Mediated Citizenship and Digital Discipline: A Rhetoric of Control in a Campaign Blog1

Abstract

The Internet's capacity for interactivity has resulted in greater expectations for public political deliberation and citizen participation in the public sphere, through political campaigning and beyond. Until recently, political candidates have tempered that hope and limited the World Wide Web's potential by controlling the degree and nature of the interactive aspects of their campaign web sites. However, in the 2004 US presidential campaign, candidates surrendered some of that control by incorporating blogs (weblogs) into their web sites. Some campaign blogs allowed citizens to post comments instantaneously without any editing or interference from the campaign itself, and thus had great potential for fostering online rational–critical interaction about politically and socially significant issues, an important form of citizen participation in the public sphere. Nevertheless, through an analysis of Blog For America, the blog on Howard Dean's campaign web site, this essay argues that “bloggers” themselves created a self-disciplining system on the campaign site that maintained control over the campaign's message and muted the potential for meaningful online political deliberation and citizen participation.