[1] The so-called new or electrified technologies had, of course, hit politics much earlier than the 1950s. In 1924, radio stations for the first time broadcast political conventions, and in that year, as well, the first biographical film for a presidential candidate (Calvin Coolidge) was made. See Gronbeck & Miller, 1994; Becker & Lower, 1979.   [RETURN]

[2] Other new technologies, of course, have had significant impacts on political campaigning--fax machines, satellite communication, time-code based video editing, high resolution video technologies, computerized phone banks, etc. See Armstrong, 1988.  [RETURN]

[3] The word "I' is used collectively here; I thank Karla Tonella of the University of Iowa's Information Arcade for showing me how to grab and to whack WWW images and for setting up the URL in which you now can find these sample pages. See http://www.uiowa.edu/~commstud/Faculty/Gronbeck/politick/ .   [RETURN]

[4] If you visit the Web site noted in n. 3, you'll be able to tell which pages are whacked by looking at the address line, which will signal that you're to go to "www.uiowa.edu" for them. If another address shows up when you point to a link, it's in fact a hot link out unto the WWW. Given that the election is over, you may or may not find the site still active; if it is active, it likely will not reflect the content of October 1996, which is what I examined for this paper.   [RETURN]

[5] This not to say, of course, that we could not have used radio and television as point-to-point, or even many to many, communication media. Radio indeed is used in point-to-point situations, and teleconferencing illustrates many-to-many interactions. The dominant uses of both radio and television, however, in both American and most other technologically advanced societies are for source-to-many communications. The role of cultural conditioning in contextualizing media use is one of the themes of Carey, 1989.   [RETURN]

Footnotes for Politicking on the Information Superhighway
AUTHOR: Bruce-Gronbeck@uiowa.edu