Almost every major name in the running probably already has a blog, a microblog, a social networking account, and a few people in charge of running his or her social media campaign. I had high hopes for the Internet being a great tool for positive and proactive campaigns for the national elections in 2010, but from what I have observed, social media is used along the same lines of the traditional campaign.
The same things you’ll see in the paper trail are pretty much the same things you would see on the Internet today: negative campaigns, mudslinging, and the occasional snarky campaign manager/public relations specialist using analog methods for a digital medium.
That’s great and all – I’m sure the race to 2010 has lucrative returns written all over it – but it kind of looks ridiculous. The Internet is supposed to help elevate political awareness and translate that to political action. Yet if people treat social media like they would pamphlets or comic books distributed at the polling precinct right before voting, it somehow renders the tool sorta-kinda ineffective. If a digital tool is used in an analog way, the impression fails.
I’m not the be-all-end-all of anything except jologs lyrics translations, and I’m not an expert on the Internet, but here are some of my thoughts on how social media could be used to great effect on the road to 2010.
