Politics In The Age Of Social Networking

Social Networking and Web 2.0 are changing the face of politics. This year you no longer have to rely on outdated news outlets or slow newspapers, nor do you need to depend on television news channels with an obvious party bias. You can get all of your candidate information delivered to you 24-7 via the Web 2.0 application of your choice.

How is Web 2.0 bringing candidates to you? For starters, there is Twitter. You can immediately tell which candidates are the most tech savvy by which ones jumped on the Twitter bandwagon immediately. Barack Obama and John Edwards were two of the first politicians to offer a way to follow them on Twitter. Both have used Twitter as a way to offer brief opinions on subjects and to get the word out about where they are appearing on the campaign trail in an up to the moment fashion. Other candidates that eventually joined the Twitterwagon included Ron Paul, Fred Thompson and Joe Biden.

Some candidates, like John McCain and Barack Obama, have started their own social networks modeled after such sites as FaceBook and MySpace. In fact the existing social networks have played a large role in politics this election, and have been instrumental in grabbing the attention of the younger voters, as well as driving the campaigns of some surprising candidates, like Ron Paul. FaceBook even went as far as sponsoring a debate in New Hampshire this weekend, with candidates fielding questions from FaceBook users in real time. This was a powerful experiment with mixed success, as the number of questions online far outnumbered the limited time in which to answer them.

Sites like YouTube have been a powerful way to promote a candidates cause, and even to bash candidates, as witnessed by the Hilary Clinton 1984 viral video from earlier last year. YouTube has also been a key way to see candidates speak that you normally would have missed, like Ron Paul in the beginning of his campaign. It has also proven effective in replaying a candidate's comments that you want to dissect, like Romney's declaration not to hire aliens if he is in office. With the availability of video clips for the masses long after your speech is given, YouTube has made candidates accountable for their words like never before.

Social event planning sites like Upcoming, MeetUp and Eventful are also becoming instrumental in a candidate's campaign. Now you can announce a new venue and get immediate feedback on who plans to show up to your meeting or event. Before you had to rely solely on advertising off line and just hope people showed up to your rally or to your speech at the local college. Now, you can see immediately if you are getting interest in that town by online “RSVPs” and people's publicly posted event calendars.

Social networks like FaceBook and individual blogs have done the most to alter the face of politics. In addition to partnering with ABC to bring you the third party “US Politics” application on the site, FaceBook has given each candidate a way to “befriend” their constituents, and to draw them into groups and get them to answer interactive polls about how they feel on the issues, allowing each politician to keep their finger on the pulse of America in a new way, in real time. Friend count has become one way to take a measurement of a candidates popularity, and comments on social networks are one way for a candidate to know exactly what issues he needs to address to get people to the polls. After all, no matter how many “friends” you have online, it doesn't matter unless those friends turn off their computers for an hour or a day and vote.

Hopefully, in 2012, we will be writing an article about the latest Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 online voting applications eliminating the need to take a day off work to show your support for a candidate. Until then, web savvy voters have a plethora of information about the issues and the candidates at their fingertips to prepare them for the big day at the primaries and in November. Shoot, there are even web sites there to help you figure out which candidate meets most of your requirements on the issues, and you can go to the web sites of the House and the Senate to see your candidate's voting record in office. However you use it, the Internet and Web 2.0 have done one thing to change politics forever - there is no longer any reason to use “I didn't know enough about candidate X to vote” as an excuse not to get to the polls.