New Media and Politics Expert Group

Today in class the expert group on new media and politics presented. This group was very well informed and presented the information explaining news media and politics, its past history, and what possibilities there are for news media and politics in the future. I really enjoyed the texting polls that we did in class, rather than getting into groups! One thing that I found very interesting from their presentation was that they claimed 60% of people are politically active online. This means that they post, like, or comment on political things on any social media site. They also stated that 43% of users want to know more about an issue because of something that they saw online. This could mean that someone posted an opinion on a current political issue and just shy of half the people who see that would go pursue more facts on that issue.

Another interesting thing that has come up in modern politics is that the internet and social media has changed the way that political donations are collected. It used to be were a candidate gets huge donations from a small number of people. Now it is where a huge number of people can donate small amounts to a candidate of their choosing. This is what happened with the Obama campaign. He raised huge sums of donations just by having a large number of people donate amounts around $5. An interesting statistic that he group showed us was that today about 50% of donations are raised online or through email. Another 10% is raised through apps and text messages.

The group also talked about the history of the media and politics. Basically this showed us that FDR was the “radio” president. John F. Kennedy was the “Television” president, and Obama was the emerging “internet” president.

One thing that I found the most interesting from their presentation was when they showed a chart of all the current presidential candidates and what social media sites they are signed up for and use regularly. They brought up the questions of uses Snapchat in a political manner. Would you follow a candidate who is on Snapchat? It’s an interesting question since Snapchat is such a new medium and that means this is the first campaign where this is even an option for a candidate to use. One thing about Snapchat is that it is such a raw form of social media. By this I mean that once you post something it is on your story for about 24 hours and I don’t believe you can take it down. As we have seen in the past some candidates would tweet something out that they are later advised to take down. On other social sites such as Instagram, twitter, and Facebook you can heavily edit and even delete something that you have previously posted. Snapchat changes that a little bit. You can only really edit a chat with what text/stickers you want to add to it and then you cannot really edit it much further. I’m not so certain if that is fully appropriate for a political candidate running for the presidency, and in the long run it may actually do more harm than good for the individual candidate. I suppose only time will tell how new media is effecting politic. And we will see this especially in the upcoming year.