+1.415.763.5717in the political arena, mainstream media can’t compete with social media
if you followed the election last year, you probably heard about the impact social media had on the presidential race. it was difficult to escape reading about obama’s 3 million online donors or about the 2 million profiles created on my.barackobama.com. the election of 2008 was dubbed by many as the “social media election”. we began to see social media, in particular twitter and facebook, replacing some of the functions that the so called more “reliable and factually sound” mainstream media was traditionally responsible for during such elections. for example, youtube videos were used during presidential debates and twitter feeds were used to share political speeches and gather opinions. this begs the question, if cnn, msnbc, the san francisco chronicle, and fox news deliver more “valid” information, why is it that the use of social media in politics is growing so ardently?
when you start to follow a political figure on twitter, you may not get an answer to your personal tweets. you also may not be able to create a conversation with your state representative. however, you choose to follow them anyway because they may provide information that is valuable and than you in turn can share. no more “hey it’s too bad you missed that coverage on msnbc”, instead it’s “@soandso has retweeted this youtube video so check it out!”
the use of social media in politics isn’t just limited to america. remember the #iranelection? iranians utilized social networking sites to update each other and the world about different important events taking place. updates were reliable and frequent and easily tracked through a timeline, that aggregated events throughout the election using twitter, facebook, flickr, and youtube. without these networks, the world would have never experienced the events during those turbulent weeks. social media certainly had a powerful influence on mainstream media during the iranian election. one example of this is seen in the trending topic #cnnfail. this thread was about how cnn was not covering the iranian election thoroughly. someone at the network surely took notice because within a few hours of #cnnfail becoming a trending topic on twitter, the large news organization began to cover the iranian election much more closely.
what do all these media changes mean for politicians? they point to a fundamental shift in the way and the speed that politicians can connect with their constituents, and vice versa. while information is being exchanged at unprecedented rates, social media has given politicians the opportunity to reach out to millions within seconds anytime, any place, any day. there is no need to wait for interviews, debates, or press releases to share and react. the public can now learn details about government representatives and political events on a level that our parents and grandparents never imagined. we only wonder what kind of dialogue would have been possible if web 2.0 tools had existed during the fall of the berlin wall, the end of the cold war, the election of nixon, the assassination of jfk….and so on.
so why is the use of social media increasing in the political arena? it boils down to communication. some would argue that mainstream media is more accurate, but it is a one-way communications channel. and maybe social media doesn’t always deliver the “important” news stories but it definitely delivers the interesting ones and let’s you share them. let’s just say that if people are talking about it, it’s going to be on twitter, facebook, digg and so on. also, as seen in the case of iran, social networks are open to anyone and you don’t need to be a journalist or have a special visa to share pertinent news. this is only the beginning as we expect to see more many more changes, such as protesters leveraging social media to organize, political organizations gathering worldwide support for different causes, countries with little to no freedom of speech being forced into more transparency as well as politicians using social media to gather immediate feedback. ladies and gentleman, worldwide politics is going viral, going social and moving more into the hands of the people.