Arianna Huffington, editor in chied of The Huffington Post once said: „Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee“.
In his campaign Obama organized his supporters using the Internet, in a way that in the past would have required many volunteers and paid organizers on the ground. The campaign tools have changed since a few years ago. Because of the Internet Obama was able to move thousands of people to organize.
Obama took advantage of sites like Youtube and used it for free advertising. Using such videos ment millions of dollars worth of free advertisement. Those videos posted in his campaign were also more effective than television ads because viewers either chose to watch them or they might recieve them from a friend instead of their television shows being interrupted during the ad.
Obama even created a webside to keep in touch and talk to the citizens. We´re going to end this blog on the words of Mr. Trippi, who ran Howard Dean´s 2004 campaign about Obama´s campaign : „Just like Kennedy brought in television presidency, I think we´re about to see the first wired, connected, networked presidency“.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/how-obamas-internet-campaign-changed-politics/
Hanna
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/how-obamas-internet-campaign-changed-politics/
Hanna
I think its worth pointing out that Obama's advertising was not free - although it is a good point that youtube offered a free and hugely pervasive distribution channel.
ReplyDeleteThe sheer scale of Obama's election campaign, however, still required a massive (indeed the largest ever) amount of funds. To produce the content, coordinate the content etc...
Of course as you pointed out on a previous post, a huge amount of this funding came from the internet. Which is an interesting model - for whilst it will continue to be impossible to stage a presidential run in the states without ridiculous amounts of money - the internet, properly used could power a self-sustaining campaign.
The day we see a candidate from outside the political hegemony use the internet in this way, to any effective degree - now that would signal a true change in politics.