| Since the United States' inception, technology has been attributed as having the capacity to improve the quality of political representation in the U.S. In this dissertation, I analyze Howard Dean's 2004 campaign for U.S. president from a rhetorical perspective to understand how the internet was constituted as a potential "fix" for democracy and how the notion of internet citizenship was constituted from three different perspectives: those of the popular press, of the campaign, and of Dean's supporters. My findings indicate that the internet is seen as an appropriate fix for U.S. democracy in primarily three ways: that technologists are uninterested in the pursuit of personal power; that the internet is a medium appropriate for political outsiders; and that the internet's use in political contexts is privileged over its use in other contexts, for example, commercial or military. In the second area of inquiry, I found differing conceptions of internet citizenship among the press, the campaign, and the campaign's supporters. The press supported the romantic ideal of the engaged and highly active citizen, suggesting that supporters used the campaign's blog to interact with each other and with the campaign to ultimately function as a distributed campaign staff. The campaign supported a less active conception of the internet citizen by structuring its Web presence to constitute its supporters as internet-using consumers, giving supporters frequent and highly visible opportunities to read content and contribute money to the campaign. Dean's supporters used the site to rearticulate the campaign's own message of contributing to the site, thus using enacting the identity of the internet-using supporter to publish their own instances of rhetoric constitutive of internet-using Dean supporters. |
