What role is technology playing in changing the political game

It can — but it is also a key factor in allowing a politicians message to be pushed out to a wide audience at a speed no other media can match, and sometimes this speed is what a campaign needs most of all. A campaign spot on the radio requires a strong voice, an easily understood message, and perhaps the judicious use of sound effects.

A second TV commercial on television allows a campaign to reach voters with visuals, sounds, and perhaps text on the screen, too. A campaign flyer or direct mail letter can communicate a campaign message in text and might even add a few photos or graphics design elements to make it memorable.

Now consider the versatility of the internet and the options that it offers those seeking to communicate a political message to a pool of potential voters. Want to reach a voter who wants every detail of every policy? Send them to your collection of PDFs. Want to reach a voter who is attracted to visuals? Send them to your Instagram feed, your Facebook photo album, or your YouTube video playlist.

The voter who wants information tailored for their personal political preferences need only click a couple of boxes on a list to ensure they get newsletters personalized in a way that direct mailers can only dream of. The voter who liked the radio ad can be delivered a podcast, the voter who preferred to watch speeches can see them streamed live, and anyone who likes to watch campaign commercials — these people do exist, trust me! The versatility of the internet is truly a game changer for political campaigns, as is the third and final way in which the internet is altering the political campaigning landscape.

To understand a speech at a campaign rally one need only open eyes and ears to the message being amplified over a public address system. A newspaper or campaign flyer is enormously easy to use, and a radio is not so difficult to tune in. But none of these technologies come close in terms of ease of use to the internet. For one thing, the internet is a technology that is incredibly mobile. A smartphone is internet enabled and can be carried in a pocket — try that with your big screen TV!

While a newspaper is fairly portable, it is also out of date by the time it is printed, let alone by the time it is actually purchased by a potential voter. A radio is easy to tune in but it is not easy — or usually possible — for one person to be listening to two stations at a single time. A window for a streaming music site can be open while another window with the campaign website is open on the same screen.

Where a home might have one or two TVs it is likely that every voter in the home has their own smartphone, probably their own computer, and likely another internet enabled device tablet, game console, and yes, even a TV , too.

This week DOZ is exploring the nexus between marketing and politics, with a particular emphasis on political campaigns online. Click through everyday as we look at the way the internet has changed political campaigns, the key points that a politician needs to get straight with their campaign manager, the importance of social media to online campaigns, and five times that the internet played a big role in a political story. Somewhere between the two, illustrated neatly through video games, is a working, beneficial government — in games at least.

Operating at mayoral level, you must construct housing estates, industrial parks and transport links to create and maintain a working metropolis. You must also oversee crime levels, tax rates and utilities. A simulation of the presidential election whereby you choose a Democrat or Republican candidate and must allocate your campaign budget towards either smearing your opponent or talking up yourself.

Notable for its slightly altered names — play as Jack Ohama or Mick Ronney. You control an entire people, from primitive beginnings through the Renaissance up to today and beyond. Focusing more on big leaps forward than political nitty-gritty, Civilization invites you to choose between humanitarian leadership and despotism. Playing politics in video games: how you can have democracy or despotism at your fingertips. Tropico and Democracy 3 give you a chance to experience being a political leader.

Tropico: giving all things to all people becomes impossible. Initially, the political problem posed by the motion of bodies in physical space involved the destabilizing and dangerous relationship between excessive and errant motion.

For Hobbes, the sovereign's elimination of contending claims to power prevented the fruitless and uncontrollable thrusting of equals upward and outward in space. Under a "mortal god," mobilization is moderated. Bodies move in concert and in concord, industriously, securely, and contentedly. For Montesquieu, the establishment and maintenance of horizontal boundaries took on a similar political role; spatial enclosures permitted the laws to shape the tempo and direction of the body politic.

In one sense, these predicaments were cemented in place by the confines of the European nation-state, where closed frontiers made the firmness of foundations essential to managing the forces of social motion.

In a deeper sense, however, the challenges arose from the confines of the past. The presence of such space, Tocqueville recognized, made the North American continent fortuitous in three tremendous ways.

First, it permitted the foundation of a new democratic order free from the encumbrances of the Old World. Second, by absorbing the force of Americans' excessive motion, it absolved them of their errancy.

Finally, it enabled theorists to observe the political problems that emerged from the new vectors of mobility made possible in the New World. In his own observations, Tocqueville discovered that the vastness of America's new space by no means emancipated humankind from the politics of motion.

Suddenly, the problem of too much motion within enclosures raised the specter of too little structure. Tocqueville scholar Joshua Mitchell distilled this idea in The Fragility of Freedom : "There must always be boundaries; where they do not exist in the material world, they must exist in the mind. In both settings, the expanse of the world led us to dwell more on its indifference toward us than its novelty for us.

This nearly simultaneous enclosure of bodies and minds created a vicious circle. As ambition and accomplishment became the provenance of a dwindling few, Tocqueville foresaw, the curse of a modern or democratic age would be found in an all-too-stable equality.

Enervated by the petty competition of all against all in a perpetual present, the literally vast majority would sink to a level of inert dispersion that presaged a sort of heat death of history.

The arrest of history brought on by the paralysis of the mind would usher in a failure of history in the realm of the body. Although we are not there yet, by a comfortable margin, it is clear that the imperative of competition and the prejudice of precaution have entered into a vicious cycle of their own, producing a viscerally physical form of political and economic stagnation that seems to foreshadow Tocqueville's dystopia.

Our invisible barriers to advancement show forth in our obsession with securing marginal advantages at minimum risk. Instead of the terror of the unbounded horizon, our vectors of mobility have been arrested by fearfully circumscribed horizons. In reaction, policy leaders have strained to reinvigorate the body politic both along the horizontal vector "stimulus" and the vertical vector "upward mobility". But today's horizontal, which sees money as a boundlessly animating spirit, hopes to bring good order to spaces by immoderating the motion within them, not moderating it as Montesquieu would.

And today's vertical, which prescribes money as the measure of all things, fails to absorb the intransigent pride that Hobbes warns will cripple a commonwealth within its frontiers. The dilemma is a formidable one, but it is made more daunting by a grand misunderstanding of the new vectors of mobility aroused by our technological revolution. Just as technology today is mistakenly or overly valued for its "inspiration" in the realm of the mind, in the realm of the body it draws excessive and misdirected praise for its power of "disruption.

More than a disruption of our alternately indifferent and isolating modern spaces, we are presented with an altogether alternative space, virtual in character and networked in structure. As the problem of moving bodies at the center of modern politics plays out in Cartesian space, the flattening and fragmenting of thought and movement is seen as a price worth paying for human gains in predictability and control.

The rise of virtual, networked space offers vectors of mobility wherein such tradeoffs do not need to be made. In the new space created by the technological revolution, money becomes less important to ordering and directing human intentionality as the cost of organization and action drops. Doubtless, the likelihood of a certain kind of excessive movement increases in the short run, as people mistakenly believe that the internet "democratizes" influence, for instance, by "giving everyone a megaphone" or a "presence.

Functionally infinite storage of information, and its acceleration to light speed, humble us in a generative way, moderating yet strengthening our motion. Some may shudder at the prospect of technology rising to the status of a mortal god.

But the better touchstone is Tocqueville. Rather than causing a stampede away from physical reality, it is more likely to awaken in our shared imagination a curiosity about how to restore the experience of human significance in the world of flesh and blood.

The foundation of that project from outside the precincts of politics will carry with it one of history's ironies. Critics of modernity trace our political crisis to the inauguration of an earlier project launched from the realm of technological theory. In addition to Descartes, Bacon is condemned for conceiving of the purpose of science as "the relief of man's estate. Kass approvingly cites Aldous Huxley's "predictions and concerns," wherein the "really revolutionary revolution" in technology "is to be achieved, not in the external world, but in the souls and flesh of human beings.

But few have stopped to consider how this crisis in the realm of the spirit might be alleviated by a revolutionary advance in the technology of nature itself. The effort to restore a more natural science has not yet been closely linked with the science of creating nature. Our fear is that such a project would require acts of godlike transformation, since the only raw material for natural creation is nature itself.

And our dramatic push into nano-technology hastens that fear along, giving rise to the prospect of "designer" humans, resurrected dinosaurs, monstrous chimeras, and more. Nevertheless, the relief of man's estate carried out by our technological revolution includes a real hope of release from the bitter paralysis that characterizes our age, yet which neither modern science nor modern politics has been able to resolve.

Given its profound departures from the modern experience and the modern conception of mind and body, our technological revolution should be seen to betoken a departure in spirit as well. For the "modern project" inaugurated by Descartes and Bacon has been seen to damage the human spirit above all.

Though nature has faced its ration of abuse, it is humankind that cannot survive a break in its right relationship with the natural, according to modernity's critics. Dissevered, humans become so profanely and mechanically appetitive that their violent nihilism seeks out a bigger target than nature itself.

As Heidegger suggested, the modern project that "fills out that world by means of proposing and planning" ends in the seemingly rational judgment that humankind, too, is inherently nothing, just another void to be filled. Conditioned by the modern project, we reason that the rise of the internet, with its interface screens that are boundaries yet portals, augurs our ever-greater technological alienation from the natural world.

But in the silence that prevails when we turn off our devices, to reflect on how our technological revolution may be made manifest in real life , we may glimpse its foundation in a new kind of natural science.

Consider the relation between our present experience of the internet's "inner" space and our future conception of outer space, which continually calls out to us to bring forth new life.

In an effort to explain the way that the idea of human unity could become historically thinkable, Tocqueville observed that the unification of "an immense flock" of humanity "under the scepter of the Caesars While, on the one hand, the fruits of the modern project have conditioned us to fear that technology will complete our alienation, our experience with revolutionary technology has prepared us to envision a different destiny.

Though virtual, networked "inner" space can never become a realm of flesh and blood, in its anti-Cartesian scale and structure it is preparing us to found such realms, equipped with 3-D printing, terraforming, and other tools, in the new worlds of outer space. In its reunification of inner and outer space, the current technological revolution aims to humanize the alien, not alienate the human.

If our best technologists share our fear that we could lazily foreclose eternity by locking ourselves in a perpetual present, devoid of horizons in space or time, they share our hope of re-opening experience to the infinite. As abstractions, these notions can be disorienting and misleading, but as practical experiences, they help us understand technology in a sense that is powerfully freed from the old model of science as the forcible imposition of will upon nature.

Rather than transforming nature for the relief of man, our future hinges on relieving Earth of that unbearable burden. In the meantime, rather than ungluing us from the physical world, our technological revolution will reintroduce our habits of mind to the politically significant concept of an underlying unity between seen and unseen, material and immaterial, finite and infinite.