Political Slacktivism Round 2: Howard Dean

Howard Dean’s political campaign was just short of infallible: he raised a ton of money (mostly online), got people to volunteer for him even though only around a quarter of them learned about the recruiting meetings from peers, and attracted a huge crowd of people to visit his site and read his platform. While using the Internet definitely meant Dean wouldn’t be viewed as just a Dark Horse candidate, it also meant that the Internet plays a very important role in politics.

But it’s important to delineate the difference between the web playing an important role versus playing an important role that can change the outcome of elections. Just like we discussed the topic of ‘slacktivism’ in class, perhaps Dean’s online campaign was just a way for early adopters of political involvement on the Internet to feel like they were doing more with less work. “It did many of the things successful campaigns do, of course — got press and raised money and excited people and even got potential voters to aver to campaign workers and pollsters that they would vote for him when the time came. When the time came, however, they didn’t” (Shirky, Existing DeanSpace, p 2). 

A question that arises upon analyzing that statement: who is on the site, then? The Internet also has the extremely deceiving problem that anyone can pledge support. People under 18 who are likely much more internet-savvy than older generations. Perhaps college students too, who can contribute a couple dollars but don’t have time to show up to the polls. Additionally there are other biases inherent to the web’s political use. “Although liberals and conservatives are online in roughly equal numbers, survey data suggest that liberals visit political web sites much more than do moderates or conservatives. This likely helped Dean by making the online campaign, in essence, an early primary among a very liberal constituency” (Hindman, 121).

In addition to the news media reporting over 1,000 stories that mentioned Dean and his use of the web, MoveOn.org sponsored an “online primary” which symbolized his win (Hindman, 123-124) but online support simply does not translate to actual action outside the computer screen. Getting a few people to volunteer, a lot of people to go to a candidate’s website, and raising a lot of money (even millions) online doesn’t translate to an automatic win. People need to physically enter a voting booth and cast a ballot, and until that can happen on the web, it’s simply another way for people to trick themselves into thinking they’re getting involved.