Abstract
This chapter focuses on how the MoveOn model informed the campaigns of Howard Dean in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2008. It suggests that Dean’s experience proved that the use of digital networked media could help challenge established hierarchies of power in the American political milieu in a manner that for scope and reach was unprecedented. By following and implementing on Dean’s playbook, the chapter argues, the Obama campaign was able to establish a thriving grassroots movement of many millions of networked citizens whose influence on the election was unparalleled by any of the other contenders’ supporters’ group.
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Clausing 1999.
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MoveOn Primaries started on Tuesday, June 24, 2003, and last 48 hours. The top-three candidates were: (1) Dean (votes 139.360 = 43.87%), (2) Kucinich (76,000 = 23.93%), and (3) Kerry (49.973 15.73%) who eventually became the Democratic Party nominee for the 2004 Presidential Election. “Report on the 2003 MoveOn.org PAC Primary” 2003.
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Blog : the first reference to the term blog dates back to 1999, when Jon Barger, a fairly unknown American computer-savvy, started his own website, the Robot Wisdom Weblog (www.robotwisdom.com—no longer working). Barger kept a public log of his thoughts on his website. The technical simplicity of blog sites made the process—from thinking to that of publishing online—easy and immediate. The content of these posts bounced ‘unapologetically from high culture to low, from silly to serious, from politics to porn’. Blogosphere : Barger can be considered the first blogger, the archetypical member of the then nascent blogosphere, the virtual intellectual dialogical space shared by the growing constellation of blogs, linking and sharing each other’s content. William T. Quick, founder, editor and publisher of the Daily Pundit, an online journal, is usually credited as the first to use the term in his most widely adopted meaning, which refers to a contraction of three different words: weblogs, the Greek term logos (meaning: reason, discourse, speech), and sphere. However, it is worth noting here that the actual first mention of the term, although less serious than Quick’s post, dates back to a message appeared on Brad L. Graham’s website on the 10 September 1999. The post mocked the use and transformation of new terms popularising the Internet such as weblog. The author wrote: ‘Is blog- (or -blog) poised to become the prefix/suffix of the next century? Will we soon suffer from (and tire of) blogorreah? Despite its whimsical provenance, it’s an awkward, homely little word. Goodbye, cyberspace! Hello, blogiverse! Blogosphere? Blogmos? (Carl Sagan: “Imagine billions and billions and billions of blogs.”)’ See: Quick 2002; and Graham 1999.
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Lessig 2003—The web address was http://deancalltoaction.blogspot.com/.
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The web address was http://blogforamerica.com—the address belongs now to a different organisation.
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Lessig 2003.
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Wired Staff 2004.
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Lessig 2003.
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Trippi 2009, 86, 148.
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Web 2.0 was a shorthand buzzword used to describe the technical as well as the social and economic elements of the evolution of the Web between the 1990s and early 2000s. The main difference with the World Wide Web of the past was its underlying technology. In the 1990s, most Web applications were strikingly hierarchical and static in their design. The technology design followed strong top-down-based procedures for management and content creation, as it required a basic know-how more suitable for tech-savvy people (back then the majority of the potential users of the Web); therefore, end-users experienced the Web simply as a product to consume passively. A finished product, unchangeable, very much like a newspaper or a book bought at a local newsstand. In the early 2000s, however, the technology changed, considerably. The Web and its many applications moved towards a new dimension, one that was and still is, more dynamic and participatory. Users became an integral active part of the content-production cycle: they did not only consume information, but sent inputs; uploaded material; actively participated in the creation and implementation process of content and features of websites. Key to this evolution was the growing popularity of the Internet as communication medium (50 million users in 1995, 350 million in 2000 and 1.5 billion in 2008) coupled with the arrival in the market of user-friendly web-editors and content management systems software that allowed—and still allow—users to create or modify easily existing pages; meanwhile the loss of confidence in Internet-based business, a product of the 2001 worldwide economic crisis known as the DotCom Bubble Burst, pushed companies to lower considerably their financial exposure with Internet start-up ventures and invest more wisely on web-companies that relied on user-generated content—For Web 2.0 definition see: O’Reilly 2005; see also discussion in Zimmer 2008.
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Kreiss 2012, 9–12.
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Keeter, Funk, and Kennedy 2005, 3–4.
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Kohut et al. 2005, 20–25.
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Kuhn 2004.
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Horrigan 2008.
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Bausch and McGiboney 2008.
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Pew Research Center 2008.
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Among the Republican candidates for instance, Ron Paul thanks to the popularity his libertarian views ‘attracted the largest Internet following during the 2008 Republican primaries’. Vaccari 2010, 326.
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Kreiss 2012, 13–14.
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Drehle 2008.
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Dorning and Tankersley 2008.
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Quoted in Putnam 2001, 19.
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Carr 2008.
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Chadwick 2013, 113ff.
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Vaccari 2010, 326–29.
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Blades and Boyd 2004, III, XIV.
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Kiss 2008.
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Talbot 2008.
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Stirland 2008.
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In detail: Obama: 197,444 preferences; Clinton: 83,084. Source: MoveOn Members Endorse Obama, Email from MoveOn email list, received February 1, 2008, 17:15.
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URGENT: Presidential Endorsement: Vote Today! Email from MoveOn email list, received 31 January 2008, 17:50.
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MoveOn Political Action Committee 2008.
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MoveOn Staff 2008.
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Vargas 2008b.
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Vargas 2008a.
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Vargas 2008b.
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Trippi 2008.
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Carr 2008.
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Navarria, G. (2019). A Model Imitated: From Dean to Obama. In: The Networked Citizen. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3293-7_5
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