Studying the Relationship Between the Internet, New Media and Politics.

Message from the Director

In a heated primary season and Presidential election year, it’s easy to see the importance of studying the relationship between the Internet and other new media and politics. Whether the use of You Tube videos in presidential nomination debates or the growing sophistication of campaign websites, it is clear that how campaigns, and political figures more generally, connect with supporters and challenge opponents is changing in the face of the increasingly pervasive presence of the Internet in everyday American life.

At CITS, we have been on the bleeding edge of research on this topic for the entire life of the center. CITS founding Director, Bruce Bimber, is an internationally respected scholar on the relationship between political communication (including political information, campaigns, and collective political action) and the Internet. He began publishing on the Internet and politics in the mid-1990s and by the time CITS was founded, he had published on the Internet and campaigns, political information, and political communication, among other topics. Bruce went on while Director of CITS to write two award winning books on the relationship between technology and politics, Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power and Campaigning Online: The Internet in U.S. Elections (published with Richard Davis).

Also still under his tenure as Director, Bruce embarked on an NSF funded project on the Internet and collective action with colleagues Cynthia Stohl and Andrew Flanagin, examining how different voluntary organizations used the Internet. That project will soon wrap up and has resulted in several important theoretical articles and a book manuscript in progress.

By the time I joined the faculty of UCSB in 2002 and began to be involved in CITS in 2003, I had published on social movements and the Internet, a topic that continues to be a driving force in my own research. In 2006, I was awarded a prestigious NSF CAREER Award to fund my research on Internet activism from 2006-2011 with $405,000. My own research focuses on how people use Internet technologies—sometimes with little benefit and sometimes to surprising and impressive ends—to pursue political, social, and cultural causes they care about.

Bruce and I together head one of the CITS research initiatives, entitled “Social Collaboration and Dynamic Communities,” which examines more broadly how people work together on civic and political projects, how our understandings of “community” is changing in the Internet age, and how the relationship between community and collective projects may be changing.

This initiative has helped to inform our thinking, as well as the thinking of other initiative members, and framed the topics of discussion for the 2006 Santa Barbara Forum on Digital Transitions. The “SB Forum” as it has come to be known included discussions with approximately 120 high-level technologists, community builders, and politicos about the meaning of communities and their relationship to civic and political life. Folks who either representing, or had been previously employed by, groups like MoveOn, PetitionOnline, Get Active (now Convio), Free Press, and the New Organizing Institute mingled with community builders from Live Journal, MeetUp, Yahoo, and Wikipedia, discussed their common interests with technology thought leaders such as John Seely Brown and Howard Rheingold, and, of course, were in dialogue with scholars from CITS and our colleagues invited from around the country.

Looking back, the Center has really “grown up” while pursuing this work, and while also pursuing work in other areas simultaneously—such as studying the role of technology in education and the political economy of digital media in developing countries, to name two prominent examples. Looking forward, I expect that in 10 years CITS will have continued to be at the center of major advances in understanding the relationships between politics and technology, as well as at the center of advances in other research areas as well. I hope you will become of part of this mission, if you are not already active in CITS, so that you can be a co-creator of our future.