Hello my name is David Ronserman and this is Talking Politics.

This week I'm just here to introduce with John Norton, a conversation that John recorded

a few days ago in Oxford with Phil Howard and John's just going to tell us a bit about

who Phil Howard is and why this is such an important subject for this podcast and when

you hear it you'll recognize some of these themes because we keep coming back to them.

We are really interested in what digital technology is doing to politics.

So John why is Phil Howard such an important person to discuss this with?

He's a very interesting person because he's an academic who has done a great deal of

the early empirical and ethnographic research in this area.

So he's actually gone out into the field as it were?

Yes, in interesting ways.

He's a sociologist by background and he started by becoming an intern on the Gore and Bush

campaigns in the 2000 presidential election.

And from observing what happened on those campaigns he began to appreciate the way in

which a small number of geeks had developed interesting and powerful ideas about how you

could use this technology to shape public opinion.

And so that led to a very good book in my opinion which is about the managed citizen.

And he came to my attention because he was somebody who was sociologically informed, understood

the importance of ethnography in this area and had begun to understand what the capabilities

of the technology were for politics.

And he's tracked this over a quite a long period.

I mean you, if you'll forgive me saying so, you've tracked it over a longer period, right?

...