On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're an Underdog

by Shedon Rampton

Whoever wins the 2004 presidential election, it will be remembered historically as a watershed moment in American politics. The Internet, whose transformative potential has been predicted for years but never fully realized, has finally become a powerhouse organizing tool for political activists.

An Internet-centered campaign strategy enabled Howard Dean to emerge from nowhere and become a serious contender in the U.S. Democratic Primary. At the beginning of 2003, Dean had virtually no money and no name recognition outside his home state of Vermont. By the end of the year, his fundraising had not only outpaced his rivals but had set new records for presidential primaries. More importantly, the money was coming from sources that previously had not been able to participate meaningfully in campaign giving. Dean received 97 percent of his contributions from individual donors, with 61 percent coming from donors who gave $200 or less. Only 11 percent of Dean's money came from big-money donors who gave $2,000 or more. (By comparison, the Bush campaign has received 53 percent of its money from donors in the $2,000+ range.)

Money, for better and for worse, has long been the mother's milk of politics, and until now, the dominance of big donors has been due in large part to the fact that the transaction costs involved in recruiting and processing small donations eat up most of their value. The Internet has changed this equation by making it possible to raise large amounts of money from small donors at minimal cost, with credit card transaction fees constituting their biggest expense. "For the first time, you have a door into the political process that isn't marked 'big money,' " says Carol Darr, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet in Washington. "That changes everything."

Money, however, is only part of the picture. Equally, if not more importantly, the Internet has become a vehicle through which like-minded citizens are finding one another, building relationships and networks offline as well as online - or, as some geek activists like to put it, in "meatspace" as well as cyberspace.

For Whom the Web Tolls

The corporate PR community noticed the Internet's potential for political purposes early. In 1995, public relations specialist Edward Grefe, a former vice president of public affairs for the Philip Morris tobacco company, joined Republican Party organizer Martin Linsky to author their own book, titled The New Corporate Activism: Harnessing the Power of Grassroots Tactics for Your Organization. In it, they argued that a "new breed of guerrilla warriors" could win political battles for their corporate clients by adapting the tactics used by radical organizers on the left. "The essence of this new way," Grefe and Linsky argued, "is to marry 1990s communication and information technology with 1960s grassroots organizing techniques."

By 1998, however, Grefe began to worry that "communication and information technology" was actually a threat to the interests of his clients. "Do not ask for whom the web tolls. It may be your company," he wrote in the September 1998 issue of Impact, a public relations industry trade publication. As an example of this trend, Grefe cited the recent success of an international treaty to ban land mines. "From beginning to end," he wrote, "that globe-spanning campaign, coordinated by a Vermonter, was a movement started by people who had no power base, only a mission and a keen awareness of the rallying power of the Internet . . . . Most politicians around the world wished the campaign would fade away. It succeeded because it appealed to people at the grassroots in other countries who then pressed their leaders to act."

The result, Grefe warned, is that "we are being trumped. In nations around the world, grassroots movements are being formed that will spread fast and far beyond borders . . . . I would like to be able to assure you that the United States Congress - that Washington itself - is still the dominant player in handling world issues. That would be reassuring to those spending millions of dollars in this country to defeat agendas being driven by millions of people in other countries. I cannot, however, offer such assurance."

In 1998, computer entrepreneurs Wes Boyd and Joan Blades launched an online petition opposing the impeachment of President Bill Clinton following his affair with Monica Lewinsky. The petition, which called on Congress to "censure Clinton and move on" to more important matters, quickly attracted half a million signers. Since then, millions more have joined MoveOn.org's campaigns against the war in Iraq and other causes. In response to homophobic remarks by radio talk-show host Laura Schlessinger, gay rights activists launched StopDrLaura.com, which successfully campaigned for the cancellation of her TV show. In 1999, opponents of corporate-led globalization used the Internet effectively to coordinate protests against the World Trade Organization that came to be known as the "Battle in Seattle."

Here are some other examples of ways that the Internet has changed politics:

South Korea's traditionally authoritarian political system has been transformed within the space of a few years from conservative to liberal - "all seemingly overnight," the New York Times reported in March 2003. According to many observers, it noted, "the most important agent of change has been the Internet. . . . In the last year, as the elections were approaching, more and more people were getting their information and political analysis from spunky news services on the Internet instead of from the country's overwhelmingly conservative newspapers. Most influential by far has been a feisty three-year-old startup with the unusual name of OhmyNews."

OhmyNews takes its name from the idea that the news should be stories that make the reader exclaim, "Oh My!" It has used the Internet to merge traditional reporting with grassroots newsgathering. It has a staff of several dozen full-time reporters and editors, but most of its news comes from more than 20,000 "citizen reporters" who write for the site, contributing about 200 stories per day. This army of citizen reporters has enabled OhmyNews to explore stories that the mainstream media in Korea previously ignored. According to San Jose Mercury News tech columnist Dan Gillmor, "OhmyNews is transforming the 20th century's journalism-as-lecture model - where organizations tell the audience what the news is and the audience either buys it or doesn't - into something vastly more bottom-up, interactive and democratic."

The Philippines - a relatively poor country with a large technology gap - underwent its own political changes in 2000 and 2001, when opponents of President Joseph Estrada used web-linked mobile phones and Internet mass mailings to expose corruption and bring down his government. Christian Science Monitor reporter Ilene Prusher noted that Estrada's rapid downfall contrasted with the country's uprising against dictator Ferdinand Marcos 14 years previously, which took years to organize using ham-radio broadcasts and mimeographed fliers. The opponents of Estrada, she noted, "are putting tens of thousands of people into the streets of Manila in a matter of minutes. Call it 'spam democracy' or 'instant protesting,' but the pace of events in this society offers a cautionary tale for government leaders everywhere."

MoveOn.org's anti-war billboard rejected by Viacom.

The U.S. anti-war movement was unable to prevent the war in Iraq from occurring, but this failure should be balanced against some appreciation of the speed with which the movement was able to mobilize itself and make its views felt. The Bush administration did not begin its public push for war until September 2002, and within the space of only a few months, organizers pulled together demonstrations on February 15, 2003 that involved an estimated 11 million people worldwide - unprecedented numbers to protest a war that at that point had not yet begun.

New York Times writer George Packer called the protests "an instantaneous movement. . . . During the past three months it has gathered the numbers that took three years to build during Vietnam. It may be the fastest-growing protest movement in American history. . . . Internet democracy allows citizens to find one another directly, without phone trees or meetings of chapter organizations, and it amplifies their voices in the electronic storms or 'smart mobs' (masses summoned electronically) that it seems able to generate in a few hours. With cell phones and instant messaging, the time frame of protest might soon be the nanosecond."

Although the Howard Dean campaign is the most successful example to date of Internet fundraising in election campaigns, other candidates have also used it with some success. Jesse Ventura used the Internet effectively in his successful third-party run for governor of Minnesota. In 2000 presidential race, Bill Bradley raised more than $2 million via the Internet in his Democratic primary race against Al Gore. For the Republican primary that same year, John McCain used the Internet to raise $6.4 million.

As these examples all illustrate, the Internet seems to be more useful for "outsider" candidates than for party frontrunners. "The Internet is tailor-made for a populist, insurgent movement," says Joe Trippi, who managed the Howard Dean campaign. In his campaign memoir, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Trippi notes that the Internet's "roots in the open-source ARPAnet, its hacker culture, and its decentralized, scattered architecture make it difficult for big, establishment candidates, companies and media to gain control of it. And the establishment loathes what it can't control. This independence is by design, and the Internet community values above almost anything the distance it has from the slow, homogenous stream of American commerce and culture."

The Internet also invites a decentralized approach to campaigning that runs contrary to the traditional controlled, top-down, message-focused approach. "The mantra has always been, 'Keep your message consistent. Keep your message consistent,'" said John Hlinko, who has participated in Internet campaigns for MoveOn and the electoral primary campaign of Wesley Clark. "That was all well and good in the past. Now it's a recipe for disaster. . . . You can choose to have a Stalinist structure that's really doctrinaire and that's really opposed to grassroots. Or you can say, 'Go forth. Do what you're going to do.' As long as we're running in the same direction, it's much better to give some freedom."

Criticisms

Internet activism has been criticized on grounds that it gives disproportionate access to affluent activists, failing to empower poor people, minorities and elderly citizens who either lack access or are inexperienced in the new technologies. Another concern, expressed by author and law professor Cass Sunstein, is that online political discussions lead to "cyber-balkanization" - discussions that lead to fragmentation and polarization rather than consensus, because the same medium that lets people access a large number of news sources also lets them pinpoint the ones they agree with and ignore the rest.

"The experience of the echo chamber is easier to create with a computer than with many of the forms of political interaction that preceded it," Sunstein told the New York Times. "The discussion will be about strategy, or horse race issues or how bad the other candidates are, and it will seem like debate. It's not like this should be censored, but it can increase acrimony, increase extremism and make mutual understanding more difficult."

Another observer, University of California professor Barbara Epstein, warns that the impersonal nature of communication by computer may actually undermine important human contact that always has been crucial to social movements. However, some Internet sites, such as Meetup.com, have been used by activists for the very purpose of overcoming the social isolation that has become common in modern, TV-fed society.

The Internet has also been criticized as a place where technologically clever but antisocial "geeks and nerds" congregate, engaging in debates that are intense but irrelevant and have little impact on the "real world." Recently, however, the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet published a study in which it found that the Internet activists actually have considerable potential to influence the thinking and behavior of others offline. Its study was titled "Political Influentials Online in the 2004 Elections." It defined "online political citizens" (OPCs) as people who use the Internet to engage in activities such as visiting Web sites of candidates or political parties, making contributions to candidates or political organizations online, sending or receiving political email, or posting comments on political weblogs and chat rooms.

OPCs, the study found, "are not isolated cyber-geeks, as the media has portrayed them. On the contrary, OPCs are nearly seven times more likely than average citizens to serve as opinion leaders among their friends, relatives and colleagues. OPCs are disproportionately 'Influentials,' the Americans who "tell their neighbors what to buy, which politicians to support, and where to vacation. . . . Normally, 10% of Americans qualify as Influentials. Our study found that 69% of Online Political Citizens are Influentials. . . . Online Political Citizens have strong ties to their communities. They actively participate in local institutions, hold positions of responsibility and, like most Influentials, have strong opinions they do not hesitate to share. The data belie their reputation as isolated techies, aging ex-hippies or, as one news story would have us believe, love-spurned youths who have pulled up stakes to join the political equivalent of the Foreign Legion."