Constructing Skeptical Citizens: How Campaign Microsites Foster New Ways of Engaging Political Information and Understanding Citizenship

Digitally mediated campaign messages contain normative expectations of citizens' political and civic behaviors that users must navigate routinely. This analysis of microsites (smaller Web sites containing a different address than the organization producing the site) from the 2010 election argues that these tools' content reflects an account of how citizens should approach information. Differing from traditional campaign communications, microsites highlight "hidden" content and complicate notions of what counts as "fact." In doing so, they perform a skeptical encounter with political information, and construct a normative model of citizens who ought to use similar measures to discern valid from invalid information.