Some Things

This post is part of an ongoing series of posts about the Web 2.0 and its role in the American presidential election 2008. The main purpose of this series is to provide a platform for discussion among the members of our group and, in true Web 2.0 spirit, everybody else. It will lead into a series of podcast episodes. The series is being written for the seminar “Campaigns & Candidates” at the University of Osnabrück in the winter term 2008/2009.  

This is just a quick teaser for the next, longer post, but I want to share this video right now. I found it a while back, but never got around to watching it, but going through pages I had archived for reading at a later date, I stumbled upon this post on boingboing. Boingboing is blog that functions as “A Directory of Wonderful Things”, where interesting sites, stories, applications and much more from around the Internet are collected. It is a very influential, judging from the number of boingboing posts appearing on social news sites like digg or reddit.

Once and again, boingboing lets guests blog on the site and the video I want to share is in a post, written by a guest blogger. His name is Clay Shirky and he works, among other things, as an adjunct professor at NYU in the Interactive Telecommunications Program. His post shows, that the Democrats are not the only ones profiting from “netroots” activists. The Dear Mr. Obama video is very effective on an emotional level, as of now has been watched by more people than the famous “Obama Girl” video (13.5 mil <-> 12.9 mil, although Dear Mr. Obama was posted over a year later) and still didn’t get the same attention “Obama Girl” or the will.i.am Yes We Can Music Video. Shirky explains this seemingly strange development, by referring to the homophily of the Republican blogosphere. Conservative blogs usually only link to conservative blogs and so on. As long as the story doesn’t get picked up somewhere else, it might be hugely popular in these circles, but unknown to the public. This is also mentioned in Netroots Rising by Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox, who describe the conversation in the conservative blogosphere as merely repeating what Republican politicians and conservative journalists say.

So, without further ado, here is the video:

Image by Bluvalo, it was released under a GNU Free Documentation license.

This post is part of an ongoing series of posts about the Web 2.0 and its role in the American presidential election 2008. The main purpose of this series is to provide a platform for discussion among the members of our group and, in true Web 2.0 spirit, everybody else. It will lead into a series of podcast episodes. The series is being written for the seminar “Campaigns & Candidates” at the University of Osnabrück in the winter term 2008/2009.

Welcome to the first ever post of the “Campaigning 2.0″ series. These posts are meant as a discussion of our topic, that will hopefully lead us to conclusions that we can present in our podcast series. This first post is a short introduction of the “2.0″ in “Campaigning 2.0″, a collection of sources we might be able to use and a starting point of a discussion on where we should go with this topic, how we can incorporate other topics and how we should go about doing this whole thing. But first, the most important question of all: Why should we talk about this?

A lot of people say, that the 2008 election was in many ways different from the elections before. For the first time, the Internet became a viable and important part of the campaigns. According to many commentators, especially Barack Obama used new technology effectively. His use of technology seems to be a deciding factor for the outcome, not only of the presidential race and, perhaps even more importantly, the primaries. Last night, I stumbled upon a documentary on N-TV (reruns are pretty frequent, it seems), in which an American TV journalist said, that the Obama camp treated them (the TV journalists) as if they were old-fashioned and outdated. She said something along the lines of “They were much more interested in writing SMS, than talking to us.” But there’s more. While SMS are already old-fashioned themselves, the Obama camp seemingly had a presence everywhere on the web. But not only Obama used the Internet and its many communities, his opponent John McCain did as well and to this day Ron Paul has a strong following online (as with all links to Wikipedia in this post, this link is meant as an illustration for curious readers, rather than a source), to the point that he turned into a an Internet meme of sorts (he gets mentioned in this 5-part webcomic series for example) . So, it seems like there is a lot to talk about. Was the web really a deciding factor? How did the candidates use the Internet for their campaigns? The Internet has been around for a while, why is it suddenly becoming so important? That last question is something we should probably get out of the way first, say, in the next paragraph.
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Im Silicon Valley scheint es immer wieder gewisse Trends zu geben, was die Namen von Produkten und Buzzwords angeht. Es gab zum Beispiel die e-{Produktname hier} Zeit, die my{Produktname hier(erster Buchstabe groß bitte)} Phase, die i{Produktname hier (wieder erster Buchstabe groß!) und möglichst einsilbig!} Ära und er ein-paar-Vokale-weglassen-Trend ist hoffentlich gerade vorbei. Ein aktueller Beitrag unserer American Studies Blog hat mich daran erinnert, denn scheinbar könnte Barack Obama der erste e-President, iPres, presdnt oder gar myPresident werden. Mehr dazu im Artikel des American Studies Blog, aber ich will ja hier auch meinen Senf dazu geben, wozu sonst bloggen, gell?

Eins ist klar, ich bin ein Geek, Social Media geschädigt und RSS-abhängig. Also: natürlich fände ich das absolut richtig und in einem gewissen Rahmen sogar notwendig.

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