Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Media systems
Culture and practice of media consumption? Culture and practice of media ownership? Culture and practice of media regulation?
Public sphere
Originally conceptualised by Habermas, the public sphere is a discursive arena where private people come together as a public to discuss freely matters of mutual interest The rational-critical debate ideally results in consensus, or public opinion, which then serves as a mediator between private citizens and the State And thus constitutes democratic control of state activity In practice, the public sphere is highly dependent on information and communication tools New media technologies allow for more information and voices to reach a larger audiences Like-minded individuals are better able to organize Enabling people to be active participants in the public sphere as opposed to passive readers, listeners or viewers
Source: http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/GB
So overall the internet does promise and deliver a lot It can empower individuals, widen our world and provide endless information But it can also absorb and engulf us, giving us more information than we can ever process It can promote our identities as consumers, but also, with some effort on our part, it can allow us to cultivate our identities as citizens
Re-thinking the roles of political communication and public opinion in the age of participatory media
Copyright
1994: Senator Diane Feinstein, Democrat of California, put up the first campaign web site. 1998: The Minnesota campaign of independent Jesse Ventura featured email. 2000: presidential candidate John McCain began raising money online and used the Internet to disseminate political news and information. 2004: Howard Dean's presidential campaign used blogs to generate voter interest, recruit, motivate volunteers and change the interplay between citizens and campaigns. 2008: Social media tools were used including candidate Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, texting services and others. The New York Times said Barack Obama was the first presidential candidature to truly understand social media. 2010: Most Congressional campaigns and over 53% of voters used social media to connect to election information and news. 2012: Mobile apps are rise significantly during election cycle.
Over 50,000 people list themselves as a social media consultant on Linkedin 200 million Tweets are sent per day with over 10 million users Over 50 million users on Facebook YouTube is the second largest search engine and largest video-sharing site on the Internet Tumblr is a blogging platform that has over 1.5 billion views per month and is one of the top 50 sites on the Internet Flickr is the top online photo sharing site with the most stock images available under common creative licensing (you can use them without paying a fee)
Scholars are growing interested in understanding the social media ecosystem..it is proving to be a complex, dynamic system that is rapidly changing and difficult to empirically examine
Barack Obama famously used social media to court the youth vote in the US presidential elections But how effective is the social media platform for political parties? Allows politicians to connect with people on a large scale How interactive is this? All UK parties maintain a social media presence Facebook pages, Twitter and YouTube accounts prominently linked from their respective websites
Facebook page friends Twitter followers Twitter tweets Twitter reach Klout score a measure of Twitter influence Compete score a measure of website traffic
But overall the UK parties are not doing well at leveraging social media
Facebook likes of official party account 159 044 143 244 92 078
Unique Facebook likes of official party or leader pages 217 900 132 840 129 340
Conservative Labour
Unique Twitter followers of all MPs (minus leader) 614 719 (401 882) 503 881 (413 691) 173 184 (88 604)
Unique Twitter followers of all MPs unique to party (minus leader) 430 893 (272 356) 316 237 (280 834) 68 335 (35 255)
Activity
Analyse and critique the social media presence of the main political parties How effectively are they engaging with social media platforms? Are they structured to facilitate top down or bottom-up communications practices?
Impacts
The internet and social media are having a profound effect on British politics It will re-shape the way elections are won and lost, how policy is made, and how people get involved in formal and informal politics Facebook and Twitter are extremely important new arenas for political activism If you measure the unique number of users that follow MPs from any given party (excluding users that follow MPs from more than one party):
Significantly more Twitter followers for both the Conservatives (430 893) and Labour (316 237) than formal party members (under 200 000 for each) That said, these virtual members are a younger demographic One in 3 are disloyal (follow MPs from multiple parties)
This virtual support is part of a wider transformation of what it means to belong to a party from formal hierarchical model to a more networked, ephemeral, conditional support
A common pattern
Similarly, recent work on Beppe Grillo and the Movimento 5 Stelle found his Facebook supporters were highly mobilised his one million Facebook friends included 200,000 volunteers who were active campaigners during the recent Italian election and vital in the effort to get the vote out. Grillo refused to speak with any of the Italian news or broadcast media, preferring instead to communicate directly with Virtually Members - his supporters via social media. As Douglas Carswell has argued in The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy, the ability to communicate directly to constituents rather than indirectly through established media is likely to have a dramatic effect on the ability of parties to maintain message discipline, making elections more about candidates than parties; and making MPs more responsive to their constituents once elected.
Concluding comments
Research on new media and political communications is still in its infancy BUT some new media effects are already discernable The internet is not providing the brave new world of an unfettered public sphere, BUT has to a degree altered citizen interaction with public issues Whatever the impact, politics needs to be marketed and communicated as much online today as in traditional media outlets