As long as we're opening a discussion about data mining, might we consider the fact that it's not just the government that's paying attention to our digital entanglements?
There's a reason why the National Security Agency was interested in accessing the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. When you're mining, you go where the precious resources are, and technology companies have got the gold.
Data is digital gold. Corporations know that. They're big into data mining.
But it's not just profits that data can yield.
Data is also mined by those who seek power.
Political candidates, political parties, Super PACS and dark-money groups are among the most ambitious data miners around. They use data to supercharge their fund-raising, to target multi-million dollar ad buys and to stir passions and fears at election time.
Data drives the money-and-media election complex that is rapidly turning American democracy into an American Dollarocracy, where election campaigns are long on technical savvy but short, very short, on vision.
Here's a short excerpt from our new book, Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America (Nation Books), which is published today. It focuses on data mining by political campaigns:
If there was one assessment of the 2012 campaign that the campaign consultants loved above all others, it was the analysis that said, "Thar's gold in them thar iPhones." After two decades of trying to figure out how to monetize bits and bytes, the consulting class is now all in for the digitalization of our politics. Indeed, the final election-season issue of Campaigns & Elections ("the magazine for people in politics") featured "10 Bold Ideas for the Future of Consulting." This was the money-and-media election complex talking to itself, and there was no mistaking the message. Yes, of course, there were the calls for more spending: "Money in Politics: Time to Embrace It." And complaints about even the most minimal restraints on campaign donations: "Give Candidates the Ability to Fight Back: With Contribution Limits Intact, What's a Candidate to Do?"
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But the primary focus of the "bold proposals" was on spreading the political pathologies of the "old media" -- brutal negative campaigning, crude messaging, divisive tactics, and, above all big spending -- to the "new media." "Political Technology Is Best Served Partisan," declared one headline, which was sandwiched between "The Future of Direct Mail Is Digital" and "Software Will Revolutionize Local Politics." Any fleeting talk of ideals and values was mostly muffled by the drooling over dollars: "The political technology field is still relatively new and whenever a new industry shows promise and money is being made, venture capitalists are quick to notice and search out promising opportunities for investment," noted one of the more thoughtful commentators. "Some in the political technology space have been quick to meet these new players with a ready grin and an open palm."
The political players who have mastered television and radio and direct mail, the Karl Roves and the David Axelrods, as well as the thousands of consultants you've never heard of, are deep into a process that they believe will allow them to master the Internet. The reality is that the consulting class no longer views the Internet as a "new frontier" or a tool that needs to be understood. Those are the discussions of 10, even 15 years ago.
Now, their professional journals are packed with ads that scream "Big Data. Bigger Results" and "Canvassing Tools for the Mobile Campaign." The digital tipping point has not been reached, but we can see it from here -- and so can the consultants, slow as they may once have been. They are now racing toward it because they have come to understand, thanks to the innovations and successes of the Obama campaign, that there could well be another pot of gold just beyond the tipping point.
Truth be told, there's already a good deal of gold being spread around. By our calculations, the total amount of campaign money spent online for political advertising in 2012 was in the range of $300-350 million. This was a good tenfold increase from 2008, and what was spent on the Internet in 2012 was almost twice what was spent on television candidate ads in the entirety of the 1972 election, even when inflation is factored in. Recall that in 1972 this level of TV advertising was widely considered scandalous and could have had no small number of Americans fantasizing about burning their TV sets in effigy. So 2012 Internet political advertising was hardly chopped liver, and by all accounts its exponential growth rate will continue through election cycles for the foreseeable future.
Online advertising is, of course, the easiest measure of political activity on the Internet. But it is neither the beginning nor the end of the Internet's role in American politics. In our view, the focus on advertising understates the Internet's overall role in campaigns. In 2012, the Pew Research Center determined that 47 percent of voters categorized the Internet as a "main campaign news source," second only to television, well ahead of newspapers and radio, and up from 36 percent in 2008 and 21 percent in 2004. Pew research also determined that 55 percent of registered voters watched political videos online and nearly 25 percent watched live videos online of candidate speeches, press conferences, or debates.
Moreover, 45 percent of smartphone owners used their phones to read other people's comments about a campaign or candidate on a social networking site, while 35 percent of smartphone owners actually used their phones to "look up whether something they just heard about a candidate or the campaign in general was true." A Google poll found that 64 percent of battleground-state voters used the Internet to fact-check the candidates. After the first Obama-Romney debates, there were more than 10 million tweets, making it to that point the most tweeted about event ever in U.S. politics. By November 2012, there were 110,000 political Facebook pages in the United States and more than 11,000 pages just for American politicians. Nearly 25 percent of all the time that Americans spend online is spent on Facebook.
