e.politics: online advocacy tools & tactics

The Internet as a Political Tool

July 3rd, 2006

Updated June, 2008

Let’s think about the medium itself. What are the salient characteristics of the internet as a political communications tool?

1. Ease. Anyone with an internet connection can set up a website or launch an email campaign — the only significant barriers to entry are knowledge and time. Of course, the deeper your pockets, the more you can do, but the internet is unique among communications media in the extent to which it allows citizens to participate as the equals of major corporations and interest groups. Little guys can look and fight like big guys in the online world — and vice versa (just who IS behind that “grassroots” site you were reading yesterday?). As a New Yorker cartoon once put it, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”

2. Speed. An organization or activist can learn about a piece of legislation in the morning, get fact sheets and statements online by noon, generate thousands of emails to Congress by happy hour and have bloggers and mainstream journalists writing about it all day and the next night. And, of course, opponents can do the same.

3. Reach. Yes, as all those nice Nigerians who write me for help transferring money know, the internet does span the globe. This wide reach gives bloggers a tall soapbox, but more broadly, it lets all of us gather based on our interests. Which helps campaigns find us, and gather people based on what they care about rather than by where they live (aggregating supporters by interest rather than geographically). Just as Ebay finds that ecstatic Singaporean buyer for your signed photo of The Fonz, the internet connects campaigns with scattered supporters we’d never meet in the physical world.

4. Interconnection. Linking is the web’s vital technology and its essential characteristic. True since the first web page flickered up on a copy of NCSA Mosaic, it’s true today — the central brilliance of the latest generation of web tools (social networking sites, blogs, Flickr and the rest of the so-called Web 2.0 technologies) is that they rely on people’s interconnection of ideas for their strength. It’s a classic example of the network effect: one fax machine is useless, two fax machines can hold a conversation, and 100 million of them make an indispensible business tool. On the web, the connections between ideas enhance the value of the individual pieces.
As we’ll talk about next, the same idea holds true for the different parts of your own online advocacy: your website helps build your email list which creates an initial audience for your hilarious-but-serious video clip which sends traffic back to your site which builds your email list even further which helps you grow a donor base which helps fund the website and your social networking outreach. Just like a pyramid scheme, only distressingly legal.

Next: Five Simple Rules for Online Politics

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