| This study critically engages the discourse of presidential candidate websites during the 2004 presidential primary. Generally, research has identified and evaluated candidate websites from the 1996 and 2000 presidential election cycles as one component of a larger campaign strategy. Thus, current work overlooks the significance of websites as public texts that are engaged in the practice and construction of public discourse. In this project, I argue that candidate websites are better theorized as a genre of public discourse that contributes to understandings of the appropriate place for publics during election time. Based on an archive of online campaign materials from the early period of the 2004 presidential primary season, I conduct a descriptive analysis of the themes, forms of content, technical features, iconography, and modes of address in operation on candidate websites. I find that the interplay of these elements within the genre produces a rhetoric of cyber-politics that hails individuals into an active place in the political sphere through the following propositions: that cyberspace is site of political action, that political support for a candidate is a form of political participation, that politics is an everyday activity, individual participation is political spectacle, and political activity constitutes membership in a community. I conclude that this logic of cyber-politics fails to support the notion that the Internet can revitalize liberal democracy because it blurs the boundaries between individuals in their public and private capacities, and collapses the public into politics. |
