Political Participation Wrap-up!!

So as a wrap-up for all of the blogs I've kept throughout the semester, I would have to take the stance that new media has a positive and lasting effect on political participation. Political participation and new media technologies are becoming synonymous with one another.

Social and Technological Determinism

After going back though old notes and looking at the stuff we have covered over the entirety of this Living the E-Life class Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" article caught my eye. Looking at the social and technological determinism part of it, and how that can be directly tied in to politics and new media, with politics being the "society".
Social determinism is a social theory which believes society shapes technology, it focuses on the history, design, and development behind the technologies. Social determinism identifies the social systems technology is embedded in as the determining factor for shaping technology. Technological determinism is the theory that suggests that technology shapes society. This theory does not recognize the social, economic, and historical conditions under which technology was made. Technological determinism assumes that society must change to fit technology.
Now whether or not you fall into the social determinist class or the technological determinist school of thought we can substitute politics as a representation of "society" seeing as the political realm is a small society.
New media has definitely shaped the way that politics runs campaigns and works the day to day business. It is much more efficient and convenient to collect campaign donations over the internet rather than mailing checks or collecting at a speech, debate, etc. Politicians these days are riding on the coat tails of facebook pages, blogs, and twitter accounts.
The 2008 presidential election was HEAVILY influenced by new media, and through new media the presidential election really reached generations that would have paid little to no attention if it weren't for new media.
On the other hand, politicians are always looking for the upper hand in any way, shape, or form they can get their hands on or create. You could argue that in an effort to gain the "upper hand" they had to start creating these new media resources for their own use and political gain. Over time these technologies have evolved and the use of them in the political sphere has been augmented.
I tend to fall more on the social determinist side, agreeing that society (politics)created and harnessed the use of these technologies to shape the new way politics is run and communicated to the publics.

Political Participation: Technologialy Advanced Countries vs. Non-Technicolical Countries

We are able to see that new media has played a large role in politics and the way citizens participate in their role of politics in the United States and other technologically established countries around the world, but a good question to investigate is if non technologically advanced regions political participation suffers due to the lack of new media presence.
Here we have so many modes of technology in which political participation can be done, such as:

-Cell phones
-Computers
-Television
-Satellite Radio
-INTERNET!!
-Blogs
-Social Networking Sites

However there are many individuals from other countries who have never seen a computer, or handled a call phone, much like the case studies we examined in class on India, and Ireland. These countries do not have the knowledge of how to not only use these technologies, but how to utilize and harness all that new media can do for themselves and their country. Some individuals may lack the financial standing to own any of these new media portals, or be blocked by a language barrier. They do however, have other means of rallying and getting their voice heard.
Recently in my Spanish class we were watching a video about marches is Santiago, Chile. To organize a march Chileans grab pots and pans and march down the street banging on them, then others join and the continue on, although it seemed effective, a tactic like that would not seem to work as well in a country like the United States.If you were not asked to RSVP for the latest march by a facebook group, then it is likely you will not be in attendance.
Although other countries may not use the same methods of political participation as we do, they still will find the means to make a stand for a cause as to have their thoughts and ideas heard by their government, dictatorship, or authoritarian regime. After researching this topic and blogging about how much new media helps and fosters political participation, I do not believe that it CREATES political participation. Clearly other countries are able to create and participate in other forms, even when new media is not involved, although it does offer a heavy advantage. And one day I believe that the majority of the 5rd world regions will begin to catch up with us,but it is something we need to help them accomplish. And who knows where our level of media use for politics and civic engagement will be by then?

Facebook Saves Lives?

My family is from Bogota, Colombia, so this story obviously hits close to home. Facebook can not only connect old friends together, hold tons of pictures, and offer a million applications, but it can also put saving kidnapped individuals lives on its resume. On February 2008 The Associated Press put out an article about how one facebook group produced massive rallies leading to the release of several Colombian captives.

"BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Hundreds of thousands of Colombians wearing white T-shirts marched in their homeland and abroad Monday to demand the country’s largest rebel group stop kidnapping people and release those it holds. The idea of the protests against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, was born less than a month ago on the social networking Web site Facebook, and nearly 100,000 people in 165 cities around the world confirmed their participation.”



Thousands joined this facebook group and within a matter of time there were marches in Colombia, Argentina, Paraguay, The United States of America, France, Spain, and many others. The FARC have reacted by releasing some of the captives and I can imagine that they can only continue to do the same.
If a social networking site can release captive prisoners to a rebel group controlling a nation, what else does it have the capabilities to do? It is amazing that the individual who started this group made a SIGNIFICANT difference in the world. It is amazing what one person can achieve with the help of a simple group invite online.
Marching is a great way to participate politically, and not only is it for a good cause but it engages citizens to further participate in local and national political rallies, marches, and causes, and makes them more politically aware of their current environment. In this case the marches drove the point straight to the FARC and very real and impressive results were seen. I anticipate the next article like this one, maybe a facebook group could finally free Tibet?

New Media, Politicians, and Civic Engagement!

http://www.ralphbecker.com/

Hey everyone I hope that you can all read this, I have been having a hard time getting the text of my blog to show when I attach a picture or video. Is this happening to anyone else?

Anyway...

When Joy Pierce, Professor in the Communication department at the University of Utah came in to speak to our class she ended her presentation with comments on the way politicians have started to utilize new media in their campaigning seasons, and throughout their terms in office. This is a very interesting topic because now if I decided to run for a state, local or national office, one of the first things I expect the campaigning manager would ask is... "If you don't already have a website, we need to set one up immediately".
I posted the link to the Ralph Becker (Mayor of Salt Lake) homepage. I hope you all get a chance to look at it, he has a space to make donations, visions and issues, and a live blog, where Ralph and PR representatives I'm sure, post upcoming events, new news, and responses to news articles, such as the most recent post on state immigration legislation.
Ralph Becker is a great state example, but even the candidates running for the presidency used teams of bloggers and web design teams to create a web 2.0 creation for what they were about and how individuals could become involved and help with the campaign. The DNC (Democratic National Convention) and GOP (Republican National Committee are constantly updating and continuing to improve user ability and up to date websites.
Now, looking at a very specialized case in which many of us are very familiar with, is the ASUU student elections that happened last month, even the parties created facebook groups and websites. www.voterevolution09.com, www.thegoparty.com are a few examples of the most recent election. Every aspect of the campaigning process is effected by the new media yoke.
If I decided to run for a major city office and advertise and campaign with fliers, billboards, and news paper ads, and no website, and ran against an opponent who had the Web on their side, I do not think it would even be a competition. If you wanted to find out more about a candidate, watch their latest debate, view their platform, make a donation, or become more active within the campaign, where is the first place you would look?

New media technology inhibiting political participation?

As Annie responded to my last blog post about how the advances in new media technology have taken political participation and mobilization of the masses to a whole new level, she asked, "do you think the new media technology can inhibit political participation?".
This got me thinking, after I had looked at many of the positive effects of new media on Political participation, how on earth this same technology could hinder it at all. I realized that if you were to take the new media out of the equation, how we were even able to mobilize and organize protests, marches, or demonstrations of any kind?
I think that a possible hindrance that new media presents is that new media becomes the "crutch" that everyone comes to depend on. If thousands of millions of individuals didn't have cell phones, blogs, e-mail accounts, or facebook profiles, it would be a daunting and incredibly hard task to participate politically in such events like a gay rights advocacy march or something of that nature.
In Bugejas article on the divide on interpersonal relationships due to social networking sites online, I believe that the same effect can be placed on political participation due to new media technologies. If you were to put together a rally for a cause that you strongly believed in and you had no way of communicating it to the community technologically, how would you go about doing it?
I recently rented and watched the movie "MILK" and there is a scene where one of the characters is setting up a march, and uses a pay phone to call friends to tell them to call friends, etc. It took an intense amount of dedication and work to put these types of events together, not that it doesn't now, but we are at such an advantage with theses new technologies, that I think we have maybe become a bit lazy with our participation and wait for it to come to us over a facebook event in invitation rather than going out and searching for the events to attend and support.
I still think that new media technologies are an advance in the political participation realm, however I believe this is the beginning of a shift of lackadaisical behavior regarding the initiative to actively participate rather than simply joining an online group.

Convergence in Technology and Political Participation

Convergence as defined in a dictionary “denotes the approach toward a definite value, as time goes on; or to a definite point, a common view or opinion, or toward a fixed or equilibrium state”. Through the article we read for class, Jenkins describes it as “alternates the relationship between existing technologies, industries, markets, genres, and audiences”. This is important according to Jenkins because Convergence describes a PROCESS not the ENDPOINT. We are entering a new era in which media messages will be made available to us through more mediums that ever before. Using cell phones as an example, we are not only able to make phone calls, we are able to text message, check e-mail, browse the web, send video and photographs, listen to music, check the weather, get alerts about stock, and even view television programs, this list is becoming endless. Convergence is the idea of controlling interests across the entire media and mediated industries, instead of specialization of interests. Convergence is important because it affects the way we view, consume, interpet, and produce media, and mediated messages.

Convergence of these technologies, and the avenues they offer can be seen as a way to augment and encourage political participation amoung the masses. Political Participation can be defined as "the active engagement by individuals and groups with the governmental processes that affect their lives. This encompasses both involvement in decision-making and acts of opposition. Acts of active engagement include conventional political participation (such as voting, standing for office and campaigning for a political party) and unconventional acts, which may be legitimate (such as signing a petition and attending a peaceful demonstration), or illegal (such as violent protest and refusing to pay taxes)". If we continue with the cell phone example, an individual could be able to go online and review current issues, say for example the debate surrounding proposition 8. They continue browsing and they log onto their facebook page and they noticed a event invitation to attend a rally to oppose the passing of proposition 8. They then in turn invite all of their facebook friends to attend, then creates a mass text to send out to their entire adress book on their phone, after which they call some friends and have them do the same. All of this readily available technology makes it very wucik and easy and convenient for many people to recieve a message and then makes them more aware and able to participate. Who knows if it hadn't been for those forms of media how many people would know that there would even be a rally going on.

Other examples of technology used to foster political participation could be the mass e-mailing of a petition, or an alert sent to phones and e-mails encouraging citizens to participate in elections and vote! How many mediated messages to vote did we see this past year? How well do you think the convergence of all of these media affected the voter turnout?

Convergence of these technologies will be key in the future to organize and encourage political participation, and we will only continue to see it used and become more prevalent in the future.

You Tube Debates

A most interesting part of the most recent 2008 presidential election has been the "You Tube Debates". These debates were hosted by CNN and broadcast on live television. This was the first debate series of its kind. Citizens were able to post their concerns and topical questions for the candidates on YouTube, and then select videos were chosen to be presented to the presidential candidates for answer and debate.
The Democratic Party debates were held in in Charleston, South Carolina and aired on July 23, 2007. The Republican Party debates were held in St. Petersburg, Florida and aired on November 28, 2007. Both recieving high television ratings.
A reporter for MSNBC, Chris Matthews introduced the debates on a YouTube video, and Anderson Cooper served as the moderator for the debates.There were video questions specifically for Senator Dodd, Senator Clinton, Senator Obama, Senator Biden, Senator gravel, Senator Edwards, Congressman Kucinch, Govenor Richardson, and questions directed at all the candidates as a whole. Some examples of questions were

"If you were elected president of the United States, would you allow us to be married to each other?" (Mary and Jen, Brooklyn, New York)

"Hey, I'm Mike Green from Lexington, South Carolina. And I was wanting to ask all the nominees whether they would send their kids to public school or private school".

"I have two questions. By what date after January 21, 2009, will all U.S. troops be out of Iraq? And how many family members do you have serving in uniform?"

"With Bush, Clinton, and Bush again serving as the last three presidents, how would electing you, a Clinton, constitute the type of change in Washington so many people in the heartland are yearning for, and what your campaign has been talking about? I was also wondering if any of the other candidates had a problem with the same two families being in charge of the executive branch of government for 28 consecutive years, if Hillary Clinton were to potentially be elected and then re-elected."

"Senator Obama, the laws banning interracial marriage in the United States were ruled unconstitutional in 1967. What is the difference between a ban on interracial marriage and a ban on gay marriage?"

These debates were a new step in presidential campaign, and a new golden nugget for "info-tainment". Info-tainment is a source of news and information, but spun in a crowd pleasing and entertaining way, such as the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, or The Colbert Report.
According to CNN.com a poll taken after the debates from focus groups, and reported that the majority of the people thought Senator Obama most understood their issues. The debates had an average of 2.6 million viewers, making it the second most watched debate of the campaign season.
Reactions for the debates have been mixed, the argument was placed that the more popular video questions were asked rather than the most important and pressing ones. For instance some questions were very serious, while others although dealing with serious issues were dealt in a more joking manner, such as the snowman global warming video. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0BPnnvI47Q)
These debates really have marked an important point in the New Media landscape. Jenkins could most easily apply the first characteristic "Innovative" to these debates. This can only have us look to the future of new media, and what politics in 50 years from now will look like, and if the elected officials will even be in the same room or if it will all be over screens in front of a live audience?