Friday, April 20, 2012

Social Media Breaches the Gap


            During this presidential campaign candidates have utilized social media to communicate with their voters. Obama’ss campaign is actively using Twitter for promotion. Both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have participated in Google+ “Hangouts”, a video-chatting feature, to communicate with professional interviewers as well as every-day American citizens, who two decades ago would have been unable to access the president directly. This is yet another example that proves that old forms of media are dying out and making space for these technologically advanced forms of communication.
            Presidential campaigns have been pushed to use such forms of new media to transcend traditional forms and to appeal to younger audiences. The parties plan to integrate such technologies deeply into their campaigns. These tools will allow voters to see new points of view, provide them with more information and inevitably shape their political discussions.
            Social media will continue to be a growing part of politics. The Republican National Convention announced last week that they would live-stream their entire four-day convention through Google. This way viewers will be able to access complete coverage of the event and fill in the gaps traditional television and cable news shows must omit to make way for other stories. 




1 comment:

  1. The political use of social media in campaigns has become an area that a number of Internet scholars now write about. You are right that both a desire to appeal to appeal to younger voters and a wish for a wider bandwidth method of communicating more generally make this appealing to candidates. The question might be: how does this relate to digital journalism? Do you think that candidates are trying to do an end-run around journalists as intermediaries?

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