Keith N Hampton

Phil Howard at the University of Washington just released his book on the role of ICTs in political campaigning. New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen is a solid empirical study, it is one of the few thorough studies out there and will become a must read for anyone studying political communication. I have included the formal book description and contents below:

\”The political campaign is one of the most important organizations in a democracy, and whether issue- or candidate-specific, it is one of the least understood organizations in contemporary political life. This book is a critical assessment of the role that information technologies have come to play in contemporary campaigns. With evidence from ethnographic immersion, survey data, and social network analysis, Philip Howard examines the evolving act of political campaigning and the changing organization of political campaigns over the last five election cycles, from 1996 to 2004. Over this time, both grassroots and elite political campaigns have gone online, built multimedia strategies, and constructed complex relational databases. The contemporary political campaign adopts digital technologies that improve reach and fund-raising and at the same time adapts its organizational behavior. The new system of producing political culture has immense implications for the meaning of citizenship and the basis of representation.\”

CONTENTS
Introduction: the hypermedia campaign; 1. Political communication and information technology; 2. Producing the hypermedia campaign; 3. Learning politics from the hypermedia campaign; 4. Organizational communication in the hypermedia campaign; 5. Managed citizenship and information technology; Appendix: Method notes on studying information technology and political communication.