by Jesika Brooks
President-Elect Barack Obama stands by a grocery cart and shakes a young girl’s hand. Obama smiles and holds a wide-eyed 4-month-old. A 2-year-old girl hugs an Obama doll up to her face.
During Election 2008, readers could easily find photos of Obama with adorable kids on the blog Yes We Can (Hold Babies) at yeswecanholdbabies.wordpress.com. But those same readers could just as easily surf over to a Youtube video decrying Obama’s political agenda.
Used for purposes both silly and profound, the Internet had a massive impact on this year’s presidential election. Volunteers, politicos, and even apolitical laymen used online media to express personal views on presidential talking points and to analyze campaign tactics.
“The Internet has transformed elections in this country,” said Tammy Stokes, 38.
Stokes runs the political blog Seeding Spartanburg when she’s not working in higher education administration. Seeding Spartanburg – found at www.seedingspartanburg.com – mostly covers S.C. politics, although Stokes has posted on the presidential election as well.
“I admit that yesterday, after casting my vote, as I walked out the door of my precinct, tears welled in my eyes,” Stokes wrote in a post-Election Day entry. “I realized the importance of what I had just done. I realized how my children’s lives would be different than my own–more different than I ever imagined.”
People used political blogs as a means of expressing their views on campaign tactics and on the candidates themselves. Stokes is only one of many political bloggers living in South Carolina. These S.C. bloggers range from armchair politicians to successful campaigners.
Earl Capps, 37, runs The Blogland of Earl Capps, a political blog based in Summerville, S.C. Although his day job is with U.S. Group, Inc., a highway and sitework contractor, he has worked with political campaigns for 20 years. His blog can be found at earlcapps.blogspot.com.
Capps also focuses on politics in South Carolina. But he had – and has – plenty to say on politics at the national level.
“Regardless of who wins the White House next Tuesday night, the biggest winner of Election 2008 won’t be John McCain or Barack Obama, nor the party which controls Congress. The biggest winners of the 2008 election will be those whose pioneering efforts shifted political campaigning on the Internet from the fringes of American political culture into its mainstream,” Capps posted on his blog October 4.
As a regular election resource, the public’s use of the Internet leapt from 9 percent in 2000 to 24 percent in 2008, according to a January 2008 study by the Pew Research Foundation.
“Reading some blogs is as essential to being informed about the campaign as is reading major newspapers,” said John O’Connor, 31, a political reporter for The State newspaper. “That’s not likely to change. But readers need to recognize that blogs are still the Wild West and that in some cases people are being paid by the people they are writing about.”
Presidential candidates used the Internet to address both decided and undecided voters. They used social networking sites to connect to the youth vote, campaign sites to mobilize the volunteer effort and homepages to address voter curiosity.
“The Internet encompassed every aspect of this campaign season, from candidates using the web to mobilize supporters and raise money, to mainstream media and voters turning to the Net for the latest updates and reactions from the campaign trail,” said blogger Jennifer Read.
Read, 29, is a fundraising consultant. In her spare time, she acts as co-editor of Indigo Journal, the home site of South Carolina’s Online Progressive Community. She started Indigo Journal in October 2008 after writing for Elonkey, her S.C. political blog. Elonkey is at elonkey.blogspot.com, while Indigo Journal is at www.indigojournal.com.
Volunteers, news coverage ombudsmen and “culture remixers” also used the Internet as a platform to express their diverse views. Culture remixers create mash-ups of different media such as television and music.
“Outside parties using the Internet to get the message across aren’t just influencing voters directly, but through agenda-priming, they’re influencing news media coverage, which then reaches people who may not be online,” said Capps.
Along with the ubiquitous Obama Girl, whose ode to Obama garnered national attention and nearly 12 million hits, Youtube hosted clips of debates, interviews and campaign ads. Video of CBS anchor Katie Couric’s interview with Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, was exceptionally popular: it reached over a million hits.
“A lot of the role played by the Internet in this past election wasn’t from official sites of campaigns and parties, but rather the ability of private citizens and activists to use the Internet to create and disseminate information both for and against candidates,” said Capps.
He added, “This reaches to people who are increasingly trying to ‘balance’ their news by getting inputs from the usual ‘official’ sources, such as mainstream news media and campaign websites, with inputs from independent sources, such as blogs and YouTube content.”
Many bloggers think that the Internet will become an integral part of future elections.
“Odds are good that the major tools of ten years from now are either just being developed or they don’t even exist yet. The only certainty you can count on with the Internet is the absolute certainty of uncertainty. Change is the only constant,” said Capps.
Read believes that old media will begin using new media techniques as a part of its future election coverage. “If they don’t,” she said, “the new media are likely to dominate the flow of information again in 2010 and beyond.”
“Stay plugged in because the next big step forward is always around the corner,” said O’Connor.
Brooks is an English major and art minor at Columbia College. Graphic design and linguistics are two of her passions.
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See also: Election 2.0 sites to visit and Obama 2.0
1 Comment
November 27, 2008 at 2:49 am
[...] Election 2.0 « C2writes Weblog “Odds are good that the major tools of ten years from now are either just being developed or they don’t even exist yet. The only certainty you can count on with the Internet is the absolute certainty of uncertainty. … [...]