Check out this piece on Barack Obama and the influence of social networks and new media.
Facebook is designed around the shallow and social. Networkers are not “commentators,” as they would be on a blog; they are “friends.” Friends do not need to agree on ideas; they just need to like the same kind of music. Friends do no need to agree on ways to improve society; they just need to like a candidate’s cadence, his body, or his clothes.
As each day of this campaign passes, it becomes more and more like 1968, with the generation gap between young and old emerging as the factor of difference between our candidates. Obama is the Facebook candidate, and he has an awful lot of folks merrily following his yellow brick road. It may lead to the White House, I fear, and Obama may become our very first Wizard in Chief.
Part of the reality of an increasingly citizen-driven government is the challenge of young people not knowing enough to know better, while being most adept at the tools of viral influence. I strongly suspect, along with the author, that this will be a very hard tide for the conservatives to turn, especially in their post-Bush malaise.
A big question in this election is whether McCain will be required to reach the hearts and minds of young people to win, and if he does attempt to do so, can he offer a more credible and superior vision of political involvement and social action for those who natively speak the languages of new media and social networking technology. This generational divide may prove decisive in providing Obama the win.
The important question of whether Obama will prove to be a “wizard” is another matter we will discuss in the coming months. The evidence points to an Obama magic in all the wrong senses, though I cannot but rejoice at the elevation of such an able Black politician. No one can doubt he’s got game.
Perhaps that is an indictment on the game itself, a turnabout of the greatest irony.
whether McCain will be required to reach the hearts and minds of young people to win, and if he does attempt to do so, can he offer a more credible and superior vision of political involvement and social action for those who natively speak the languages of new media and social networking technology
Well, no.
(Sorry to be responding backwards: I read this first.)
When Republicans present their political positions clearly, they’re direly unpopular. McCain can’t offer a “vision of political involvement and social action” to people who profoundly disagree with and dislike his political positions. There are so many important issues in the US today where the fifty-year age difference between McCain and a voter who wasn’t old enough to vote in 2004, is a yawning gap. (Women’s rights, LGBT equality, the Iraq war… )
It does no good to be able to use the new media and social networking technology when the people you are communicating with are so far away from you politically…