The success of Barack Obama in the 2008 United States Presidential elections was historic and groundbreaking for a number of reasons. Notably, Obama’s race, which made him the first black man to lead the country. Obama’s political hooks and promises offered much hope to a beleaguered nation of people, tired of the war-ravaged and generally incompetent George W Bush administration hat had been in power for eight years.
However, the tools used by the various political masterminds of Obama’s election campaign were innovative and made fine use of the growing shift towards new media and the internet, in particular. Social media played an impossibly large role in the election outcome, with candidates using a variety of means to communicate with their voters. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, You Tube - all social networking websites that were cleverly used by both Obama and rival John McCain in order to get in touch with the people and secure more votes.
The turnout for the election was significantly better as a possible result. 62.8% of the voting age population turned out to register their vote, one of the highest ever figures, equalling the turnout for the 1964 election but narrowly losing out to the 1960 vote, where John F Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon. The numbers certainly make good reading when you hold them in comparison with recent years. In 1996, just over 50% of the voting population bothered to vote, a number that only slightly increased for the 2000 elections.
Now, one of the reasons for the surge in voters may have been Obama’s popularity and the fact that he was a new and different candidate but experts are crediting the use of new media for the revitalisation of democratic participation in the election. So just how did they do it?
A look at Barack Obama’s official Facebook page tells an interesting story. Obama currently has 6,072,317 ‘supporters’, meaning that those people are linked to his page and are made aware of any updates or communication coming from the page. It’s a heft amount of online followers, especially when compared to the 574,107 supporters for John McCain. The Facebook page is probably never updated by Obama himself (he likely has teams of people to do that for him) but it contains photos of him at key speeches and addresses and videos of him and his election promises. Now that he has been elected and inaugurated, the page is still updated almost every day, with news of his exploits and newsworthy moments. It’s an excellent device for getting media coverage and the brilliant thing about it is that Obama’s people were able to spin it whichever way they wanted.
On the information section of the page, Obama is even decent enough to provide us with a list of his hobbies and interests. He states them as ‘basketball, writing, spending time w/ kids’ before a list of his favourite musicians, films and books. It’s through this tool that his audience can relate to Obama and see a different side to him than the stern authoritative, political one that people are used to. It’s Obama’s way of showing that he’s, to borrow a popular phrase, ‘down with the kids’. In the job description section, it states, rather frankly, that he is ‘President of the United States’ from January 2009 onwards.
It’s a fascinating tool to use as it makes him seem just like any of the 6 million odd supporters he has. People would have looked at the information provided and related it to the information they had themselves provided regarding their own interests and employment. It may not have made people instantly want to vote for him, but it was a new tactic, devised to make best use of the growing demand around the world for new and social media.
Jesse Hirsh, in a interview with CBS News back in 2007, made the valid point that by using Facebook, candidates were able to access the locations of their supporters, by looking at their information. Hirsh cites the example that members in New Hampshire could be informed of a special announcement or speech from the candidate at the touch of a button. The point is also raised that the general desire of people for daily usage of Facebook and similar social networking sights means that there is greater chance for quick responses. In essence, the word can be spread faster and to more people and in a frenzied campaign such as the ‘08 Elections, that function could have be absolutely vital for Barack Obama.
However, it’s not just his Facebook page that won the election for Obama. The role of internet blogging will have had a huge and unprecedented effect on the election. With citizen journalism on an almost inexorable rise, it is doubtless that blogs covering the election would have been extremely popular. Blogs were a way for the media to gauge what the public were talking about regarding the election. For example if a large number of blogs were devoted to a particular address from a candidate then the media would know to post special coverage of that event. The advantage blogs have over mainstream media is that they can be posted out quicker. The Internet has the capability to make everything faster and more accessible to the people.
As a result of the probably deluge of political bloggers, the Obama campaign could have also had a better access to public reaction. Gone are the days when only opinion polls would give a true suggestion as to how well a campaign was being received. It’s possible that the rise in political blogging could have had a positive effect on the turnout for the election; anyone in their right mind can blog. It isn’t like mainstream media where only qualified people get to voice their opinions. The availability of blogs and the internet mean that the average Joe can convey his feelings and try to convince others of what they believe just by a few words and a click of a button. Essentially, the bloggers will feel like they’re involved in the political media process and the election will mean a whole lot more to them and to others.
The beauty of these new media functions is that the great majority can be anonymous; if, say, John Smith is posting a scathing attack of a candidate’s policies online from his basement in Nebraska, then no-one need know it is John Smith who is writing. That way he can be free to give his full opinion, however controversial or drastic it may be.
The anonymity of the Internet can mean that a campaign can manipulate the process in their favour. Blogs have a large influence on the public and would have a significant effect on undecided voters. Due to this effect, it is possible that pro-Obama blogs could have been written in order to raise a positive feeling in the Democrat Party and to generate more support for them.
One thing is for certain; Obama was definitely a popular blog topic. Statistics show that almost 500 million blog mentioned him since the end of August, just a few months before the election. During the same time period, only about 150 million blog posts mentioned his rival John McCain. Could it have been the increased publicity, both in the media and on the Internet, that won Obama the election?
YouTube is another new media vehicle that was utilised heavily by both candidates. And it’s interesting to note that the most popular election related video on the site is an anti-Obama one, attracting more than 11 million hits. Made by a soldier who returned from Iraq, the man talks about Obama’s stance on the war, saying, "When you call the Iraqi war a mistake you disrespect the service and sacrifice of everyone who has died promoting freedom... Because you do not understand or appreciate these principles Sir, I am supporting Senator John McCain for president." He then walks away from the camera to reveal he has an artificial leg and a typically tacky pro-America song is dramatically played as he leaves.
It’s extremely theatrical, almost, and has clearly been designed carefully to tug at the heartstrings and appeal to the undecided. Still, it’s videos such as this one that candidates used to get their messages across to the people and to a newer generation of people that used the Internet as their main source of information and knowledge. The Democrats themselves put out a video of several well known celebrities echoing Obama’s popular phrase ‘Yes we can’. These videos are all meticulously prepared so that the correct message and values are conveyed and can be an extremely useful tool.
Andrew Rasiej, from the Techpresident blog, which monitored the impact of the Internet on the election, says that YouTube played a big part in changing the political landscape. He said, in an interview with the BBC, “The power to control the message is no longer in the hands of the political parties and candidates or the mainstream media. It's now shared by the public at large. They can distribute a piece of media on YouTube faster in a 15-minute news cycle than traditional media can in a 24-hour news cycle."
Perhaps the greatest effect had by YouTube was that the majority of the videos watched were light-hearted and moved away from the intense, seriousness of Presidential debate. Julie Germany, from the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University, said that while serious videos such as a landmark Obama speech on race notched up millions of viewers, it was the lighter videos that the people were more into. She commented, "Some of the most popular videos are the ones which show a lighter side and tap into pre-conceived notions and bias. They tap into characteristics that we either find funny or we fear, and these sorts of messages help them become viral."
Certainly, YouTube realised that their site would be at the forefront of the rush on new media for political attention. They even launched a new sub-section of their site, ‘You Choose ‘08’, which focused solely on the election and featured official party videos, interviews with Obama and McCain and all the election information that you would possibly need to know. In the end, it benefited Obama the greatest, although it is worth noting that the McCain campaign, with an inferior budget to the Democrats, ploughed the majority of their resources into YouTube and away from television advertisements, a sign that they recognised the opportunity for new media to play a role in getting the message across.
Dr. Paul Haridakis, associate professor of Communication Studies at Kent State University, investigated the impact of all new and social media on the election and said, in an article for Sciencedaily.com, "Many people will watch videos and use traditional media like TV to acquire political information about the candidates, but they also are going to the Internet and using social networking sites to see who people they know support. The information gleaned from their social networks may be the information they find most credible and persuasive.
“They'll listen to their buddy on his MySpace page, not necessarily the traditional messengers that candidates employ to reach out to the voters, or even the candidates themselves. That exploits the power of social media pretty well. The candidates in this election season have not fully harnessed the power of these tools."
There are plenty of reasons why Obama's Presidential campaign gained a lot more attention and publicity on social networks, blogs and other new media forms than the McCain campaign. The demographics and ages of social media users tend to fall in line closer with those of today's common Democratic voters. Looking ahead to the next election in four years time, it seems abundantly obvious that all political campaigns will be taking advantage of social media trends and failure to do so could very well end up in defeat.
(University essay on New Media Contexts, 2009)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment