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If the 2004 presidential campaigns demonstrated a paradigm shift as mass-mediated campaigning gave way to digital media campaigning, which in turn changed the power dynamic between supporters and campaigns, the 2008 election was about learning to control supporters through networked interactivity to the campaign’s greatest advantage. The Obama campaign built upon not just the innovations from 2004, but also upon the earlier practices from 2000 and 1996, establishing an effective digital media strategy for fundraising and organizing. Other candidates, especially Democratic primary candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican primary candidate Ron Paul, experimented with and centralized DCTs as key components of their campaigns. The financial disadvantage John McCain had with Obama in the general election was substantial. McCain’s campaign had little choice but to focus on tried-and-true mass-mediated campaigning, and could not effort to fully build out DCTs to work to its advantage.

This chapter provides an overview of key arguments and goals. A key mission of the book is to help scholars of political communication and digital media contextualize and better understand the shifting practices by campaigns long before Barack Obama was a household name. To do so, this chapter borrows from the work of Robert Denton, looking especially at the political and social context, the organization, fundraising, and image construction of the candidates, as well as factoring in the role of journalists and the hybrid media environment and public opinion polling. The chapter also examines citizen involvement in the campaign, describing how campaigns’ use of DCTs, and the specific affordance of interactivity, highlights that the objective of a campaign is to win, not to genuinely engage citizens in the campaign. This chapter concludes by providing a brief outline of the book, underscoring the shifting campaign practices that occurred between 1996 and 2012.

The 2000 campaigns focused on experimentation with digital communication technologies (DCTs). Changes in election laws made collecting contributions online feasible, which became a focus of campaigns. John McCain was savvy at capitalizing on fundraising, establishing the infrastructure to channel enthusiasm into money following key events. George Bush built a massive voter file for microtargeting. Steve Forbes constructed an image as the first “Internet candidate,” while Al Gore, who also should have done so, instead used DCTs conservatively. Bill Bradley developed a community involvement kit, a clear indication that campaigns began to see the potential of two-step flow. Yet campaigns were still generally distrustful of what might happen if they let their supporters genuinely engage with the campaign. As hierarchical organizations with professional and highly paid senior staff who at their gut level and through their experience know how to campaign, they found the idea of more citizen-driven efforts unthinkable.

The 2012 presidential candidates refined proven practices and ran the most data-driven campaigns in history. The candidates deployed social media, strategic online ad buys, and their websites as the cornerstones of their campaign practices in the increasingly complex, hybrid media environment. Obama’s and Romney’s campaigns produced a variety of tactics to interact with supporters in a way that suggested that controlled interactivity had been perfected. They built massive voter files to target the usual demographic groups while expanding to new groups typically unreached by campaigns, and conducted careful message testing to yield maximum effect. Yet for the carefully scripted work to structure interactivity between supporters and the campaign and among supporters to greatest advantage for the candidate, a substantial challenge remained: how to manage messaging in the complex, hybrid media environment where gaffes and opposition discourse can be amplified in ways unintended and with unknown consequences for campaigns.

This chapter establishes the relevance of nationalism in the digital age, and it discusses the importance of contemporary China in this regard, not merely as a simple case, but as a vast laboratory for social, cultural, and political change. The chapter introduces the ambiguities and contradictions that characterize digital politics in China today, and it outlines the themes that shape scholarly debates about digital China. This prominently includes discussions about the potential of digital technologies like the internet to empower Chinese citizens against the state and the ruling Chinese Communist Party. The introduction questions such interpretations of digital technologies as inherently democratizing. Instead, it makes the case that digital politics should not be viewed as simple struggles between state and society, but rather as complex negotiations, collaborations, and persuasions that benefit various stake-holders. Nationalist discourses in digital China, and particularly Chinese online representations of Japan, are a case in point.

Chapter 8 examines information and communication governance in the People’s Republic of China, a topic that is closely linked to broader debates about Chinese politics in the twenty-first century. The chapter reviews discussions about authoritarian politics, arguing that ongoing debates about authoritarianism underemphasize important aspects of Chinese politics and ultimately obscure how communication governance and political legitimacy work in general. This is in part because discussions about authoritarianism potentially draw attention away from the degree of participation and collaboration that takes place in Chinese politics. It is in part because such a focus creates unwarranted boundaries between authoritarian China and an ostensibly democratic ‘West’. Such boundaries fail to acknowledge how politics around the world are increasingly intertwined with information management and control, and how the Chinese case is not as peculiar as it is often made out to be.

This chapter provides important contextual information for understanding the influence of Google on copyright law and practice. It introduces the central objectives that define copyright law including both public and private interests. It provides a brief history of digital copyright politics, including the dominant interests and ideologies. This chapter also outlines Google’s origins and core business activities, search and advertising, as well as the reasons why Google is a unique force in the history of copyright.

This final chapter recaps the arguments and discussed implications of how campaigns have used digital communication technologies (DCTs). By only looking at digital practices of political campaigns, we may fail to see that for most campaigns digital media are still only a small part of the overall focus of campaigns, and greater appreciation is needed for understanding DCT use in the context of other factors of a campaign. Relatedly, greater understanding of how a variety of candidates, not just the winners, adapted to and adopted DCTs is needed. One positive consequence of networked campaigning is that we may see less fragmentation over time with more accidental exposure to diverse views. That benefit aside, although affordances of DCTs enable greater involvement by citizens in political campaigns, they strive to control and harness citizens as a means to an end: winning. Paradoxically, political campaigns are inherently undemocratic affairs.

The quest for data-driven campaigning in 2012—creating massive databases of voter information for more effective micro-targeting—found greater efficacy and new controversy in 2016. The Trump campaign capitalized on the power of digital advertising to reach the public to engage in unprecedented mass-targeted campaigning. His campaign spent substantially more on Facebook and other digital media paid ads than Clinton. Yet, the company that Trump worked with, Cambridge Analytica, closed up shop in 2018 under a cloud of controversy about corrupt officials and voter manipulation in several countries, as well as ill-begotten data of Facebook users that drove their micro-targeting practices. The Clinton campaign modeled itself on data-driven successes of the Obama campaign, yet the algorithms that drove their decision making were flawed, thereby leading her campaign to underperform in essential swing states. Similar to the Romney campaign’s Narwhal challenges on Election Day when the campaign effectively was flying blind on get-out-the-vote numbers, the Clinton plane was flying on bad coordinates, ultimately causing her campaign to crash in critical swing states.

The 1996 presidential campaigns were the first to experiment with digital communication technologies (DCTs). Democratic president Bill Clinton and his challenger, Republican Bob Dole, built the first presidential campaign websites, and their experimentation established the core genre of the campaign website. Ironically, it was the seventy-three-year-old Republican who had the more cutting-edge website, while the president’s site was more cautious—reflecting a pattern in future elections in which challengers are more forward thinking and experimental than incumbents. They have more to lose when experimenting with untested communication technologies. The campaigns demonstrated the mass-media paradigm of campaigning, while dabbling with digital media. The absence of human-interactive affordances in their DCTs underscores that the underlying attitude typical campaigns hold toward citizens is that they are to be managed and controlled, persuaded but not empowered except in the most limited sense.

This chapter examines the practices of the 2004 presidential campaigns. This election cycle exhibits an important shift from the mass-media campaigning paradigm to the networked media campaigning paradigm. Howard Dean’s remarkable rise in the polls and financial success came after capitalizing on the affordances of digital communication technologies (DCTs) for two-step flow. The best illustration of this paradigm shift, though, is in the candidacy of Wesley Clark, which started as a netroots movement, and eventually became a front-runner campaign. The clash between the netroots and a new way of campaigning and the campaign professionals’ historic way of mass-mediated campaigning reveals the paradigm shift. In the meantime, George Bush continued to build a comprehensive data file of offline and online voter behavior for microtargeted messaging; and, John Kerry conducted analytic testing of website design and e-mail messaging features to maximize effects. Both practices were harbingers of future election cycles.

The concluding chapter of China’s Digital Nationalism retraces the central findings and arguments of the book. It first summarizes how digital discourses are managed in China today, and it then asks what implications digital nationalism has for the PRC and its regional relations. Following this discussion on East Asia, the chapter turns to more general findings about imagined communities and networked societies, and it summarizes how nationalism changes in a time of ubiquitous digital media use. Finally, the chapter concludes with a personal, normative assessment, which is that without serious rethinking on the part of policy-makers, information gate-keepers, tech innovators, and information and communication technology users, the twenty-first century is bound to again be a century of nations and nationalism, now filtered through the networks of neoliberal digital capitalism. Without intervention, this will be a parochial world, ultimately ill-equipped to handle the daunting challenges humanity faces today.

If the 2004 presidential campaigns demonstrated a paradigm shift as mass-mediated campaigning gave way to networked media campaigning (which in turn changed the power dynamic between supporters and campaigns), the 2008 election was about learning to control supporters through networked interactivity to the campaigns’ greatest advantage. The Obama campaign built on not just the innovations from 2004 but also on the earlier practices from 2000 and 1996, establishing an effective digital media strategy for fundraising and organizing. Other candidates, especially Democratic primary candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican primary candidate Ron Paul, experimented with and centralized DCTs as key components of their campaigns. The financial disadvantage John McCain’s campaign had compared to Obama in the general election was substantial. McCain's campaign had little choice but to focus on tried-and-true mass mediated campaigning and could not fully build enough with DCTs to work their advantage.

The 2012 presidential candidates refined proven practices and ran the most data-driven campaigns in history. The candidates deployed social media, strategic online ad buys, and used their websites as the cornerstones of their campaign practices in the increasingly complex, hybrid media environment. Obama’s and Romney’s campaigns produced a variety of tactics to interact with supporters in a way that suggested that controlled interactivity had been perfected. They built massive voter files to target usual demographic groups while expanding to new groups typically unreached by campaigns and conducted careful message testing to yield maximum effect. Yet, for the carefully scripted work to structure interactivity between supporters and the campaign and among supporters to greatest advantage for the candidate, a substantial challenge remained: how to manage messaging in the complex, hybrid media environment where gaffes and opposition discourse can be amplified in ways unintended and with unknown consequences for campaigns.

This chapter provides an overview of key arguments and goals. A key mission of the book is to help scholars of political communication and digital media contextualize and better understand the shifting practices by campaigns long before Barack Obama was a household name. To do so, this study borrows from the work of Robert Denton, looking especially at the political and social context, the organization, fundraising, and image construction of the candidates, as well as factoring in the role of journalists and the hybrid media environment and public opinion polling. I also examine citizen involvement in the campaign. I describe how campaigns’ use of digital communication technologies and the specific affordance of interactivity bring to light that the objective of a campaign is to win—not to fully engage citizens in the campaign. This chapter concludes by providing a brief outline of the book, underscoring the shifting campaign practices that occurred between 1996 and 2016.

This final chapter recaps the arguments and discusses implications of how campaigns have used DCTs. By only looking at digital practices of political campaigns, it is worrisome that we fail to see that for most campaigns digital media is still only a small part of the overall focus of campaigns. Greater appreciation is needed for understanding DCT use in the context of other factors of a campaign. Campaigns have dramatically changed their strategies over time as they learned the benefits and the challenges of communicating with the public and the media through DCTs. In 1996 they barely interacted with the public and controlled the message as much as possible. By 2016, they were using a variety of interactive affordances to mobilize supporters, attack opponents, and influence the news media’s agenda through their digital media accounts. They also learned to capitalize on the public’s data that they generate about themselves when they interact with the campaign online and in partnering with digital technology companies, such as Facebook, to engage in unprecedented micro-targeting through paid ads.

The 2000 campaigns focused on experimentation with DCTs. Changes in election laws made collecting contributions online feasible, which became a focus of campaigns. John McCain was savvy at capitalizing on fundraising, establishing the infrastructure to channel enthusiasm into money following key events. George W. Bush built a massive voter file for microtargeting. Steve Forbes constructed an image as the first “Internet candidate,” while Al Gore, who also should have done so, instead used DCTs conservatively. Bill Bradley developed a community involvement kit, a clear indication that campaigns began to see the potential of two-step flow. Yet, campaigns were still generally distrustful of what might happen if they let their supporters genuinely engage with the campaign. As hierarchical organizations with professional and highly paid senior staff who at their gut level—and through their experience know how to campaign—the idea of more citizen-driven efforts in political campaigns was unthinkable.