Our contemporary system of political communication is built by information technology consultants whose design choices affect the exercise and distribution of political power or by technology-savvy citizens who have access to many of the same technologies and much of the same information that was once reserved for political elites. Political consultants, likewise, build their political values into the tools and technologies of hypermedia campaigns, and one of the most important normative choices they make is to value informational transparency and technological access over personal privacy. This has resulted in the proliferation of political information technologies through the consumer market and the collection of immense amounts of personal information that most citizens would prefer not to have surrendered. Hypermedia campaigns mine personal data for political inferences, redline particular communities for targeted campaigning, and implant campaigns with the hope of capitalizing on artificially seeded social movements.

I have presented evidence about how political communication is constructed through information technologies by the consultants working for some of the most important candidate and issue campaigns in national politics. In the Introduction, I provided quantitative and comparative data about how political information has been produced through new media technologies over the last decade, and in chapters 2 and 3, I went into richer ethnographic detail about the construction projects of four exemplary organizations. My argument is not that hypermedia might be used to manage and control political culture. My argument is that hypermedia are used to manage and control political culture.