I realized that several people wrote some very interesting blogs in regards to the elections, but, more specifically focused on Facebook. I was also very intrigued by how much of an impact Facebook itself might have had in these past elections.
As I am sure several of you witnessed the rampage of Facebook status updates minutes, perhaps seconds, after President-elect Barack Obama, was announced, I am sure most of you also witnessed the ones days, perhaps hours before the voting casts closed. I personally, didn't do this, but, I was very interested when I read the "...is the 1,618,392nd person to donate their status to get out the vote for Barack Obama today. Donate yours: http://causes.com/election/11700602" and the same for McCain. Talk about fabolous PR move!
According to an article, For Facebook's Causes Election Rally application on the social-networking site, users can pick to which candidate -- either Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. John McCain -- they would like to donate their status on Facebook. They also can donate their status simply to get out the vote.
We have heard time and time again, that this was the election of first time voters. According to polls in the same article, sixty-nine percent of Facebook users who used the application opted to remind users to vote for Obama, the Democratic Party candidate, while 16% wanted to remind people to vote for Republican Party candidate McCain. Obama and McCain are the main candidates for the U.S. presidency, though there will be other candidates on the ballot.
Now, I am not saying that this is proof of anything, but it is definetly worth noting how this social network allowed us to have some sort of idea as to what the young voters were thinking, isn't it?
3 comments:
I also noticed this and was so intrigued to see all of the fights going on concerning the election over facebook status and comments. Somebody would put their status as GOBAMA! and it would start a whole comment argument by other people who had different views. I have friends who got into it over facebook notes as well. I stayed out of it...but the facebook thing was no joke...you could watch debates play out right in front of you.
I too found it interesting how much social media affected this election down to the very end. Also, many of our classmates are blogging about it because I think we all experienced political activism more that anyone from our age group has before. It is convenient to support your cause from your bedroom isn't it? It's easy to get the word out for your candidate by changing your Facebook status. I think that it was a great experience for first-time voters to be part of such a historic election.
Good post, I had been very curious on the breakdown numbers for who people voted for on Facebook. I saw lots of people voting for Obama so I knew that he had to majority of the Facebook vote. I was a little annoyed thought that they didn't have an application to view the overall numbers at the time.
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