviously she was included in the leader debates in the last election. How much do you think that their online savvy has contributed to their rise in the polls and their higher profile?

TS: I am not going to say that it doesn’t have an impact, but I am going to say that something that has a more important impact is the money. The decision to run three hundred eight candidates in 2004 was probably the best decision that they ever made. By doing that, and with the changes to the campaign financing law, they have secured themselves a financial base that is going to be beneficial for years and years to come. … But I think that, because the Green Party is part of a social movement, I think that their openness to technology is quite different than other parties. It allows them to connect to different groups. The Green Party is part of a network, and therefore the network technology sort of overlaps with their worldview. I think that is why they are more innovative and less afraid. In terms of their success, clearly they have done a lot of work. Their website is far more attractive than it used to be. … I think that there are good reasons why they use the technology, but their success probably came out of their decision prior to 2004 to run three hundred eight candidates. It was a good decision. In addition the environment has become a very important issue.

CI: I ask the question because the Green Party has a lot of support amongst young people, and it offers this example of the connection between young people, the Internet, and politics that probably you don’t have really with the other parties. Is their approach an example of what might happen as time moves along and more young people come along expecting interactivity?

TS: I am not sure what the future holds for the technology. One of the issues is that every election there is something new. One problem that all the parties have and campaigners have is that you have to try to find new ways to use new technologies effectively, and the old rules do not apply. How you use a website in 2004 does not apply to how you use Twitter in 2008, and how you might use whatever comes next. Look how fast Twitter has eclipsed Facebook in all discourse of 2.0 in the last three months. It is now the technology of the moment.

At the core though campaigns are about control. In the way that modern parties campaign it is about control. … When you go back to 1993 when Kim Campbell said that an election is not the time to talk about issues, it seems like a really absurd thing to say. Probably a very wrong thing to say, but she was correct, right? We don’t talk about issues during an election. Give me a break! We would like to believe that is what we are going to do, but we don’t. What the technology allows you to do is to discuss it all, but if we are not going to change elections away from style machines and we have debates where people bring in huge binders, what does the technology actually bring? Again, I am waiting to hear how people assess the way that Obama used the technology, but I suspect that the response of scholars is going to be far more tempered than the way that the media has interpreted this. His big success was getting people to give money, like Howard Dean did, and the reward for giving money was that he would send all sorts of emails and put you on his Twitter list. I think that there are a multitude of factors that impacted that campaign.

Canadian parties would have to become substantially more open for the technology to matter. Politics would have to change. There are little changes, like the idea that bloggers are being accredited. I think that is a new thing that never would have existed ten years ago. The idea that a blogger would do an interview with a party leader is new. … But the goal is still the same. The reason you want to speak to a prominent blogger is because a prominent blogger has access to prominent Liberals that you want to speak to, the same way that you want to speak with Jeffery Simpson or Andrew Coyne. I am not sure that the mindset about having a prominent blogger is any different than it is to give accreditation to the Globe and Mail or the CBC.

I guess I am not too sure what the value-add is. Thinking about Twitter, I am not sure what the value-add is. I am not too sure what the value is to knowing that Jack Layton was at CFRB at eleven thirty. I found out about it at five o’clock. I live in New Brunswick. That was in Toronto. I have to question what the value-add is for that. I am befuddled by Twitter as a technological tool. A website at least provides lots and lots of information and allows people to read through things. My assessment of YouTube is similar. YouTube gives that opportunity to be like ‘well, I saw a clip on television, Jack Layton made this announcement, and now I can watch the entire clip on YouTube.’ I think there is value to that. Some of these technologies, I am not sure what the value-add is, what it actually does.

CI: Last question: in your article on Garth Turner, as he hypes himself as Canada’s ‘digital democracy leader’, you mention that he feels he is putting his blog forward as a public service. This is interesting because for most people the idea of public service means that you are putting yourself ‘out there’ at some personal risk to try to do something beneficial for the community, and that definition kind of works for blogging. As Turner put up posts that were sometimes personal and sometimes controversial – obviously he got kicked out of the Conservative party – there is some risk to it. Do you think that there is a broadening of the idea of public service to include the need to connect with people through the Internet?

TS: The reason that I did the paper on Garth Turner is because what he was doing was unheard of. It was this thing that was not going on in any country, not in Britain and not in the United States and definitely not here. It was a unique moment that I am not too sure other people are going to be able to follow. When I presented that paper I had a cartoon that Garth Turner had on his website. It is a picture of Garth at a computer and Stephane Dion is behind him. He says ‘you know Garth, you’re not going to tell people what we talked about’, and on the screen it says, ‘you know Garth, you’re not going to …’. I always showed that at the end of my presentation to give the idea that the Internet is going to be used within the structure of the way that Canadian parties, American parties, and British parties campaign, and how politics in that country works. While I do think it will have the capacity to make changes, and some of them might be quite dramatic, these are systems that have been around. Party discipline has been around for quite a long period of time, and I am not too sure that the Internet in 2008 is going to have that capacity to shake that particular structure. Clearly there is going to have to be a real sort of change in parties and society – I am not even sure that Canadian government, responsible government, can work without party discipline.

One of the things I always temper people with, especially in my classes and when I talk to journalists, is that what goes on in the United States can’t be applied wholeheartedly to Canada because the systems are so different. One of the incentive structures that Barack Obama had that Canadian parties don’t have is the fact that he has to raise a kazillion dollars to win an election. Therefore this changes the way that they are going to use technology. Canadians parties just don’t have that incentive structure, and I think that those incentive structures, opportunity structures, those constraints of the political system, do frame the technology. So I am skeptical. I am not saying that it won’t bring changes. Television has brought changes, dramatic changes, but those changes took a heck of a long time. For a long time I used to say that it is like 1958 in terms of the Internet. Maybe now we are at 1962. This is the first time that anyone who has used the technology has actually won anything, with Barack Obama, like the way that JFK used television. How politics has been shaped by television has come a long way since the 1960 election. Television really has not changed that dramatically, but the Internet is not that technology. The Internet is this constantly changing, evolving technology. Parties have used television in a particular way. The imperatives of television are quite stable. What you need to do to be good on television is you need to be a good speaker, to be smartly dressed, and those imperatives have not changed. To make sure you are in front of a crowd that is racially diverse, and a person in a wheelchair, all these things that we do. The Internet does not have this stability. It creates a challenge for parties.

Date of Interview: 05/02/2009
Location: Chapters/Starbucks, Dieppe, NB
Link: www.mta.ca/faculty/socsci/polisci/tasmall.htm