Dr. DigiPol

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Alan Rosenblatt, Ph.D. (Dr. DigiPol) is a long-time scholar, consultant, and educator in the field of Digital Politics. As of July 2007, he is the Associate Director of Online Advocacy for the Center for American Progress and the Center for American Progress Action Fund. His first campaign with CAPAction was the highly successful Clean My Ride campaign.

Alan is the Founder of the Internet Advocacy Center in Washington, DC. IAC is a hybrid between a virtual think tank dedicated to the study of digital politics and integrating digital technologies into the world of politics. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, and American Universities, where he teaches course on the intersection of politics, the media, and the internet. He was a 2008 Fellow at the Institute of Politics, Deomcracy, & the Internet. As well writing here, Alan writes for TechPresident.com, the Huffington Post, K Street Cafe and occasionally for PoliticsOnline.com, Idealware.org, and the Institute for Politics Democracy & the Internet. He serves on the Board of Directors for e-Democracy.org and the editorial review boards for the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, the Journal of Political Marketing, and other academic journals devoted to the intersection of politics, social science, and the internet.

Shortly after completing his doctoral dissertation on presidential use of television to manipulate public opinion (Winter 1992), he learned about a new technology, Mosaic, which transformed the Internet into the World Wide Web. He had been working with computers and political science since 1986 and with the Internet since 1988, so he was no stranger to the intersection of computers and politics. But with the advent of the Web and talk of convergence between the Internet and TV, the potential impact of the Web on politics seemed enormous. In the Spring of 1995, he and a fellow professor offered one of the first university courses on cyberpolitics. In the six years he taught it at George Mason University, the course evolved from an exploration of what the Internet’s impact on politics could be to how it was being used in politics.

Still, with the online audience still growing and new online technology being developed at a mind-numbing rate, there was still much more on the cyberpolitics horizon. In 1998, Dr. Rosenblatt started to push the cyberpolitics envelope, himself. As Washington Bureau Chief for Media Bureau Networks (MBN), he succeeded in getting a fledgling online media company press credentials for the 2000 Republican and Democratic Presidential Nominating Conventions. The MBN team streamed live from both conventions a daily array of talk shows that wove the themes of politics, the Internet, and youth civic engagement into a hip presentation for an online audience of hip-hop and jazz fans spreading out from MBN’s hub in Phildelphia. With no previous broadcast exeperience, he hosted two talk shows, Questions You Should Ask (QUSA) and the DJ’s Roundtable, where he and his colleagues interviewed Steve Forbes, Jr., George P. Bush, Representative Bob Barr, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, Schooly D, Ted Nugent, John Stewart, Governor James Gilmore, DJ Lil’ G, and a host of other politicos wandering about the first Internet media sections at the party conventions, Internet Alley and Internet Avenue.

In 2003 he became Director of Training Programs at e-advocates, where he provided strategy consulting and seminars to the advocacy community. In 2001, Alan became Vice President of Stateside Associates and launched and managed its Online Advocacy Services practice, the first-ever practice of its kind dedicated to state and local issues management.

As you might imagine, he likes the topic.