Social media has
become a facet of the political machine in the twentieth century; it is the
future of reaching out to the voters that are undecided during a election year.
After reading Professor Vrooman’s post on how Hillary Clinton could have one
the race, I do a little digging myself finding the many ways social media has
changed the way we perceive things especially politics. A great example of this
was another piece or outlet of media back in the 1960s where the first
televised presidential debate was aired. The two candidates being John F.
Kennedy and Richard Nixon, both in a first time heated debate on a black and
white square box. This was cutting edge at the time, it meant that for the
first time candidates could be seen actively speaking about topics and plans
for their election. Though what needs to be taken from this is the way in which
the debate was very one sided not because of the way John F. Kennedy swept
Nixon off his feet in the debate but on the contrary if you compared the event
televised to it being heard via radio Nixon was supposedly the clear winner.
What makes this so interesting is the way John F. Kennedy went about the
televised debate, he did everything in his power to use his looks to persuade
the viewers to side with him while Richard Nixon was not prepared looking pale
and sweaty. (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/1960-first-televised-presidential-debate/)
An image can mean a lot especially from a media standpoint, it does not
necessarily matter what kind of media it is as long as you know how to properly
represent yourself on that platform of media. This brings me to the very
important notion of how Trump basically won the election by understanding how
to use social media and from the looks of it (him sitting in office) it worked.
Though I want to focus more on this new phenomenon of using social media in the
politics machine. Breaking down the way Trump did it is an easier way to
understand that social media has a much larger impact on politics and a much
larger one in the future. Following medium.com’s break down of the election you
can grasp the reasoning behind Trumps victory, not by sheer rallies and news
but controversy surrounding his social media, a good way to put it is “there is
no such thing as bad publicity right?”
-Clintons
Campaign had created 19% more messages than Trump’s but Trump’s had acquired
more news coverage
-Trumps social
media grew from 4.2 million to 12.35 compared to Clinton where she went from
1.7 million to 8.4 million on Facebook
-The use of the
hashtag #MAGA compared to #Imwithher (https://medium.com/tow-center/a-final-data-driven-look-at-trump-v-clinton-on-social-media-7ea9bb747982)
-Trumps
marketing ploy to have supporters buy his hats on Facebook
-Use of attacks
on social media during Primaries (Trump’s increased)
Through the use
of the data found on medium.com just like any other election revolving around a
new form of media the one who used it better than the other one. Using my prior
blog post on my personal blog for my literature review I had quoted Adam
Alter’s Ted talk data on the three hours of personal time a day we have on
average (3 hrs.), by calculating the amount of time we are online with media we
use around 2.7 hrs. of it online meaning we find ourselves in more online political
trends and debates than we do anywhere else understanding how social media
drives political action, creates greater accountability (39% of US adults
engaging in politics/networks online), and legitimacy through an online presence
(nearly 2/3 of us find ourselves online as a captive audience to online ads for
campaigns as well as seeing an online presence of a candidate determining if
they are real both offline and online in today’s society)
The future of
the political machines lays in the hands of social media particularly in the
form of psychographic profiling, hypermedia, and digital fortresses (Siva
Vaidhyanathan) dragging in undecided voters to the campaign one donation or
campaign purchase at a time. As everything begins to transition to being online
so too will the debates and campaigns of the political machine, maybe in the
future if you trend enough and come up with a catchy hashtag you might be able
to pull off what Trump did through the use of Facebook.
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