Abstract: This article defines a new methodological framework to examine
emerging forms of political campaigning on and across Web 2.0 platforms (i.e.
Facebook, Youtube, Twitter) in the North-American context. The proposed method
seeks to identify the new strategies that make use of campaign texts, users,
keywords, information networks and software code to spread a political
communications and rally voters across distributed, and therefore seemingly
unmanageable spheres of online communication. The proposed method
differentiates itself from previous Web 1.0 methods focused on mapping
hyperlinked networks. In particular, we pay attention to the new materiality of
the Web 2.0 as constituted by shared objects that circulate across modular
platforms. In this paper we develop an object-centered method through the
concept of traffic tags – unique identifiers that by enabling the
circulation of web objects across platforms organize political activity online.
By tracing the circulation of traffic tags, we can map different sets of
relationships among uploaded and shared web objects (text, images, videos,
etc.), political actors (online partisans, political institutions, bloggers,
etc.), and web based platforms (social network sites, search engines, political websites, blogs, etc.).
