Chapter 3 - A Political Marketing Tool and a Network of Cyber Battles

Summary

This chapter explores the practices of politician-bloggers who strategically utilized the online platform with the aim of exerting a wider sphere of influence over the voting public. It discusses how online avenues became less appealing to the politician-bloggers during the official campaigning period. The research participants revealed that they instead resorted to traditional non-mediated face-to-face canvassing during that time. Some of the factors cited for abandoning online media during the official campaigning period included the broader political economy of the media, coupled with constituencies defined by ethnicity, location, and the digital divide, as well as the preference of politician-bloggers for a personalized approach.

A key point of the chapter examines the use of the Internet as a tool for marketing political images in order to garner public support. Such usage occurred particularly in the lead-up to the general elections. Generally, most of the politician-bloggers had restricted access to the mainstream media so they turned to blogging to publish unfiltered messages to increase visibility for themselves and their party. Content included the scandals of political rivals, which indirectly helped to boost the bloggers’ image in contrast. The politician-bloggers also promoted themselves as reputable politicians worthy of public support by declaring their thoughts on issues of public interest. This can be interpreted as a blurring of boundaries between the private and public sphere. However, such boundaries were guarded when politician-bloggers did not want their personal thoughts to jeopardize the image of their political parties. Such was evident among some of the politician-bloggers who were elected following the 2008 election.

The chapter also interrogates the perception of politician-bloggers about Web practices that appeared to have a bearing on the ways they were using the online platform. It examines the emergence of a network of cyber battles that was prevalent for the election of 2013 but not for 2008. During the 2008 election many of the research participants regarded blogging as a personal endeavour and did not connect with other individuals or bloggers to establish ties or a network. Two veteran politician-bloggers treated the online tool like their “own newspapers” without any form of coordination to achieve their political goal. However, the increasing use of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter saw the creation of fluid ties to help win the support of the voting public during the 2013 election.