You’ve come a long way kid

While reading the Blog for America and Civic Involvement paper, only a few pages in I came across a sense that made me chuckle. “This is tempered, to be sure,by the fact that most people do not use the Internet for political purposes” Kerbel, M.R. and Bloom, J.D. (2005). I cannot think of many sites that I regularly visit right now that wouldn’t have some political content of sorts. Even my comics have commentary that link back to the blogs, tweets, flickr or whatever method of the political campaigns to make themselves known on the internet. Was this campaign of  Howard Dean’s only… wow, ok, 9 years. (Now I just made myself feel old)

Reading the (above mentioned) paper was fascinating to take an external view on how this was really a ground breaking change in the realm of political campaigns, but it was tempered by first, knowing how (not very) successful Howard Dean’s campaign ultimately was, and also how successful a similar strategy was when applied in the very next campaign by a front runner. So the Barack Obama campaign was so amazing because of the way he was out in the media, but digitally rather than the oldskool media style of his opponents. What I am curious about though, is lets say that Sarah Palin and John McCain had taken and applied this technique more with their campaign – would it have been as successful as Barack Obama? It occurs to me that the Howard Dean blog was amazing because it was really the first of it’s kind, and it paved the way for the social media and grassroots campaign that Barack Obama ran online.

My next thought along the same vein, is that we are never going to see the same phenomena. Moving forward, every candidate worth their salt is going to run a social media campaign, especially utilizing blogs that not only make them present in the online communities, but it also gives them a human personality. So Now we expect these campaigns, and both sides will be running them. Now we get to sit back, and wait to see what the next revolution will be in technology and see how the candidates of the day will run with it.

When reading the I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience article (Marwick, A. and boyd, d. (2011), I was playing devils advocate in my head for most of the paper. I fully believe that many people that I follow have well crafted presence’s online that shape who I think they are, but there are a few individuals that I was willing to bet did not fit the mold that they were suggesting. I was all set to write most of my post about Penny-arcadeand the co-authors online, until I saw one of them actually quoted in the paper. (I won’t lie, I really did LOL). “

Several highly followed users did not mention trying to build and maintain audience or feigned unawareness:

TychoBrahe: Honestly, I have no idea who reads them. Hopefully a very small group of very
forgiving people!

Now, if you come back with the idea that his crafted image is that he doesn’t have a crafted image, you’re getting to Meta for me.  :P