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- 9 February, 2007 -
- Online Media, Politics, Technology -
- Tags : Online Media, Politics, Technology
- 2 Comments
The Internet is playing an increasingly important role in help citizens shape their political reviews. The Pew Internet and the American Life 2006 Elections Online (pdf) released last month presents a revealing look at how Americans use the Internet with relations to politics. The findings in this report include
- 15 percent of Americans used the Internet as their primary source of information for political news (up from 7 percent in 2004).
- 31 percent of Americans used the Internet to get some form of political news.
- 23% of Internet Election news users became campaign activists posting their own political commentary, forwarding someone else’s commentary, creating political audio or videos or forwarding political audio or videos.
- Republicans and Democrats are equally likely to look for political information online. Democrats cite newspapers and broadcast news operations like CBS, NBC and CNN as their news sources and Republicans favor Fox News and talk radio.
Throughout the 2008 election cycle I plan on analyzing election sites by looking at the technology used, design standards and search engine optimization. Hopefully, we can some interesting information and maybe where and why certain politicians succeed online and others fail.
I think the popularization of political blogs as a source of information about candidates has the potential to completely change the face of modern political campaigns. For example, the information that you found about Barak Obama’s radical Muslim upbringing was thoroughly documented in a political blog. With the election almost 2 years away, who knows how that kind of information and discussion forum will change the way candidates have to dispense information and defend their political histories?
You even have campaign staffers with blogs and then being painted with the same brush as their staffers for opinions their staffers expressed on their blogs.