When I was looking at Communication programs for my PhD, there was a small part of me that wanted to go to UPenn to study with Kathleen Hall Jamison, one of the best known authors and researchers of Political Communication.  This was not because I wanted to bask in the glow if her intellect.  No, I really just wanted an opportunity to tell her how wrong she was about so many things.

Perhaps because I am coming from a political background to Communication studies rather than from Communication to look at politics as the authors of this week’s articles, the research seems a bit backwards.  In other words, the questions that normally occur to me are how politically minded and involved people use communication rather than how communication use shapes political attitudes and involvement. From my point of view, some of the issues that confound or surprise the researchers are perfectly understandable to me.  Most of the studies noted that SNS, Youtube, and mobile communication use is higher generally among younger people.  They also noted that uses of this technology correlates to political and civic engagement, generally. However, what the studies fail to discuss is that political engagement increases with age.  While civically engaged, young people are the lease likely to vote.  To understand the significance of these seemingly contradictory trends, one has to consider findings of articles read earlier in the semester, specifically, the understanding that SNS and the like are most often facilitating factors in communication rather than initiating or instigating factors.  Social engagement offline generally correlates to social engagement online because the technology is a tool which increases the ease at which a person can do what they are already inclined to do.  Likewise, the technology increases the ease at which a person can engage politically in a way they were already inclined to do, so it is adopted by those wishing to engage.  Since the uses of this technology is not limited to political activity, young people who are highly motivated to engage socially, and thus use the SNS as a tool for doing so, aren’t necessarily going to increase their political participation just because the same technology facilitates it.  Likewise, large, heterogeneous network participation offline correlates to increased political participation, which is reflected online.  Conversely, people who generally have a limited homogeneous social network offline are less likely to be politically engaged.  This is also reflected online.  Campbell & Kwak argue that technology comfort levels predict political engagement.  I argue this is because politically engaged people become more comfortable with the technology because it is a useful tool of self-efficacy and education.  As such, addressing the digital divide may have only limited impact on political engagement.  Interest drives use rather than use driving interest.

I also suspect that if Kaye had been more familiar with day to day party politics, she would not be confounded by the findings that party affiliation was tied to SNS and blog use but ideology was not.  While ideology is significant to party id, it is not a determining factor.  In Tennessee and across the South, there are many Democrats who are Democrats because Republicans started the War of Northern Aggression.   For many people, they identify themselves with the party they do for the same reasons they are Baptists or Catholics or Cubs fans, which may have nothing to do with ideology.  They were just raised with that label and they don’t question it.  Also, people with strongly held ideological beliefs may feel ignored or dismissed by mainstream parties.  People who feel disenfranchised have low political participation.