Internet-based Political Communication

Despite the fact that the ARPAnet(Advanced Research Project Agency Network), the prototype of today's Internet, was not developed yet when Karl Wolfgang Deutsch formulated the theory of Political Communication, Internet is now the best note to Deutsch's Concept of Nerves of Government. Online political communication is increasingly playing a crucial role in the US presidential campaign. In 2008, Barack Obama was even named as the first "Internet President" because of his remarkable online political communication during the campaign.Scholars on politics have taken serious thinking on this phenomenon. Starting from diverse views of theories, they try to study the performance and mechanism of the online political communication in campaign, and their conclusions differ from each other. These diversities have been the driving force for further research as well as for this paper.The hypothesis of this thesis is that, by changing the model and effect of political communication, Internet challenges traditional political communication greatly in the 2008 US presidential campaign. Online political communication, instead of internet technology itself, has already shown positive impact on the US political practice, and will continue to influence the US politics.Based on the above hypothesis, this paper consists of five parts. Chapter 1 compares different studies about online political communication, introduces the concepts of political communication and social media, and tries to establish the analytical framework based on the theory of political communication and the theory of political system. Chapter 2 reviews online political communication in the US campaign history. By outlining the search engine, social network, blog, microblogging and online donation in the 2008 campaign, Chapter 2 also analyses the motivation of key actors, i.e. parties and citizens, who use internet as political communication tool. Chapter 3, starting from some typical characteristics of online political communication, elaborates systematically the mutual impact between online political communication and political actors, as well as the impact of online political communications on the real society, such as narrowing the information gap and promoting more political participation. Chapter 4 gives further discussion on some questions in dispute about the online political communication, such as liberty, truthfulness etc. And the last part reviews the whole paper and draws on the conclusion.