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Politics and Social Networks: Voters Make the Connection By Jose Antonio Vargas TOLEDO, Ohio -- Here in the battleground of all battleground states, the people in charge of this soon-to-end presidential campaign are Chris Myers and Katie Stoynoff. But Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama have never heard of them. 
Myers, 33, is a lifelong Republican. Though he's always been wary of McCain's "Straight Talk Express," he got onboard the moment it made room for Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. "McCain could not have made a better pick," says Myers, who lives in Toledo. On his community blog, Swamp Bubbles, where Palin is often maligned, Myers is her biggest defender. Stoynoff, 32, meanwhile, is a die-hard Democrat. "Must have been born that way," she jokes. Raised in the small town of Green, just outside Akron, she signed up with Obama's campaign on Feb. 10, 2007, the day he announced his candidacy. That afternoon, Stoynoff logged on to Obama's social networking site and formed an online group, Akron for Obama. Though they share almost nothing in common politically, Myers and Stoynoff are part of a growing set of Americans, "a participatory class," as Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet & American Life Project calls it. Online social networking sites -- socnets, from community blogs to YouTube -- are changing how the members of this class get their news, whom they trust to provide it and how they act on it. Whatever the source, they comfortably and routinely comment on the news, reproduce it, then forward it to relatives, friends, co-workers and, yes, strangers. The relationship between candidates and their supporters has shifted, too. Supporters see themselves less as agents of campaigns but as independent of them. And with the Internet making it easier than ever for voters to fund a candidate, act as their own publishers and search for information (and misinformation), the Washington political establishment -- candidates, strategists and journalists -- has been forced to loosen its grip on setting the narrative of the campaign. For voters such as Myers and Stoynoff, this is a sign of how the electoral process has been democratized and individualized. It's neither McCain's nor Obama's campaign. It's their campaign. "A campaign used to be the big gear trying to get you, the smaller gear, to turn around, to line up with their agenda and what they represent," Myers says. "Now, through blogging, through online donations, whatever, the voter is now the big gear."
The Socnet Forum The online group that Stoynoff created last year kept growing: from 10 members to 30, then 85 and now 323. Most of them she's communicated with only by e-mail. Some she's met in person, at canvassing walks and volunteer drives. She also joined other groups: Ohioans for Obama (1,502 members); Educators for Obama (1,786 members); Women for Obama (20,774). For most of 2007, it seemed as if Hillary Clinton had the nomination locked up; she had double-digit leads in national polls, and the media heralded her tightly controlled and well-oiled machine. For Stoynoff, it was comforting to have a network of Obama supporters online, "to feel like you're really a part of a grass-roots movement," she says. She started blogging in the spring of 2007 -- mostly for herself. "I blog when I feel a frustration, or I feel like I have to speak out," says Stoynoff, an English instructor at the University of Akron. At 6:29 a.m. last Friday, for example, she wrote on her blog: "I am so stressed that I sent out an email to 230 people with the wrong version of the word polls in it. Hello! I am an English teacher." What's surprised her most about all the blogging and networking, she says, was her ability to reach out to people whom she did not know, especially Clinton supporters who were reluctant to back Obama. "In my discussions, I allowed them to express their disappointment and then reminded them that what both Hillary and Barack were doing in their campaigns is bigger than the candidates," she says. "And to be honest, the Sarah Palin announcement finished the job." Over at Swamp Bubbles, the community blog that Myers created in January 2007, liberal voices often challenge Myers, a conservative Republican. The site is a free-for-all, open to anyone who wants to blog about northwest Ohio politics. It's a mixed bunch, "with some people leaning to the right, some to the left, some who are just plain nuts," he says. With the looming election, the site's traffic has doubled, from about 1,000 unique visitors a day to more than 2,000 in the past month. The site is not a money-maker. It doesn't have any ads, and Myers, a webmaster for the University of Michigan, pays $30 a month to keep the site running. While his own center-right views are hard to miss, Myers says he doesn't censor postings from those who disagree with him. Linking to a Rasmussen poll, Myers wrote on Sept. 5: "Following a Vice Presidential acceptance speech viewed live by more than 40 million people, Palin is viewed favorably by 58% of American voters." To which Pink Slip, another blogger on the site and a frequent nemesis of Myers, mockingly echoed a shot the McCain campaign had taken at Obama: "Wow -- she's quite the 'celebrity' now. Does that put her on par with Paris Hilton and Brittany [sic] Spears?" Myers welcomes that virtual tit for tat. "Look, I may not agree with Pink Slip -- I don't know what his or her real name is -- but sometimes Pink Slip makes comments that are good counterpoints that I haven't considered," he says. "In my everyday life -- my offline life -- I'm not in conversation with way far left people. On my site, I am." In 1995, Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard University, wrote the controversial essay "Bowling Alone," in which he argued that membership in civic organizations is declining and that this trend weakens our democracy. But the Internet, particularly social networks, has redefined networking, says Rory O'Connor, a fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. "Online, what we have are looser but more extensive networks. I'm 50 years old and I'm on Facebook with people I went to grade school with. Online, you have more people in your social network, and to a certain extent, you trust them. You get exposed to more points of view."
Reaching Out Four years ago, participating in a campaign online meant sending e-mail chains and planning e-mail campaigns. Now, it can be much more, from live-blogging an event for others who can't be there to creating YouTube videos. This transformation is not controlled by the campaigns. Sure, McCain and Obama have their own socnets -- McCainSpace and MyBarackObama-- but that doesn't guarantee that supporters will sign up. You don't need permission -- or any formal affiliation with the campaign -- to get involved. On Swamp Bubbles, Myers rarely blogged about McCain, even after he clinched the nomination. He felt guilty about this at first. "The traditional party structure is, 'Here's our nominee, fall in line,' " Myers says. But on his site, at least, not many conservatives did. "I have to be honest: That made me feel good. It meant that I wasn't alone in not being sold on McCain." He didn't volunteer for the campaign -- something he did for George W. Bush starting in June 2004. That changed when Palin joined the ticket. Now he's made calls on behalf of Palin, the first time he's done that all year. This past weekend, he went canvassing, another first. It's about 8:30 a.m. on a recent Wednesday at Bowling Green State University, about a 30-minute drive from Myers's house, where he lives with his wife, Xiaoyu, and her mother. Myers took the day off to see Palin. Inside the school's Anderson Arena, Myers sits in the stands, surrounded by a crowd of about 5,000, many of them carrying red, white and blue pompoms. Carrying his digital camera and itty-bitty netbook (a laptop weighing less than two pounds), he's here to live-blog the event. This is the first campaign rally he's gone to this year. Myers is a social conservative, and Palin, he says, is more in line with his views on issues such as abortion. Just as important, he says, is how Palin comes across -- sincere, authentic, her own person. After the news broke that the Republican National Committee spent $150,000 on clothes and makeup for Palin and her family, Myers thought the media were "just picking on her." He donated about $200 to the RNC between 2003 to 2005; he doesn't care if it spent money making Palin presentable. "She's out there campaigning in front of thousands of people," he says. When the media wrote that Palin was for the so-called Bridge to Nowhere before she was against it, Myers says: "It's what you walk through the door with. She ended up being against it in the end, and that's all that matters." Stoynoff, on the other hand, has been working for Obama's campaign for nearly two years. She has also donated about $150 to Obama. "I feel like I own a piece of this campaign. Like, I've bought and paid a piece of it, with work and heart and effort," she says. Things heated up after the Democratic convention in August. Now, about three to four nights a week, she's doing something campaign-related, such as organizing phone banks at Panera Bread, where Obama supporters gather with their cellphones to call neighbors, and helping plan canvassing walks around Summit County, where she grew up. All this work has placed a strain on the family. She has a 6-year-old son, Noah, and she hasn't spent as much time with as him as her husband, Jason. Like many others, Stoynoff first heard about Obama in 2004, when he gave the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention. She followed his career online, reading news stories and checking out his site. When he announced his candidacy in early 2007, she was sold. It's partly because of where Obama stands on issues like education. She's gone to the education section of his site so often that she's practically memorized his three core positions. He wants to invest in early childhood education. Her son has attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. If it weren't for early education, he wouldn't be where he is now, she says. But it's also because of what she thinks Obama represents. "He's said all along that he didn't believe in a red America and a blue America, that all this Republican and Democrat infighting isn't helping average Americans. Well, he's right. And right now, he's campaigning in blue states and red states. He's trying to bring more people in. I personally felt empowered by it," she says. Two days before Super Tuesday and more than a month before the Ohio primary, Stoynoff made a two-minute YouTube video and e-mailed it to her Akron for Obama online group. "Please feel free to forward this link to those who you think might need a bit of encouragement to make their primary decision," she wrote in the e-mail.
'A Major Breakthrough' Myers and Stoynoff are only two examples of the expanding "participatory class." In 2000, about 20 percent of Americans went online to interact with the presidential campaign, according to Pew. Four years ago, it grew to 37 percent. Earlier this year, Pew released a study saying that 46 percent of Americans have used the Internet to get their news, watch videos and share their thoughts on the race. By the end of the longest presidential campaign in U.S. history, Pew's predicts that figure will top 50 percent. "That's a milestone, a major breakthrough, and it has changed and will continue to change the way we think about politics in this country," he says. But is the Web creating a more informed citizenry, or just a meaner, nastier one? Palin and Obama, to name just two, have been the victims of anonymous e-mail chains. One falsely claims that Obama is a Muslim. Another is a fabricated list of books that Palin supposedly banned from her local library; Palin had no such list. "Here's the thing about the Internet: You, and only you, can believe what you want to believe," says Myers, the Republican. "You can go on Google and find Web sites that say Obama's a Muslim or a Buddhist or Palin supported this or that. But can you trust those Web sites? I, for one, don't pay any attention to online rumors. It's like junk food." Adds Stoynoff, the Democrat: "It's a lot easier to be mean and nasty online than in person. You can be anonymous, and often there are no consequences. That's the bad side of the Internet. But the good side is -- and the good side far outweighs the bad side, I think -- people can find each other and people have access to more information than ever before. People can make up their own minds. If so many people online hadn't made up their minds on Obama, I'm not sure he would have made it this far." |