Everyday when Diana Owen surfs the Internet, there's a possibility that something she finds will reshape the scope of her research.
Did another politician announce intent to run for president on a late night talk show or online video? Has an interactive Web site suddenly gained popularity? Or has a new cyber campaign been launched to energize voters?
Owen, an associate professor in the Communications, Culture and Technology program, has spent the past two decades studying the cycles of media and technology and how they work their way into the fabric of society.
"It completely changes the way political conversations take place," she said. "We've had several eras where this has occurred and I think it defines a political generation."
Her latest research studies youth political engagement in relation to new media, such as Web sites, chat rooms, online video and e-mail. Owen is examining whether and why youth are politically engaged, and how campaigns are shifting tactics to embrace young voters. She ties it all together by studying how new media affected players in past elections, and speculating about the future impact of the Internet on politics.
Civic engagement has intrigued Owen since childhood. She remembers going door-to-door in her New Jersey neighborhood, campaigning with her parents as they ran for local government offices. Owen rushed to register to vote when she turned 18, but noticed her peers seemed less passionate to engage politically. It's a trend she still observes among some younger voters.
"The reality is youth aren't voting in overwhelming numbers and when that happens, politicians don't think of that generation as a factor when they’re making decisions and drafting policies," she said.
Historian and Theorist
Owen's research casts her in a bifurcated role. She is part historian, revisiting past elections to study how changing technologies influenced the electorate and campaign strategies. And she is part theorist, predicting what the next big thing might be to change how and why Americans engage in elections.
In her early career, campaigns usually rolled out in a formulaic manner, Owen said. But as cable television and talk radio advanced, the ways in which politics and media intersected changed. Ross Perot is a good example, she said. He bucked the rules in 1992 when he went on CNN's Larry King Live to say he would run for president if supporters got his name on the ballot in every state.
Throughout her career, Owen has adapted her research questions to account for such shifts in how politicians and voters employed traditional media, and now how they use the World Wide Web.
"What's really interesting studying how the Internet and politics evolves over time is that you get to see different actors engage with the technology, change their opinions and change what they do over time," Owen said.
Early in the digital age, politicians tended to shun online chat rooms and other interactive cyber forums. Today, it's rare to find a politician who doesn't blog, have a presence on the social networking site MySpace or hold online chats during the campaign.
The only certainty to her research is that the evolving face of the Internet means flexibility is a must. So is taking risks on studying emerging trends that might have little impact in the long run.
Owen has backed the wrong technology horse in the past, she freely admits. She saw a lot of potential, for instance, in Web broadcasts of the 2004 political conventions. Considered then as an innovation that would put the proceedings at voters' fingertips, the Web broadcasts went largely unnoticed, she said.
But Owen rarely risks ignoring a potential trend – a lesson she learned from her predecessors.
"When television emerged, it didn't have the huge impact on politics that people first predicted, so its influence went ignored for a long time," she said. "It wasn't until the presidential elections in 1976 and 1980 that people really started to pay attention to how much TV influenced things. And by that time, there was no older data to compare things to."
Owen doesn't plan to make the same mistake. She feels lucky that her research started just as the digital age emerged because she will always have early data for comparison.
Keeping Current
Still, as she moves further away from the youth that she studies, generational issues have surfaced. To keep as current as possible, Owen relies largely on her five-person graduate student research team to expose her to new Web sites and trends among youth, such as the parody sites young voters flocked to in the 2004 election.
"We all have diverse backgrounds and interests in this program and that factors into the conversations we have," said Sheetal Doshi, a CCT graduate student. "One of us will come from an anthropological angle, another from a cultural view. It’s very much a dialogue between us and her."
As they examine how new media and the youth vote interacted in the 2006 elections, Owen and her team also are looking into the 2008 campaigns.
"What I think will be a bigger factor are podcasts and anything that can be done on a handheld," she predicted. "There will be more coordinating between the Web site and handhelds."
She's also looking in nontraditional places for the overlap of technology and politics.
"I want to look at places that are not designed to be political, but politics take place there. If you just look at candidate Web sites, you just see a limited amount of political action," she said. "But when you go to other sites like sports talk boards, you see a lot of political commentary and engagement."
Owen knows she could be wrong about podcasts, or find little information on the talk boards that can support a research project. But those are risks she's willing to take.
"The nature of news and technology is always evolving," Owen said, "and as new formats are added, it really creates an incredibly exciting system."
