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Web Campaigning

Web campaigning can be defined as activities with political objectives that are manifested in, inscribed on, and enabled through the World Wide Web. The terms e-campaign or hypermedia campaign are sometimes used synonymously with Web campaigning but may also be used to describe campaigns' use of a broader array of information and communication technologies in addition to the Web. To understand Web campaigning, it is important to understand its characteristics, history, and anticipated trends.

Characteristics of Web Campaigning

Various actors engage in Web campaigning in a range of sociopolitical contexts. Candidates for public office and their campaign organizations, along with political parties, seek to accomplish electoral objectives by creating and managing a Web presence that promotes themselves through one or more Web sites. The pursuit of electoral, legislative, and other political aims through the Web by advocacy groups, lobbying organizations, and individual citizens constitutes Web campaigning as well. Some Web campaigning, including most in the electoral arena, is accompanied by simultaneous and closely linked offline campaigning as well. In these cases, Web campaigning is part of a larger set of activities that include face-to-face interactions and communication through other forms of media. Other Web campaigning is initiated, organized, and enacted largely if not solely online. Sometimes, Web campaigning activities expand to the offline arena over time, such as the international campaigns against sportswear manufacturers accused of supporting sweatshops or in favor of fair trade coffee.

Political actors enact and extend campaign activities on the Web by employing one or more Web production practices. These practices can include informing site visitors about a candidate or cause, involving site visitors in supporting the campaign, enabling site visitors to connect with other political actors online or offline, and mobilizing supporters to become advocates of the candidate or cause. Electoral campaigns, as well as largely integrating Internet applications into traditional campaign activities, have also developed important and highly effective tools for mobilizing activists. In developing a Web presence that goes beyond informing and involving supporters, campaign organizations cede to others some of the control they have traditionally sought to maintain. Web production decisions by political actors reflect the inherent tensions between the desire to maintain control over messages and resources and the generally decentralizing dynamic of Web-based communication.

History of Electoral Web Campaigning

Web campaigning emerged from the experiences of political actors' use of the pre-Web Internet. The history of the Internet begins with the advent of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) in the United States in the mid-1960s. The first overtly political uses of the Internet are usually traced back to Usenet, which was first introduced in 1979. By 1986, some political actors, most often advocacy organizations with international constituencies, had adopted e-mail and bulletin board systems and were using these Internet applications intensively. Many users and contemporaneous scholars believed that computer networking technology had the potential to dramatically alter the nature and shape of political discourse, and of democracy itself, by engaging and energizing new participants in the political process. Following the January 1994 introduction of Mosaic 2.0, the first Web browser that presented integrated graphics, a few electoral campaign organizations in the United States launched Web sites, including Senators Diane Feinstein (California) and Edward M. Kennedy (Massachusetts).

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