Here are some of the stories we are tracking concerning new media technologies and the elections.
Modern technology that enables voters to better share the experience harks back to long ago. In Colonial times, people would ride in from the settlements to vote and then wait with townfolk until the ballots were counted, says Kate Kelly, a historian who wrote Election Day: An American Holiday, An American History. With the invention of the telegraph, masses of people waiting for results would gather outside their city’s newspaper. The television age changed that. (Baltimore Sun).
The country has never seen social-networking technology come into play, particularly on the grass-roots level, as it has during this election, says Sue Barnes, a professor of communication and associate director of the Lab for Social Computing at Rochester Institute of Technology.
Politics and social networks: Voters make the connection.
Online social networking sites — socnets, from community blogs to YouTube — are changing how the members of this class get their news, whom they trust to provide it and how they act on it. Whatever the source, they comfortably and routinely comment on the news, reproduce it, then forward it to relatives, friends, co-workers and, yes, strangers. (Washington Post).
The presidential campaigns of Senators John McCain and Barack Obama have taken notice of technology’s reach, using social networking Web sites to connect with tech-savvy voters.
(San Jose Mercury News).
Amid gloom, young see vote as act of hope
The candidate’s face is ubiquitous on social networking sites like Facebook.com and in YouTube videos. The campaign has relied on text messages to communicate with voters. They stumbled over the initial plan to announce the vice-presidential pick directly to supporters’ cell phones and e-mails, but found the short blurbs are an effective way to advertise early voting locations. (Associated Press).
On politics: The new republican party
Through the use of integrating social networking online into organizing volunteers at the local level through the myBarackObama.com site, the campaign has empowered individuals nationwide to create their organic, locally formed Obama campaign teams.
The technique eschews the usual top-down organization of a political campaign or state party structure, replacing it with a horizontal organization chart where volunteers have access to an incredible amount of voter identification information and Obama message points through the campaign’s social network. Wired magazine laid out the strategy in a revelatory article last week. (Nashville City Paper).
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