Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant: Digital Politics: Technology, Communication, and Changing Political Participation

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Doctoral student Charles Pearson, under the guidance of Dr. Alan Klima (University of California, Davis), will undertake research on the development and effects of the new social media structures that support contemporary political movement building. Centralized broadcast media models, once a key strength of political movements in many countries, are now in flux. The models emerging to replace them appear to be both more collaborative and more focused on bottom-up, or "grass-roots," communication. The nature and consequences of this important shift in political participation will be the focus of this research. A study of digital politics provides a rich conceptual site for understanding: a) current shifts in communication and political engagement; b) logics of participation and regulation in emerging open systems; and, c) the increasing intertwining of the technical and the social.The research will be carried out in the United States in both online and offline settings. The researcher will employ a mix of qualitative research methods, including ethnographic fieldwork and targeted qualitative interviews with key participants and media experts distributed nationally. He will also track and analyze the movement of specific messages in order to gauge the effectiveness of particular Internet-based distributed structures for managing information flows and alignments. The research is important because it will help social scientists to understand how new technologies are affecting contemporary democratic politics. More generally, the research will contribute to theories of the relation between media and message. Funding this resarch also supports the education of a social scientist.