1996

Abstract

The 1996 presidential campaigns were the first to experiment with DCTs. Democratic President Bill Clinton and his challenger, Republican Bob Dole, built the first presidential campaign websites, and their experimentation established the core genre of the campaign website. Ironically, it was the seventy-year-old Republican who had the more cutting-edge website, while the president’s site was more cautious—reflecting a pattern in future elections in which challengers are more forward thinking and experimental than incumbents. They have more to lose when experimenting with untested communication technologies. The campaigns demonstrated the mass media paradigm of campaigning, while dabbling with digital media. The absence of human-interactive affordances in their DCTs underscore that the underlying attitudes campaigns held toward citizens is that they are to be managed and controlled, persuaded but not empowered except in the most limited sense.