Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama

ISBN-13: 9780199936786 / Angielski / Miękka / 2012 / 248 str.

Daniel Kreiss

Opis

Taking Our Country Back presents the previously untold history of the uptake of new media in Democratic electoral campaigning over the last decade. Drawing on interviews with more than sixty political staffers, fieldwork during the 2008 primaries and general election, and archival research, Daniel Kreiss shows how a group of young, technically-skilled Internet staffers came together on the Howard Dean campaign and created a series of innovations in organization, tools, and practice that have changed the elections game. He charts how these individuals carried their innovations across Democratic politics, contributing to a number of electoral victories, including Barack Obama's historic bid for the presidency. In revealing this history, the book provides a rich empirical look at the communication tools, practices, and infrastructure that shape contemporary online campaigning.

Taking Our Country Back is a serious and vital analysis, both on-the-ground and theoretical, of how a small group of visionary people transformed what campaigning means today and how technical and cultural work coordinates collective action.

Recenzje

The book's meticulous tracking of various technologies, firms, and staffers' careers contextualizes how the successful 2008 Obama campaign stood on the virtual shoulders of the 2004 Dean campaign. Ultimately, Kreiss's findings fill a gap in extant research by exploring the interrelationship of new media nad politics through a lens primarily focused on those two campaigns... Kreiss's book offers to practitioners lessons learned from a decade of Democratic political online campaigns and provides scholars with a research agenda to further develop this important topic.

O autorze

Daniel Kreiss is Assistant Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.