Social Media in Elections

Boy, the U.S. is pretty darn lucky, because we’re on the cutting edge as far as international use of social media in our elections. I guess this just shows you what happens when you have as much free speech(see internet section) and internet access as we do. Then again, does the international community refer to these platforms as “social media”? Perhaps, that’s the reason why I’m not finding anything in the search engines. 

In one of my earlier posts, I showed a YouTube video of a student in the U.K. asking Prime Minister Gordon Brown how he was planning on keeping politics interesting and engaging for younger generations, so obviously, the U.K. has jumped on the social media bandwagon to a certain extent. 

We know that the international community is using the social media,

 

but are they using it in their campaigns? Is the U.S. really on the cutting edge of social media use in elections, or are we missing something here? Are we allowing our political process to succumb to the scrutiny of the anonymous blogger? Do we somehow make our campaigns less serious if our URL begins with http://www.myspace.com/? Can politicians even begin to penetrate the vast landscape of social networks that multiple by the minutes and whose popularity is like the tide? Well, at least not MySpace, Facebook, and-ah hell-a lot of other social networking sites. But, let’s not forget that some time ago, MySpace was the online force to be reckoned with.

Yet, perhaps social media is the way in the future of political campaigning- what Garrett Graff explores in his book, The First Campaign.

Barack Obama seems to be–no–he has been successful using social media to advance his campaign. Perhaps, he is the leader of the first campaign.

As I flipped through the Politicians page on Facebook…well, again, perhaps the first campaign has already begun.

Do you have a million friends on facebook?