As the country gears up for the November elections and online communities start to buzz, it’s instructive to look back at the way image myths were created, even with the openness of the Internet. The Howard Dean campaign is one example.
During the 2004 election, the Dean campaign was credited with using the Internet in new ways, reaching out to voters many assumed were college youth, otherwise disconnected from politics.
“Dean’s presidential campaign was remarkable at the time for its extensive use of the Internet to reach out to its supporters,” a Wikipedia summary now notes. “The candidate’s staff, and occasionally even the candidate, frequently ‘blogged’ while on the campaign trail and even sought advice on important campaign-related decisions — in at least two instances even making decisions through online polls of supporters.”
Dean’s approach was certainly innovative at the time, but what most people didn’t realize was that his supporters were not generally the disengaged college campus youth who wouldn’t have been involved if not for Dean’s Net tactics. Instead, Pew Internet Research reports in a 2005 study that “the group’s overall age distribution” was “fairly close to that of Democrats in the general public.” They were also “far wealthier” than general Democrats and were not the most frequent Internet users.
Read more here.