Obama's Uncertain Journey into MySpace

Politicians and political campaigns are still tentatively feeling their way around cyberspace, and nowhere has that sense of first steps and their attendant pitfalls become clearer than in the recent imbroglio involving the fate of Senator Barack Obama's MySpace page.

If you haven't heard, the drama involves a dispute over a MySpace page created independently of the Senator's presidential campaign by volunteer Joe Anthony. What began as a monumentally successful grassroots effort -- at one point the page had 160,000 friends -- has devolved into a fascinating, if somewhat ugly, dispute over control of the page. All the details are in this thorough, well-reported account from the Techpresident website, which is monitoring how the 2008 presidential candidates are using the Web. (Here's a late-breaking update.)

We thought we should check in with Kirsten Foot and Steve Schneider for their take on the story. They are the authors of Web Campaigning, which traces the evolution of politics on the Internet and includes an exhaustive analysis of campaign sites from the 2000, 2002, and 2004 elections. Here's what they had to say:

The Obama MySpace story demonstrates that the central challenge for campaign organizations remains what it has been since the advent of Web politics: coping with the loss of centralized control of communications. In 2000 and 2004, these issues were primarily focused on struggles over domain names and satirical sites, or perhaps involved relatively obscure message boards which could be, by and large, safely ignored. The full-throated emergence of viral politics illustrates the increasingly complex task involved in trying to capitalize on the energy created by the marriage of social-networking capabilities and enthusiastic volunteers. While today's campaign organizations have moved far beyond merely informing via the Web, and recognize the necessity of facilitating extensive opportunities for involvement and mobilization, they are only reluctantly willing to do so with online structures over which they have little or no direct control. MySpace is only the latest frontier of Web politics, accelerating the trend towards multiple intersecting and cross-syndicated platforms produced by an ever-widening array of political actors. The savvy organizations, recognizing the futility of commanding and controlling, will seek to coordinate and coproduce.

The scope of these challenges, of course, seems to expand exponentially each presidential campaign cycle. While in 2000 campaigns struggled to maintain dozens of mailing lists, and in 2004 tried to manage links to hundreds of volunteer-produced sites, in 2008 the immediate task facing the Obama campaign involves more than 160,000 MySpace friends. There was some comfort in the "if you build it they will come" days. Now, campaign organizations don't get to build it, or own it. If they're skilled and shrewd, they may get to use it to their advantage.

We have yet another opportunity in 2008, as we have for the past three presidential elections, to observe and study these emerging Web campaigning practices as candidates come to grips -- or don't -- with the ever-changing phenomenon of Web politics.

Comments

[Alex Hammer]

Joe Anthony Backs Down: Obama 1: New Media 0
http://hammer2006.blogspot.com/2007/05/joe-anthony-backs-down-obama-1-new.html

Joe Anthony Won't Sue: TechPresident
http://hammer2006.blogspot.com/2007/05/joe-anthony-wont-sue-techpresident-also.html

[Do the Right Thing, Barack]

You may want to check-out the "Do the Right Thing, Barack" blog. It is crossposted to both MySpace (http://myspace.com/dotherightthingbarack) and Blogspot (http://dotherightthingbarack.blogspot.com)