Aside - “Welcome to the first digital presidential election”

Aside - “Welcome to the first digital presidential election”

            The article discuses how social networks have made groundbreaking changes in the President election process through their uses of raising money, communicating with supporters, and their allowance of citizens to directly communicate with their peers.  I want to focus on the last point, because I think it this creates both good and bad consequences relating to educating people about “true” information.  Social networks have enabled and increased the spread of information and opinions, but along with this it has an effect on the bias opinions and also spread of information whether it is true or misleading.  The spread of information is important, but how users interpret and use this information is also important, especially in relation to politics.  

The information that is on an individuals social feed that they will give their attention to will mainly come from their friends, which a lot of the time have similar views.  It is important to check the sources and how the information in portrayed.  Users may just post an article, with one main headline, which may be a manipulation of data or information.  How one frames the issue makes all the difference, and with the increased amount of information available to users, they may not take the time to read the articles and find out the facts.  On the other hand if user do take the time to look into information social media creates a space for a variety of perspectives and people to comment if the information is wrong.  Often times, controversial political posts gain the most attention and foster debate because of the variety of views on the issue.  This is good to decrease bias as well. 

The article discussed how Republican’s are no longer trailing in their utilization of social media tools as opposed to the Democrats.  I think they have seized these new social media platforms, but success through social media depends on the supporters who are using these social media platforms.  I think a lot of the success in the first Obama campaign came from the citizens they were targeting.  Obama already works to target young voters, and young people make up a large percentage of the social media population, I think this also helped the successfulness of his social campaigns.