Rogers, Richard. Information Politics on the Web.

Raphael, Chad

Rogers, Richard. Information Politics on the Web. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Pp. ix, 216. ISBN 0-262-18242-4 (hb). $35.00.

What are the biases in how information is selected and presented to us on the World Wide Web? What new methods are available to study political communication online? Scholars interested in either question can profit from this book by Richard Rogers, Assistant Professor in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam.

Rogers is among those who are concerned with the shrinking scope and diversity of content we are exposed to on the web. He is especially interested in the major means of adjudicating the content we see online, such as how search engines rank and index web pages, and how dynamic preference-matching (such as that provided by Amazon.com) recommends content or products to a visitor based on her past preferences and those of others with similar likes. Whose voices and what opportunities are included and excluded by these means?

This is a matter both of what Rogers calls "front-end politics" and "back-end politics" (p. 2). The politics of the front-end of web sites concerns the inclusiveness of the kind of visible content that communication scholars are used to studying, such as news reports and political debates. Back-end politics, which are unique to the web as a medium, have to do with how search tools, filters, and so on privilege or discriminate against content that is displayed to users. Rogers argues that front-end content continues to frame political debate in exclusive ways according to traditionally powerful sources. Similarly, the backend logics of search tools increasingly privilege official sites, reducing the diversity of views that web users actually see. For example, a search for "terrorism" on Google after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City yields initial pages of hits to the same authoritative sources that dominate mainstream news coverage on and off the web: the U.S. government, American journalists, think tanks, and academics at major institutions.

However, the book is less an argument about where the web is going than a series of conceptual tools and methods for researching web-based political communication. What makes this work unique is that it includes accounts of how Rogers and his colleagues created and used several online research instruments, with examples of how they can be applied in specific studies. The introductory chapter offers a detailed conceptualization of how we can think about ways that information politics works on the web. Chapters 2 through 5 each introduce a distinct method and instrument for studying web-based political communication. Chapter 2 presents an entertaining study of how Viagra is presented differently on the web by authoritative voices (doctors, drug companies and manufacturers) and non-authoritative sources (Viagra users and re-sellers). This study uses a method that aims to take advantage both of human surfing of sites using a variety of search tools, as well as collaborative filtering of their results. The results are expressed in a web site that portrays the struggle between expert views on Viagra (as a drug for elderly men with erectile dysfunction) and non-expert views (as a party drug for youth or for whimsical experiments such as pepping up wilting flowers).

Succeeding chapters focus on more traditional topics of political communication. Chapter 3 looks at an attempt by the Dutch government to organize a national political debate over the safety of genetically modified organisms in foods. The study uses Netlocator, Rogers' web crawling program that finds all sites linked to given starting points, to identify "issue networks" of sites created by inter-linking non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In addition, Rogers discusses his Issuecrawler software, which is used here to measure the temperature of debate (according to how frequently sites modify their pages), level of territorialization of debate (by examining where organizations taking part in the debate are located), and intensity (via the number of organizations taking positions on the issue). Linking patterns between sites indicate that civil society groups engaged in the food safety debate through international organizations, and that the only national "debate" on the web was created by a Dutch television program's site, which linked widely to the views of NGOs, government and business. Chapter 4 presents the Web Issue Index, a software tool for tracking mentions of social issues on the web over time. Rogers uses it to compare mentions of globalization issues on sites created by Dutch and international NGOs and online Dutch newspapers during the 2001 G-8 economic summit in Genoa, Italy. He finds that NGO views are not well represented in the press, where official views dominate. Chapter 5 presents the Election Issue Tracker, which follows issues raised in party platforms, by NGOs, and in press coverage, allowing for comparison between them. This software allows Rogers to track which parties' issues are resonating most in the press, and the extent that NGOs are able to inject their issues into coverage. In his conclusion, Rogers asks whether the web might help free NGOs from their reliance on mainstream media coverage to spread their views and influence policy, suggesting that this may be the case when attention to NGOs and their issues are high within their issue networks on the web.

This is an important book that will stimulate thinking about how to conceive of information control on the web and how to study it. Rogers' work is valuable for its many conceptual distinctions that help us think about, and critique, the way we are guided to privileged sources of information on the apparently free landscape of the web. It is also a fount of ideas for methods of researching online communication. The discussion of how different search tools' logics work, and what kind of results they are most apt to deliver, will be of interest to scholars. The software tools he has developed, although in their early stages, should be useful additions to the online researcher's toolkit (see govcom.org for further discussion and program downloads).

The book also leaves a few questions unanswered. First, what Rogers calls "information politics" is often driven by economic factors as well, such as various "pay for placement" systems used by some search tools. One may wonder whether his object of inquiry would not be more accurately called a political economy of information. Second, the research instruments he describes here are best thought of as prototypes, and should be carefully supplemented with other forms of inquiry, such as textual analysis. Perhaps the most important example is the Netlocator. Although Rogers acknowledges that organizations may link to each other for reasons other than sharing a set of common issues, we need to think more about whether inter-linking is enough to establish real connections between organizations, rather than merely a connection between their web sites. For example, the ubiquity of links to download Adobe Acrobat Reader software (so surfers can read some documents) does not mean that Adobe is part of anyone's issue network. A conceptual issue is raised by the Election Issue Tracker as well. As applied in the book, the tool cannot measure issues initiated by the press, only by parties and NGOs, so either the program or the use of it here (it is not clear) assumes that the press can only selectively amplify issues raised by others, and cannot introduce issues into campaigns. That is unlikely.

Because of its complexity and dense academic style, Information Politics on the Web is a book for scholars and for graduate courses in research methods, political communication, and new media or cyberculture. It is fully indexed and referenced.

--Chad Raphael

Santa Clara University