Howard, P. New Media Campaigns…. Ch5 (pp 170-238)

Campaign Managers that try and justify data mining that obviously violates the privacy and trust of citizens are truly the bottom of the barrel. How they can even assemble and motivate the teams of designers and coders to carry out this type of operation is beyond me. As a designer myself, anyone assisting in this is truly a traitor the cause. High Treason.
“When campaign managers pushed designers to build these kinds of hypermedia tools, staff reacted ambiguously and were neither enthusiastic nor critical. Even when designers expressed their reluctance to pursue problematic campaign strategies, they did so with peers, and their reservations were only weakly signaled to senior managers.”
Sorry Big Brother, but “Win At All Costs” applies to college football, not political e-campaigns.

Thin Shadow and Privatized Citizenship

Howard’s description of a citizen in the eyes of the Founding Fathers and the evolution into a thinned citizen is interesting and really made me think about voting and campaigns final results. Lets say a citizen spends hundreds of hours helping with a campaign, lots of money out of their own pockets for something they are passionate about and believe in. Then there is also the citizen who rolls out of bed, throws darts at a board to pick a candidate, and then goes and casts a vote. Sounds like a huge difference in citizen types right? The final line is this; both votes count exactly the same. 1 vote.
While the thinned citizen might not seem vulnerable to campaign agendas due to the flippant nature of their invested time spent in politics, the e-campaign scavengers have still found ways to track and predict opinions, using data shadows. Everything we do in our daily lives online casts a shadow, and hypermedia is constantly present to collect information from this shadow.
Howards third point in this segment deals with privatized citizenship, although for the average reader not versed in digital democracy, it was difficult to process. My initial reaction to this page was : man what

:manwhat:

confused
Hopefully class tonight can shed some light into this.
As for hypermedia campaigns, you can emot-frogout
That chapter kind of made me want to run into the woods and live in a hut so they cant mine my precious data.