So the race for the White House begins on facebook....
So having creative ideas about the economy is not going to help you if you can't put them on twitter
So the 2011 radio is pandora, whatever time for interviews or actual political content pandora actually gives
So Yes We Can is best explained and made famous when it is featured in a video with already famous people
So politicians need to appeal to a young generation that couldn't care less about them
So politicians need to use the toys of that 30-40 years younger generation to appeal to this youth (weird!!!)
So the New Media is the New Politics. Make it yours or die.
You know my thought is that political campaigns already had enough of a lack of content. I am not sure we needed to make it even more content-free just so that it can become cooler. Politics is not "cool". There is no way anyone is going to learn about the recession over text. There is no way anyone will be able to efficiently choose a president over his facebook campaign. That's what we did for Obama, we elected the guy who had the best PR, the one who could make us dream again, who made us thought he was so integrated into our reality. Bad call. The PR campaign was a bubble, a lovely one that intellectuals felt force to embrace because the high school need to be cool and go with the mainstream never completely dies. As of now I think most people have been able to realize that Obama really never had much content. Okay we made history with him, electing an African-American and a facebook president. But is it enough? We might complain about what it did to our country but clearly we are going for even more of a facebook president for the next elections.
As we saw with the "I like Ike" campaigns, content-free advertising has been around since long before Facebook. If anything, websites, blogs and YouTube give interested citizens easy, accessible ways of examining a candidate's platform and ideas. It has always been the citizens' responsibility to search this content out; and now it is easier than ever.
ReplyDeleteI agree that facebook may not be the most conducive forum for communicating stances on actual issues. However, the PR president was not invented with facebook, nor first exploited with Obama. Kennedy's mastery of the TV personality president played a shockingly large role in boosting his popularity; a factor that has very little do with content.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, as you rightly point out, much of the youth do not care about politics. So chances are, if a candidate's position on the economy cannot be generally ascertained in 5 minutes or less, it's going to get ignored no matter what.
Finally, we saw that Obama's use of the new media was so effective largely because he combined the new with the old. Even today, complete reliance on the new media is detrimental to a campaign. So definitely ingoring the new media is certain death, but so too is relying solely on it. It's a thin line they're walking...
I agree with both of you that content-free political advertisement and "PR presidents" have been around for a while now. The thing is however that new medias,or rather the expansion of new media has greatly enhanced the whole phenomenon of political campaigns becoming prowesses of communication rather than demonstration of actual political knowledge and capacity. We have had remarks in class several times about the evolution of media, the fact that our grand-parents used radio and newspapers, that we use internet and probably won't know how to use what our children and grand-children will be using. Facebook has not "created" anything, maybe, probably, but it has made everything get to a whole new scale, and ut has redefined the stakes of the game probably to a greater extent than it has ever been before.
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