There has been a great deal of commentary about the role of the Web in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, and it’s clear that more people are engaging with online media. This year’s Media Myths & Realities survey shows that the number of American adults using blogs as a source of information has nearly doubled since 2006, from 13 to 24 percent. And while the percentage of respondents who said they would rely on blogs and social networking sites for election information was nominal, influencers reported plans to use these sources at as much as four times the rate of the general population. (The survey was conducted prior to the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 4.) Few people understand the dynamics of the Web and elections better than Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference and a community Web site that promotes the use of technology in politics. Rasiej also was a co-founder of techPresident, a group blog that covered how the 2008 presidential candidates used the Web and how voter-generated content affected the campaign. Perspectives recently asked Rasiej (via e-mail, of course) about how blogging and other consumer-generated media affected the 2008 election. Perspectives: A lot of your work focuses on the intersection of technology and politics. What role did you see blogs playing in the election? What did they bring to this election that may have been absent from previous ones? Andrew Rasiej: Since blogs first demonstrated their power to help form communities online during the Howard Dean campaign, political blogs have continued to proliferate and became a major source of news information about not only the candidates for office during the 2008 election cycle, but also about every facet of the election process itself. As newspapers cut back on detailed coverage of the elections and, especially, local contests due to lack of space, blogs filled the void and in some cases have even provided more timely and better information about the candidates, the issues facing voters, and even less obvious topics like polling, mainstream media coverage, the use of social media, ballot access, and mobile campaigning. Perspectives: Besides blogs, what new media technologies had an impact on the election and how? Rasiej: In addition to blogs, social networking platforms like Facebook and MySpace, video sharing sites like YouTube, and microblogging through Twitter all impacted the election because these tools allowed citizens to connect with each other and to easily promote their chosen candidates at no cost. These sites also allowed candidates to reach potential supporters in new ways that challenged the time-honored methods of television and direct mail. Political opinion is formed in our country by people talking to each other, and they do so in the most common of places, such as around a dining table, at the water cooler, on the playground or in the market. In this election, those conversations happened not only in these traditional settings but also online, with new media platforms and tools making them exponentially more powerful and reaching far more people in less time than would have been possible in any previous election cycle. The political media ecology has been dramatically changed, with more power now distributed to individuals and less control being available to the parties, the candidates, or the mainstream press that covers them. Perspectives: How do you see new media technologies impacting the way people receive political information in the future? Rasiej: The new media technologies not only allow people to receive information but also to modify it or to create it. They can then send it to anyone they like in an effort to inform and/or persuade that person. As these technologies become more powerful, more ubiquitous, and even easier to use, more and more political information will be sent person-to-person, further eroding the power of the mainstream media to influence the political landscape. Perspectives: The survey results also show both the general population and so-called influencers using nonjournalist blogs at a higher rate than journalist blogs. As a blogger, why do you think nonjournalist sites might be more popular? Rasiej: It’s not that journalist sites are less popular than nonjournalist sites; it’s that so many more nonjournalist sites exist than ever before, and as their numbers increase, they capture a large percentage share of the available eyeballs. Another factor is that nonjournalist sites can sometimes be more timely and break stories faster than traditional journalist sites, which often need to fact-check and double-check their sources to guard their reputations. This dynamic puts journalists’ blogs at a disadvantage in the world of 15-minute news cycles. |
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| KETCHUM'S ONLINE MAGAZINE | YEAR 2009 ISSUE 1 |
| KETCHUM'S ONLINE MAGAZINE | YEAR 2009 ISSUE 1 |
