ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the aspects critical to understanding how mobile communication has been appropriated in political campaigns, especially with variations under different social and political contexts. The reliability of the messages, as perceived by mobile phone users, helps infuse mass-produced campaign messages with personalized appeal. Interestingly in the face of citizens' increasingly powerful private consumption of campaign messages, campaigns are struggling to stake out their controllable space by maintaining top-down communication patterns while slowly increasing the level at which citizens, or at least supporters, can become involved. Different forms of positive effects as a result of mobile phone use in political campaigns have been widely discussed, including mobilizing voter support, coordinating volunteers and facilitating transparent electoral procedures. Online and mobile communication is endowed with the capacity to facilitate horizontal and decentralized networks that take autonomous form. Mobile phones, instead of being appropriated independently, need to be viewed as lodged within existing social, political and media contexts in contemporary political campaigns.
