The Internet as a significant force of electoral persuasion

The Internet is playing an every dominant role in our everyday lives. In the realm of electoral politics too, its significance has been proven time and again and only strengthened over the years. Starting with the Dean Campaign in 2004, the Internet has become a powerful medium that has altered the nature and scale of the entire spectrum of campaigning from fund raising to the persuasion of the electorate both, to come out and vote, as well as to lend support to a particular political party. The heights of this revolution are in the United States, but it is by no means limited to it as witnessed by the tremendous role of the Internet in the Indian elections held earlier this year.

It is no surprise that the Internet has altered the course of campaigning forever. As Towner and Dulio explain in their paper on New Media and Political Marketing in the United States: 2012 and Beyond, the Internet has made campaigning more effective and efficient. It has made it possible to be more creative about both, the form and content of a campaign’s outreach. Candidates can choose from a plethora of outreach options that include the foremost and most effective email outreach, followed by others (in no order of priority) like online ads, social media, YouTube videos, etc. More importantly, it has made it possible to experiment with different messaging and form at a very low cost. A critical factor enabling this is that creating content and publishing it on the Internet is significantly cheaper than the production and airing of anything on the more traditional medium of television. Apart from the low cost, the fact that messaging on the Internet can be tried through processes like A/B testing make it possible to endlessly experiment with different content until the most effective and optimized style is discovered. By allowing the selective testing of content on small audiences, the Internet has also made it possible to reveal the most effective messages while limiting the public impact from the testing of the worst of the messages.

By all measures then, outreach through the Internet should be more effective at electoral persuasion than, for example, television ads. This however, has not been the case. Online advertising has been nowhere near as effective as TV ads. Part of this has to do with the content consumption habits of Americans. As Towner and Dulio explain in their paper, a large number of Americans still spend more number of hours in front of a TV than the Internet. It is no surprise then that TV ads are more successful than, for example, online ads. Online outreach can also be less effective for the very reasons that support it – the low cost and easy access mean that the Internet is that much more crowded with ads than airtime on TV.

At the same time, messaging beyond ads can be a powerful source of persuasion on the Internet. One needs to look beyond online advertising to realize the true potential for online persuasion and the tremendous possibilities for influencing people via the internet, something that is still in its early years when compared to a more established and well entrenched medium like TV. The possibility of shaping public opinion through YouTube videos, for example, is phenomenal. Such videos can appear to be ineffective for sustained, long-term messaging. But, their force to bring quick wins in terms of shaping public opinion can be tremendous. With the ability to go viral, content that is caught on to by the public can reach a very wide audience in a very short period of time and can remain on the airwaves into perpetuity without any additional cost to a campaign. With the significant campaign successes that have already been achieved through a medium like YouTube within less than a decade of its existence, one can only imagine what the possibilities as its use becomes more sophisticated. What has been achieved so far, then, is only the tip of the iceberg.

Will professional journalism die or can it be resurrected, liberated from its traditional avatar?

Traditional journalism, the kind defined and sustained for long by print media (read newspapers) has had it bad for a while now. No matter which way you look at it, traditional journalism is on the decline - newspapers have shut shop and/ or shrunk in size, the rate of which has only been surpassed by the fall in revenues of those publications still in business. Worse, even those that have made the transition to the online world have suffered, with some at best only managing to stay afloat.

The online world of social media and the peer production of news is blamed for this. Many like Shirky argue that the online, networked world has sounded the death knell of traditional journalism as we know it. Traditional journalism is expensive, episodic, and often mundane while peer produced news is cheap, explosive, and constant. According to Shirky, traditional journalism operates on a now irrelevant and anachronistic paradigm of monopolized content and media whereas the peer produced world of news unshackles information and places the power of producing and accessing content directly in the hands of the very people that consume it. Traditional journalism had a role in society – witnessing events and bringing news to people in an age when doing so was expensive. This problem is no longer relevant in the world of the Internet. Now, everyone is a witness and the Internet brings news anywhere at close to no cost.

While the change in paradigm is emancipating, people like Starkman raise the valid concern that the decline of traditional journalism is also leading to the decline of professional journalism. By virtue of maintaining control over content, newspapers or even the online versions of them (e.g. New York Times) have so far also played the role of curating content and editing it. More importantly, in the spirit of true journalism, they have retained their focus on sourcing stories that really matter, those that contribute to the public good by maintaining a check on institutions of power, as manifested in the genre of investigative journalism (e.g. this Pulitzer Prize winning story on Wal-Mart). This makes traditional journalism professional – deep, responsible, focused, and accountable.

On the other hand, led by the trends of the day, peer produced news can miss key issues and is often based on unsubstantiated facts. It’s amateurish and carries no particular mandate to keep an eye on the institutions of power that control us. To that effect, peer produced journalism is shallow, often irresponsible and unaccountable, and more or less lacks credibility.

If journalism as we know it is moving in this direction, can we then expect the death of professional journalism, the kind that has played a critical role in public accountability for decades past? I would expect, no. Shirky talks about the need for experimentation that might lead to the new paradigm. In this news media revolution in which, as Shirky puts it, “old stuff gets broken faster than new stuff can be put in place” new models of the production, distribution and monetization of news need to be tried out until a new, viable paradigm emerges. So far, the experimenters have been in opposing camps – the traditionalists who are hell-bent on replicating the traditional news business online and people like Shirky, who insist that the future of news is one that is entirely peer driven and devoid of institutional support.

Why not envision the future of journalism to be one where the strengths of both the old and the new come together? Why not infuse the breadth and witnessing capacity of the online peer production world with the editorial capabilities of expert journalists? Nothing stands in the way of a paradigm that sees journalists engage in a two way conversation with the broader internet world, seeking ideas for stories, suggesting some, tracking amateur stories, building on them, and I could go on. Experiments like this are already in motion – the Guardian did an investigative story based on the inputs crowdsourced from its readers and the newly launched online news site Vox has tried curating reader comments. Why not imagine a paradigm where the comments become the story and vice versa?

Evaluating a Wikipedia page - India’s Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission

Having recently created my Wikipedia user account, I am initiating my first steps towards understanding the world of Wikipedia articles by critically evaluating the Wikipedia page on India’s national policy on solar energy – the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (also known as NSM). I have picked this article for my first foray into the world of Wiki because it is a topic I am very familiar with. For close to three years, I have worked for Bridge to India, a solar energy business-consulting firm in India. I have had to deeply understand the policy from its early stages starting in December 2010, track its progress over the years, develop policy briefs advising the Indian government on ways to improve the policy, and consult international and domestic solar companies on the most appropriate strategy to take advantage of the policy.

In terms of comprehensiveness, the article covers some key aspects of the policy but falls short of being complete. To begin with, the article is outdated. The NSM has undergone a massive revamp under the newly elected administration of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The changes include an increase in targets under the policy and various details of the policy with regards to restrictions on the use of domestic content for solar projects, the options for project developers to seek buyers for their power, the support for small-scale solar power generation, amongst others. The article also fails to recognize an overall shift in the policy approach the hallmark of which is the fact that the responsibility for the policy rests with a minister collectively responsible for the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy as well as the Ministry for Power and Coal. Further, the article inadequately conveys the goals of the policy, the technologies associated with the policy, the various industry and market players engaged with the use of the policy, and details on the crucial Domestic Content Requirement that is a major limitation on the use of technology within the policy.

In terms of sourcing, the article can do a lot better. It relies mostly on government sources of information, which tend to be delayed with data and use language, which is very heavily biased in favor of the government. There are some mainstream Press sources used that appear to be reliable. However, from my work in the sector, I know there are a number of excellently researched academic studies and market reports that have been overlooked by this article. Overall, the sourcing appears to be lazy.

The article’s neutrality is very questionable. The article comes across as being biased, often representing the positive line towards the policy commonly held by the government. This is no surprise given the fact that references used by the article are primarily government sources. The article would be far more useful with a more accurate and nuanced representation of the goals, objectives, and accomplishments of the policy as provided by numerous other academic and industry research sources.

The article is not particularly well written and is, therefore, difficult to read. In each section there are disjointed statements that are jarring to the reader. The sub-sections used in the article are poorly structured and are not completely exhaustive of the numerous aspects of this policy that should be covered in a Wikipedia article.

In terms of style and formatting, the article does appear to broadly conform to the Wikipedia style. Though, in this aspect again, it underutilizes the efficacy of the formatting style by inappropriately naming sections and sub-sections and lacking an comprehensive structure and style.

Lastly, the article carries two illustrations, which is better than nothing. However, the use of these illustrations is questionable in terms of their relevance to the overall article. They do not contribute in any significant way and are strikingly disconnected with the textual content of the article. The article can certainly benefit with more illustrations that connect in a more relevant manner with the text.