Over the coming weeks and months, the role of the internet and social media in the 2008 will be debated. Wired News leads with the headline “Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency.” Similar sentiment resounds in a New York Times piece entitled “The ’08 Campaign: Sea Change for Politics as We Know It.” Joe Trippi, comparing Obama’s ‘08 effort to Howard Dean’s, states “they were Apollo 11, and we were the Wright Brothers.” In my writing I’ve tried to tamper expectations regarding the political effect of social media. That said, I do think social media helped win this election, though not in the way one might expect.
Before we proceed I want to unpack (and delineate) the effects of the internet and social media. To keep this post topical, I’m not going to debate the effect of the internet. The internet proved to be a financial and informational juggernaut, powering both the Obama and McCain campaigns. Obama was prescient to opt out of campaign financing, as the internet provided him a supply of funding that was simply unprecedented. That was a huge factor in his victory, a point beyond debate.
The effect of social media is more nuanced. Howard Fineman of Newsweek wrote of the Facebook effect, something that I’ve heard a lot about over the course of this election. The Facebook (or YouTube, or MySpace, or … ) effects attempt to connect social media use with political participation. Early in the campaigns, we talked about how candidates could use these tools to engage their supporters, how these tools had a potential transformative effect. Comparing statistics on the number of candidate Facebook friends was a fun pastime, but one always wondered what the effect of this virtual support might be.
I’d like to present an alternative statistic for analyzing the role of social media in the campaign. It comes from a 2008 Pew Internet and American Life Study entitled “Home Broadband Adoption 2008.” The report finds that 55% of American homes have broadband internet, and that approximately three-quarters of Americans are internet users.
Pew is careful to point out systematic underrepresentation of some populations (low income, elderly) in broadband adoption. I read this as a broad swath of Americans having access to the full potential of the internet. One reading of “full potential” is that more Americans have access to streaming video and all of the other nifty things the broadband internet can do. Certainly, that is important. What I think is much more important is the “everyday life” impacts of broadband access on the deliberative political process.
Social Networks like Facebook reveal our lives to one another in novel and interesting ways. I’m able to friend you and watch your life pass by in a News Feed. Because of the pragmatics of daily life I probably wouldn’t be able to keep up with that information otherwise. A side effect of this is that I’m also influenced by you – your decisions about the information you share or the identity you create. And in this very personal, important election, many of us chose to wear our beliefs on our sleeves.
This phenomenon didn’t just occur in online social networks. Every time a relative forwarded an email, every time an IM friend passed around a YouTube link, every blog post you “stumbled” upon because of someone else’s social action – these constitute important influence processes. And because the internet is now this vast place where most of us can reliably find those we care about, where we can connect with them in a variety of formats, the influence of our everyday acts now carry more weight. The media we consume online, the information we push around is social – because social is the ends to the widely-adopted internet’s means.
This is not to detract from Facebook or Myspace or any of the countless participation efforts that were launched this year. I’m sure these efforts paid dividends in many ways. But Obama was not elected because of a “Facebook Effect.” No, what happened is that the internet helped us pull the veil back on one another. It provided us a panoply of channels to discuss and share our beliefs, sometimes with intent, and sometimes by complete accident. It provided the third space for political discourse that the futurists talked about. It is not surprising there was a moderating effect. As we connect and learn more about one another, we’re finding ways to share our beliefs and find common ground. It is in everyday activity, where the sharing of media becomes social and influential, we see the true political power of the internet. While I’m convinced that plenty of people changed their votes because of knocks on the front door, I’m also convinced plenty of us observed our friends, were engaged by their support, and decided that pulling the lever for Obama couldn’t be all that bad.
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
