ABSTRACT
Instead, the campaign web presence is evolving into a cohesive online and off-line effort that combines political management with technology-powered tools, applications, and media. Books such as The Revolution Will Not Be Televised by Joe Trippi, Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-powered Politics by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Burning at the Grassroots: Inside the Dean Machine by Dana Dunnan, and The Political Promise of Blogging, edited by Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell1 look at the ways voters engage in politics through blogs and social networking sites. Recent studies by the George Washington University Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet (IPDI) have provided a body of research about people engaging in online politics, and have helped turn donors of small, online fundraising contributions into a new invisible primary. As the presidential campaigns geared up for the 2008 primaries, every new utility and online tactic made the news, and blogs such as TechPresident.com and TechRepublican.com covered online campaign news and strategy. To date, the Internet has become one of the most hyped-and most promising-tools in the political sphere. (See Chapter 13, by Emilienne Ireland on the use of the Internet in campaigns.)
While American politicos have worked to turn online campaigning into a craft and a science, many American candidates, issue groups, and political non profits have until recently ignored a tool that the rest of the world has embraced: the mobile phone-a technology that weighs (and costs) considerably less than a computer and that has the ability to mobilize hundreds of thousands of people within seconds. In fact, over the course of the last decade, mobile phones have fueled revolutions and mass protests across the globe, becoming less a tool of the political establishment and more a grassroots medium for a polarized and often unhappy electorate. The timeline for many of these major events peaks around critical elections, and the events themselves are as geographically different as they are politically diverse. In January, 2001 Filipino citizens rallied through text messages, radio, and television. Their mass protests in Manila led to the resignation of President Joseph Estrada, and People Power II, as it came to be called, has become the poster child for mobile-powered political movements. A year later, in April 2002, Hungarian
political parties used text messaging to launch dueling negative campaigns. On election day, voter turnout exceeded 71% at the polls. Text messages turned out mass protests in Spain the week of elections in March 2004. The protesters mobilized the day before voters went to the polls, a day in which all organized political activities are banned. The message was powerful and immediate: the government was lying about the Madrid train bombings. The protests led to the upset of the incumbent Popular Party by the Spanish Socialist Labour Party. Similar protests occurred during the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004.
