The Obamachine: Techno-politics 2.0
Cheris A. Stallings-Carpenter

The proliferation of online campaign content has brought an end to an era of broadcast media dominance over US national politics; and has resulted in the drastic reconstruction of the traditional fundraising machinations of American politics. Since the mid-1990s, there have been growing discussions on Internet activism and how new media has impacted participatory democracy and social justice in the United States. The increased usage of the Internet in political campaigning has also impacted some of the foundational ways that politics has historically been conducted in the United States. This paper analyzes a framework posited by Andrew Chadwick which conceptualizes the ways in e-democracy is transformative for political engagement. Further, this paper argues that during the 2008 Presidential campaign president- elect Barack Obama attained unprecedented success through the utilization of the internet as a primary vehicle for his political campaign. Obama's innovative approaches to US politicking have led to one of the most transformative eras in US political history and catapulted him to an overwhelming victory for President of the United States.

In 2004, Howard Dean's campaign during the Democratic primaries marked the first time a candidate successfully funded a campaign by utilizing the internet for fund-raising and partisan politicking. Four years later, the 2008 presidential election season was further redefined by a new dynamic of interaction between political candidates and the electorate.  Led by charismatic candidate presidential candidate Barack Obama a new culture of US voters became empowered by the plethora of political punditry available online. The result was a presidential election battled almost exclusively on the internet, with the candidates immersing themselves in a frenzied campaigning of US citizens.

In order to understand the effects of internet on the US political environment, e-democracy must first be conceptualized. Andrew Chadwick, author of the "Handbook of Internet Politics", conceptualized a framework for e-democracy which utilized a technology-centered approach to elucidate the broader implications of political behavior related to voter participation. Chadwick's framework conceptualizes e-democracy in the Web 2.0 environment as being comprised of seven key components. (Chadwick, 2008) Chadwick's seven themes are:

1.      the internet as a platform for political discourse

2.      the collective intelligence emergent from political web

3.      the importance of data over particular software and hardware applications

4.      perpetual experimentalism in the public domain

5.      the creation of small scale forms of political engagement through consumerism

6.      the propagation of political content over multiple applications

7.      rich user experiences on political websites

Consider research conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press which found that throughout during the spring of the 2008 US presidential campaign season, a full 46 percent of all Americans used the Internet, e-mail, or phone text messaging for political purposes. (Rainie, et al., 2008) That was the percentage of those who received news and information about the campaign, used e-mail to discuss campaign matters, and used phone texting for the same purpose. (Rainie, et al., 2008)

Richard Rogers author of Information Politics on the Web argues the internet is a disruptive technology in which official versions of reality and policies to shape it by government are routinely shattered by citizen journalists and activists. (Rogers, 2004) It is because of this capacity for disrupting the status quo and undermining the elite that is the key to re-democratizing American politics and media because it changes the nature of political participation and removes the barriers of information professionalization.  Political information was the province of professional journalists, pollsters, and commentators, who themselves were the property of giant media corporations. The internet as forum for political engagement has demonstrably changed this reality in the United States.

The internet has reshaped notions of American political identity and community and has established the internet as a legitimate medium of the market place of ideas. The proliferation of online campaign content has also brought an end to an era of broadcast media dominance over US national politics; and has resulted in the drastic reconstruction of the traditional fundraising machinations of American politics.

The Obamachine actualized the seven concepts described by Andrew Chadwick as being important for e-democracy. The Obamachine first and foremost established the internet as its political platform. Then through careful tracking and analysis of the "collective intelligence" of the electorate and the ways in which they utilized the internet the Obamachine was able to specifically tailor their campaign messages to precisely target potential voters. The Obamachine revolutionized the key elements of a modern US political campaign through the combination of multi-platforms of online communication with traditional campaign methods. His campaign was not concerned with any one particular hardware or software web app to deliver its campaign messages and often experimented with a variety of online platforms. The multiplatform success of Obama's campaign was evidenced by the number of innovations he initiated to engage potential voters, "MyBarackObama.com, VoteforChange.com, YouTube, Wikipedia, emails, text messages" all of which were web apps that were previously untested for the purpose of political campaigning. Through this propagation of political content the Obamachine provided rich online user experiences for their potential voters and stimulated electoral participation from a pool of unregistered voters. Lastly, the Obamachine's fund-raising strategies politically engaged small money donors (previously considered unimportant to a political campaign) and produced a money-making juggernaut which netted well-over 700 million US dollars. (OpenSecerets.org, 2009)

Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign successfully demonstrated that the internet can enable Americans to have more creative involvement with the political process to the benefit of their overall political engagement.