Continuing on Obama's Internet campaign and presence, Henry from The Monkey Cage just recently posted an interesting article that compares how the Internet was seen to have helped Obama's campaign and how the Internet actually helped.
He points out that the Internet activity of the campaign was not just some big poster to claim people are contributing, but it is really a means of communicating and efficiently organizing people who wanted to make that difference. I can see why the Internet was such a useful tool for the Obama campaign. It provided just about everything an individual needed to do the door to door notices and phone call lists, like the Obama campaign volunteer guest speaker explained when we had him a week or so ago.
The Internet empowers the activists to organize, not just show off, and with how the campaign played out this year you can count on similar methods in the future.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
Clearly the internet was a major factor in helping Obama because there are millions of people who are willing to pay a buck or two but do not want to go out of their house. It allows for quick effective advertising with myspace and such which really is much better than a bulky pamphlet or having to listen to some old guy drone on and on. Furthermore, he can send information via these blogs and stuff to spread the word quickly among the youth that supports him. I do not think that Obama could have won without the internet
Obama was so clever to use Internet in his campagin. It was a great move on his part, especially since Internet age is dawning on the world. The Internet is a great way to communicate with the people. I was also told that he used texting to communicate too. Obama took advantage of today's lastest technology and I think that contributed to his win against McCain. McCain is older and I think he's less in touch with today's resources.
I think it's both a blessing and a curse that a major politician has finally realized the value of the internet and the impact it can have on the nation. It's a blessing because it is a incredibly fast means of mass communication, and the fact that the internet will replace millions of paper flyers and advertisements means lots of trees will be saved. On the other hand, it's a curse because now that the politicians have discovered the power of the internet, it will be swamped with advertisements and emails and other such things.
The internet was huge plus. But oliver is right because the internet means that everything is more organized and you can hit people twice as hard with advertisements, pleas for donations, etc. I know that we talked about this in our class a little bit, did it hurt Obama? In a moment of Obamania I registered on his website and everyday I would get at least 2 emails asking me to donate and tell me why we were winning and stuff like that. Imagine the people in battle ground states. If I was constantly getting phone calls and having people knock on my door I would get really annoyed. I wonder if he turned away any voters because of the magnitude of his campaign.
I think that the idea of using the internet is pure genius. People become more emotionally attatched to something once they have had a part in it. think if you broke one of your hot wheels cars, would you be sad? yes, but certainly not devastated. however if you broke a car model you had spent weeks working on most people would be much more upset. the emotional investment that comes form personal effort also had this effect in the obama campaign. wiht volenteering and effort being this accessible people didnt even need to leave their homes to feel as if they helped. then when Obama thanked all of the people that had helped him they felt included in this group. because of the accessability people became emotionally attatched to this campaign more than any other campaign I have seen.
The internet was a great idea to give the campaign support. The thing I noticed on facebook was that Obama/Biden campaign had a group that I was invited to which allowed members to spread the word and help out the campaign in various ways. There were also frequent updates about how the campaign was going and the major news going on in the candidates lifes. He took it to another level with the interent and his website is brilliant too because it has everything someone needs to know about his policies and how he is going to try to change the country. And also donations were widely available through the interent which helped Obama to be able to use more money on his campaign than McCain. He also branched out to cellular devices as well which I thought was clever and unique. Now everyone will copy this method in the future and the interent will be a bigger playing field where candidates will gain support.
Post a Comment