Interestingly, In Tracking Your Supporters: Events and Location-Based Services Jim Udall discussed the potential of using your mobile device as a locator. There seems to be promise in this as groups will be able to come together with ease. It does beg the question, however, when would I really need to use this? Still, it’s cool/scary (depending on your perspective) that technology like this is readily available to anyone.
Mobile technology as an essential political tool is now a given. The Politics-to-Go Handbook identified this as early as 2005—as groups we already using SMS text messaging to help them achieve some pretty remarkable things (see Orange Revolution or Howard Dean circa 2004).
With that said, I’ve noticed a trend with devotees of online/mobile communication tools. Namely, the tools themselves are seen as the primary means to achieve an end. An example of this is Howard Rheingold’s claim in The Missing Link: How Mobile Technology Connects Internet Activism with the World that Kerry lost the 2004 election in large part because his mobile campaign was not as effective as Bush’s. See, now, I’m just not that sure about that. I’d say that Kerry lost the election because people thought Bush would make a better president. The fact that Bush was better at mobilizing voters is simply a function of the will of those voters to vote. We saw a similar thing in 2008. The will of the people to vote for Obama was enormous. He did not win the election because his mobile team were all-stars.
With that said, mobile communications are huge—no denying that. But we need to remember that they are only as powerful as the candidate or cause. Hark back to Nazi occupied France. Somehow the resistance was able to communicate. (see Inglourious Basterds :). I mention that only to suggest that if the motivations are there, people will find ways to communicate. Different tools will simply help them do it in different ways.
When I think of the future of mobile technologies for political communications, I see the Internet playing the biggest part. SMS will fade away as text messaging becomes more akin to online chatting—most mobiles phones already have this capability. As change unfolds, I’m not sure how campaigns will effectively use the mobile device—as chatting is deliberate and requires agency by the chatter and is usually done by people who know each other.
As the internet will increasingly be on a phone, mobile campaigns will need to adjust. Strategies useful in the last election will be less so in the next one. The whole process of texting will soon be like the fax machine; namely, it has some use, but not a lot.
I know that this has become somewhat of a theme on my posts, but as a majority of the population adopts these new technologies, it will become harder and harder to reach people with the ease that campaigns can reach the early adopters today. Take, for example, telemarketers/automated campaign calls—no one likes them. Still, there was a time in the not so distant past when those types of strategies were effective. People only have so much time for causes and campaigns not directly related to what they are doing--if your organization is lucky to slip in with someone, that's good. But expectations should not be based on the success of the 2008 historic presidential election.
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