When the Nerds Go Marching In: How Digital Technology Moved from the Margins to the Mainstream of Political Campaigns by Rachel K. Gibson (review)

There was a time when "internet" scholars, as they were at one point called, wondered when they would have a history to study. Now scholars of technology studies are contextualizing the evolution of and trends in the intersection of technology and politics (and society) in a more targeted way, providing a deeper understanding of models and conceptual development for twenty to thirty years of internet use that can, in turn, guide future research.

Technology studies has done a better job at researching, contextualizing, and analyzing its history than the more contemporary iterations of the field: internet and social media studies. Although there is no longer a strong distinction between the broader and more specific topics, only recently have internet and social media scholars begun to grapple with history. Rachel K. Gibson's book When the Nerds Go Marching In is a strong example of this grappling: laying the foundation for a model that explains and interprets the progress that political campaigns in global democracies have made over the past more than twenty years in their technological use and misuse.

Gibson acknowledges that it can be challenging to offer insights when technology is constantly changing. The field, at times, gets hung up on the caveat "The research is good, but the examples no longer apply" (p. vii). This book successfully overcomes this limitation and sees the value in less-than-recent examples as evidence of evolution and, at times, progress.

The initial tension that Gibson identifies is based in power, something all disciplines confront at some point. Technology is both a tool to maintain power and, alternatively, a weapon to challenge power. Sometimes the people (citizens/users) can harness technology to amplify and champion pluralism. At other times, those in power repackage technology toward what Gibson calls "hypernormality," or the condition when those with power retain and strengthen their power. The study that follows is a thoughtful narrative about the fluidity of these ideas with their seeming opposites; sometimes citizens have the upper hand, using technology to weaken power structures, while at other times those in power are able to leverage technology to remain in charge.

The evidence is in the model, which relies on this context: democratic societies have elections, elections require campaigning (countries may have varying campaign rules, but one of the strengths of the model is that these differences do not seem to matter), campaigns must communicate with potential voters (and donors), and technology has fundamentally changed the way all parts of the model play out.

The model includes these phases (ch. 2): experimentation, standardization and professionalization, community building and activist mobilization, and individual voter mobilization. Each phase follows the forward momentum of technological development, coupled with the innovative uses of technologies in campaigns. The empirical work on the relative advancement of a selection of countries toward phase four (individual voter mobilization) in chapter 3 is especially strong. The analysis aggregates data from fifteen countries to evaluate their progress toward better voter-targeting instruments. While there are some expected conclusions (i.e., that the United States is at the forefront of creative technological use), there are also some surprises (Greece is also up there). The work in this chapter is very important and, most usefully, potentially replicable and updatable.

Continuing, Gibson builds on the data analysis with four strongly researched, in-depth case studies of Australia, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Each country has a personality of sorts in understanding its journey through the phases (i.e., France as the "Late Bloomer" and the United Kingdom as the "Slow Burner"). The insights are rich and, once again, the structure of the analysis seems easily applied to potential future cases.

The research leaves us "hanging" in a positive way. Uses and misuses of technology in campaigns and elections still happen with...