http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13940637/site/newsweek
The first article I read was "My Political Space" which was published in Newsweek in July of
2006. The article starts by weaving a metaphor about the internet being like a college campus. It says that amazon.com is like the bookstore, wikipedia.com is the library, facebook.com is the new dorms, friendster is the old dorms, and the classroom is a relatively new site called essembly.com. Essembly is a more academically geared social networking site that has around 17,000 users but is growing in popularity. It was developed by a classmate of Facebook creator, Mark Zuckerberg. This is one of many instances of politics starting to crop up in the social networking community. The Republican party has even launched their own site http://www.gop.com/MyGOP/ MYGOP.com which is a site that allows republicans to make their own site much like a MySpace only with political content. It has not become unfamiliar territory for politics in the "populist revolution" that is social networking.
I love this article mainly because of the strong metaphor that it began with. It grabbed my attention being as I am a college student. After the first paragraph it became nothing more than an advertisement for essembly.com for the next two large paragraphs which annoyed me but eventually had me sold and I now have an essembly account. I know I was pulled in by the shameless plug in what was supposed to have been an informative article but it happens. I liked it best when the article got back on track and started to talk about how candidates are realizing that it is necessary to have their own profile on all of the social networks in order to gain exposure and that the internet has become one of the largest platforms for campaigning. The only personal feeling that I have on the subject is that it was a damn good idea. With the emergence of the "Vote or Die" campaign started during the 2004 election by VH1 and MTV in order to convince more young voters to have a say in politics, candidates needed to find a way to speak to the young voters on their level which can be difficult for 50-60 year olds. Whoever thought of the idea to create a facebook or a myspace for their candidate should get the MVCM or most valuable campaign manager award because that was a stroke of political genius.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19213575
The second article that I read was "MySpace: A Place For Candidates". This article begins by declaring the practice of televised debates between presidential candidates, archaic. It has become apparent that people are all too consumed with cult reality television to watch the actual reality of candidates and their attempts at self-promotion while making their opponents appear as inept as possible. Social networking has risen to the challenge of filling the void and has striven to quench the thirst for politics that people can tend to when they feel like it. In the upcoming elections we are left to wonder whether we are really election a president on the basis of their political prowess or on their ability to keep an up=to-date template on their MySpace. The article goes on to feature the profiles of several of the major candidates in the running for President of the United States as well as what other social networking sites.
This article was very interesting although it sounded like it may have been written by a cynic who was not in the mood for their nation to run by a social-networker. It was interesting to see the social networks that each candidate was a member of and how they shamelessly promoted themselves. For instance, one of the candidates wrote in their Music section their opinions on the issues, which is just annoying. If a candidate really wants to connect on the level of social networkers they have to actively participate. I know that they may be busy but honestly simply typing "im too busy for music" whether true or not is better than ignoring the field and self-promoting themselves more. While it is a seemingly minor infraction on their part when you have political figureheads soliciting sex in airport bathroom stalls and having scandalous affairs, it is nonetheless inappropriate to create social networks under the pretense of being young and up on what is fast becoming America's new pastimes when it is apparent that the sites are created and run by employees and not the actual candidates.
Now I have realized that I have expressed two seemingly contradictory opinions on the matter but I was speaking from two different halfs of myself. The first article spoke to my somewhat older persona, who actually thinks that this is ingenious. This is the part of me that has always wanted to take a stab at politics myself and has always taken an interest in how the game is played. This makes me think that one candidate coming up with a breakthrough in campaign strategy is equivalent to sinking the battleship of their opponent. The tone of the second article immediately put me in a different mindset. I was instantly thinking like a teenager who thinks they are wiser than everyone else. haha All I could think was that these people are stupid if they think that we won't see that this is simply a ploy for our attention and that they don't tend to their social networking sites and if we leave comments or questions it will be yet another piece of communication lost within the maze of falsities that is politics. I am still unsure as to which of these opinions is really mine, if any. I am obviously easily caught up in the tones and opinions of authors.