Last week I listened to the audio of a panel from PodCamp NYC. The panel featured Matthew Ebel, C.C. Chapman, Dan Patterson, Christopher Penn and Whitney Hoffman and covered the use of social media in the current presidential campaign. The panel discussion got me thinking about just how effective the use of social media has been in gaining support for the candidacies of the presidential contenders.

The Political Web

Right from the get-go John Edwards and Barack Obama had blogs setup to augment their grassroots campaign movements, with Senators Clinton and McCain following not long after. They all have groups on Facebook and MySpace pages not to mention LinkedIn profiles. From what I can tell Obama and Edwards are the only candidates that embraced Twitter (Obama having the largest following of any Twitterer.) But what has all of this gotten them?

I ask because I do not follow Barack Obama or John Edwards on Twitter. I don’t use MySpace so nothing going for me there and I am not going to join any of their Facebook groups (mainly due to the fact that I do not plan on voting for any of them, yeah, I’m an independent who hates political parties.) So, have the candidates’ forays into social media actually improved their ability to reach out to younger voters?

Well, I’m going guess that the answer, to some extent, is yes. The Democratic candidates have been able to get hundreds of thousands of new voters to the polls during the primary season, many of whom are voting for the first time. Now I have to guess that at least some of those new young voters may have been urged (or at least reminded) to vote through some social media channel. I don’t know how effective Senator McCain’s efforts in social media have been, as it seems that his campaign has settled for a blog and an amazingly vague question in the LinkedIn Answers section (which I answered along with several hundred others.)

The influence of online video has been felt more in this election than any other. Videos of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s seemingly anti-American tirades have plagued Senator Obama’s campaign. Senator McCain will probably never live down his unfortunate cover of the Beach Boys’ classic Barbara Ann and Senator Clinton’s emotional moment in Vermont has been replayed ad infinitum to show her human side. If you add the CNN/YouTube debates (which were a well orchestrated joke in my opinion) to the mix then you have a political cocktail created by mixing emerging media formats (shaken, not stirred of course.)

Personally, I think that their efforts have been effective in getting people to vote in primaries/caucuses, and that’s about it. The difference that social media has made in politics is similar to the impact it has had on journalism. Information is readily available, opinions get flung around like feces at the monkey house and vitriol spews like a geiser in nearly every comment thread for political news I have come across. Unfortunately, I don’t think that social media has spread awareness of issues, what I think it has done in this election is help to consolidate viewpoints, and I don’t think that’s a good thing.

Please don’t misunderstand my point here, social media is not to blame for the echo chamber, it has always existed. The problem is that 90% of the voting population is not adequately prepared to vote in our elections, this is the fault of the government and the traditional media dumbing down every piece of information that they release. Thus far, I don’t know if social media has been able to increase the understanding of the political process in our country, but it certainly has allowed for the louder expression of singular viewpoints.

The real question we need to ask is not how it has aided the candidates, but how it should be used to aid the process as a whole? That can only be accomplished by educating voters, not simply by repeating the rhetoric they are already exposed to. Our political discourse has been lowered to the level of a middle school popularity contest. This aids the politicians who can sell hope, but it hurts the citizens who need answers, not theories. The real problem is not that the candidates are using social media to reach out to voters; it’s that the message is the same, regardless of the medium.

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