Politics and the Web
I recent years the influence of the internet upon politics has become obvious. Candidates make major announcements on YouTube, voters can now register online, and the constant barage of political content from the major news sites (and from other, less reliable sources) has made it nearly impossible for the candidates not to feel the growing need to have an active and effective website. Candidates see the importance of producing content and information that they and their supporters can control and of getting others involved in the campaign by way of networking and reaching a younger audience. These should be (and are) the obvious main goals of any presidential candidate’s website. In order to further demonstrate this argument, let’s analyze the current candidates’ websites- JohnMcCain.com and BarackObama.com.
In a world where political analysts use the nominees’ MySpace page hits to index their popularity, both candidates found it necessary to include social networks as part of their sites. John McCain has his own McCainSpace which allows participants to contact other supporters, write out their own profile about why they support the Republicans and even post confessional videos about their support for McCain. This site even includes a link to the campaign’s Facebook page so you can “take action” to recruit others. Obama has his own networking website called my.barackobama.com which includes the abilities to add friends in the network and join communities. The user also has the option to help the campaign by writing to their local new affiliates and local leaders touting the candidate. The site allows the participant to tally all the money they have earned for the campaign through these processes. Users also have their own blog, which they can feel free to use to post about the candidate, These features the hopefuls added to their websites indicate an understanding of the power of social networking sites.
Each site also feels the need to see to it that the users are informed. Both sites include tabs on their websites which are easily accessible that give the reader access to many current news stories from (mostly) legitimate news sources about what their candidate is doing. This shows a great amount of accountabily on the part of each campaign. It would have been better, however, to include a comments section to each news story, which in some cases allows for more accountability to the user as it allows the each reader to assess and reflect on the validity of each news story. It’s not a must, but it would have been better. The sites also include blogs which are constantly being updated and which do have sections for user comments, which is a must for all blogs, since they are not under the same restrictions as news copy and should therefore allow others to determine their validity.
In order to reach younger voters both sites include a great deal of embedded video in their content. It seems like all of John McCain’s issues section of the site could be either viewed or read depending on how lazy you are feeling at the time you are visiting it. The social networking sites go a long way toward involving younger voters, since they are generally the targets of such activity. Obama includes a section under the ‘People’ tab of his site for ‘Students’ which directly targets the just-over-18 crowd. The page includes blog entries, embedded videos and slideshows, and testimonials from students in the U.S. McCain does not include any such page.
In brief closing, both candidates seem to have embraced the power of the Internet over modern politics. One can only wonder what the future of political campaigning might bring as the nation continues to innovate and develop new modes of receiving information.
