// 03.19.2009 at 11:57 am //

‘Link between democracy, internet access’

The Barack Obama campaign in 2008, was phenomenal for navigating the online media landscape, and for establishing direct relationship with people, raising questions about the role of traditional media, said Nancy Scola of Tech President at the conference Election Times: Harnessing the Power of New Media in Berlin on March 19.

The conference started on a high note with critical look into the Obama campaign and its use of new media delivered by first keynote speaker Nancy Scola of TechPresident. The campaign managers made optimal use of all online media tools to reach out to the voter. And the results are there for all to see, said Scola.

The US experience

In her paper titled “Ballot casters to collaborators”, she demystefied the Obama campaign by saying that Team Obama used the Internet motto of “don’t wait for people to come to you, go where people are”.

The Obama campaign used a team of media professionals tap into Internet communities, create new ones and integrated Online and offline campaign tools to build support and followers across the country. These Online communities were all connected via the mybarackobama.com site. It tapped into, for instance, online communities such as the American Samoans for Obama, and the Idaho veterans for Obama. The latter were independent online communities which the campaign team however used to its advantage.

In using the top-down system of information dissemination, the Obama campaign controlled what information went out by “feeding” online communities with particular information that they wanted to go out.

A digital team of experienced professional created videos to exploit the fact that two thirds of Americans watched political videos. These were so successful that by the end of the campaign Hillary Clinton had posted only 92 videos on the Internet, John McCain, 100 and the Obama team had 1,800 videos watched through YouTube.

The Online communities meant that the Obama team had a ready network of supporters on the ground and the headquarters made sure they kept them informed so that they could disseminate information in their localities. Through this, it was possible to track the most active support groups  and arrange for the candidate to fly in and address a ready-made audience. They simply identified these groups and moved in to work with them.

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Beyond the Online communities, the Obama team had a special cell phone made called the Obama iphone app to keep all supporters in touch through text messaging.

The phenomenon of the Obama Online communities meant that the candidate had ready numbers which translated into supporters, fundraising pools and of course the famous 40,000 bloggers that “fed” the mybarackobama site.

But all said and done, Scola reiterated that this worked because the Americam voters were ready for a new way of conducting politics and the Obama team simply had the best strategy to tap into the new media.

By the time the campaign was reaching a defining moment, in March 18, 2008, Obama gave a speech on CNN and the video was watched 1.2 million times over on YouTube!

She was of the opinion that, the fact that there is too much information out there being given to the media and consumers directly “deepens the need for journalism”. That it is the press’s call to inform people from a professional point of view.

Volatile polities, dynamic cell space

But successful usage of online media in elections is not just a US story. Interestingly, the most unstable democracies in the world, some with track record of brutality and state coercion, have witnessed an imaginative use of digital media in the elections in recent months. Prof Harry Dugmore, MTN Chair of Media and Mobile Communication at the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University, South Africa, presented case studies from Ghana and Zimbabwe. “Technology will allow people in Africa to leapfrog so that they can catch up with the world without all those stages of development,” said Dugmore, adding that by June 2009, people using cell phones would outstrip those using internet.

Taking up the case of Ghana election held in December 2008, he pointed out how the electoral monitoring using digital media allowed people to exercise their will. The election results were very close and the two final candidates, John Atta Mills and Nana Afoko-Addo accepted the election result without delay. “There was a new level of protection thanks to extra eyes and thumbs monitoring the elections.”

In Zimbabwe, which is witnessing lowest age expectancy and highest inflation, besides a brutal police state, elections last year were different. He pointed at the role that twitter, SMSs, and graphic depiction of state atrocities on web pages had on the first phase of poll, in which President Mugabe lost, with 43.2 per cent of vote. It’s another matter that in the second phase, due to heavy coercion, he won, with 85.5 per cent votes.

On the whole, Dugmore felt, there was a link between more internet and cell access and more democracy. From seven countries enjoying democracy in 1991, the number stood at 35 in 2006. Though the internet penetration was still 5.6 per cent as against world average of 23.5 per cent, there was a shift in election dynamics, from identity-based voting to developmental voting.

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Earlier, giving his welcome speech, Dr Roland Gerschermann, Managing Director, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH, emphasised the role of digital media in politics, saying, “Freedom of choice cannot be without freedom of expression.”

Erich Stather, State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, emphasised that online media can play a role, provided people get access to it across the society. He also believed, “What you need is a political message. If you don’t have it, who will listen?”

Astrid Kohl, director, IIJ of InWent, said online media was helping break the hierarchical flow of communication, and the election results in some countries had already showed it.

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// Tagged Featured, Elections, Ghana, mobile, Obama, SMS, The Conference, Twitter, Zimbabwe