#CampusCampaigns: User Perceptions in Pre-digital and Digital Eras
Arjun Ghosh
The advent of digital life has, like everything else, transformed the way political campaigning occurs. Today almost no political campaign — regardless of the size of the constituency — can ignore the influence of digital communications. A significant effort in a campaign may be devoted to digital media strategies which supplement the traditional ‘offline’ campaign techniques. I am interested in understanding the altering nature of the strategies and reception of both ‘offline’ and ‘online’ campaigns in an increasingly digitised world.
The focus of my study is on educational campuses. In a pre-digitised environment campus politics would be marked by intense personal contact programmes, marked by door to door and class to class campaign offline campaigns relied heavily on person to person contact and real-life networks and feedback mechanisms. Influence from outside the campus would be restricted to the role of larger political forces who would operate through ideological affiliation and extra-legal forms like money and physical force. In the online world such person to person networks are supplemented by social networks groups — both open and closed. These networks may be open to influence of individual participants from outside the immediate electorate who may not be strategically linked to the campaign as well as troll armies and social media campaign teams which seek to work to a strategy.
The focus of this work is not the various methods and means used for campaigning in offline and online worlds but on the operations of the mind of both the campaign team and the electorate. For instance, though rumours and fake information form may form an essential feature of both modes — are rumours circulated in-person more effective than those delivered through smart phone apps? Does the electorate in the online era consider that they have superior understanding of the candidates or contesting platforms? or do they feel that the campaign process is more participative? Do campaigners on the other hand have to adopt different strategies for offline and online campaigns? For instance, in the online era do campus campaigners also have to engage with non-students and other external respondents during a campaign? Do strategies differ between election, agitations and other events?
Further, is the ‘offline’ of the digital era the same as the ‘offline’ of the pre-digital era or is there significant mediation in behaviour and operations?
The study would need to seek responses from campaigners and students from different eras in the pre-digital and digital periods.
Audio Recording of the Paper
Author
Arjun Ghosh teaches at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Delhi. He was a former fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, where he worked on the monograph Freedom from Profit: Eschewing Copyright in Resistance Art.
Note: This paper was presented at the Internet Researchers’ Conference 2018 (IRC18): #Offline organised in Sambhaavnaa Institute, Kandbari, Palampur, Himachal Pradesh, during February 22–24, 2018.
