I have been reading a fascinating book: Philip N. Howard’s New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen. While its primary focus, as the title suggests, is the role the internet plays in political campaigning, one aspect it discusses is new ways of delivering the right message to individual voters via a hypermedia campaign.

It is accepted that class plays little role in voter allegiances, but it is argued that neither does race, religion, age or gender; the simple demographics are no longer useful for determining how a person votes and what messages they should be susceptible to. Society is far more complex, politics is delineated by issues and to understand the individual it is necessary to understand their purchasing behaviour, where they spend and what they spend on, what luxury items are important to them, how this relates to their network of friends, what they do for leisure, who with and how often. While this may link to figures such as annual income, it is argued that this is an equally useless indicator. Politics may be better determined by the amount of disposable income, while the way it is disposed of will give information about the character of the individual.

In the US data-mining is a sophisticated and rich industry. It is not simply about conducting polls, though some companies do that. It is about collecting data from every available source. So if we imagine being able to access census records, opinion polls, academic surveys, petitions that would be a substantial amount of data. But if you can then overlay that data with that collected from supermarket loyalty cards and credit card companies what American lobbyists and campaigners have access to is data that can say a great deal about certain individuals, and can aggregate data by zip code, by neighbourhood, by voting district. But the data still cannot predetermine voting behaviour, what it informs the user is what issues and topics are likely to be of most concern within those households and neighbourhoods. It is a starting point for a conversational style of campaign not the end point.