Fred Stutzman posted reflections at techPresident on what he terms the 'social filter' feature of social media and how this seems to be generating a change in political candidate strategies and electorate engagement. Reading his piece, a commentary on a NY Times article, 'Finding Political News Online, the Young Pass it On', resulted in a longer-than-expected thread of related posts, some of which are summarized / addressed here.
The central point in this series of posts is that electoral politics is changing rapidly and radically; and, if we believe Stutzman's analysis and prediction, politics a decade down the road will be a different animal and hardly reflective of the 'politics as usual' cliché.
To begin with the NY Times article and one of the sources cited therein, a Pew report from last January suggests that media use during the 2008 US election campaign varies consistently and strikingly along age: half of the 50 and older respondents attend to TV for campaign news, 39% of the middle-age voters do so, and only a quarter of the under-30 crowd watch TV for their election news consumption. Some two-thirds of the last group, call them 'youth' for ease, rely mainly on social networking sites for campaign information.
In the context of this thread, social networking sites, although multiple and varied, encompass the very large social contact sites like MySpace and Facebook as well as file sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr and, and that vast terrain known as the blogosphere including 'micro blogging' as reflected in initiatives like Twitter.
The NY Times quote from Pew Project director Lee Rainie sums up the different way youth seem to acquire and process campaign information: "Young people are particularly galvanized in this campaign, and they have a new set of tools that make it look different from the enthusiasm that greeted other politicians 30 years ago …. They read a news story and then blog about it, or they see a YouTube video and then link to it, or they go to a campaign Web site, download some phone numbers, and make calls on behalf of a candidate."
The 'social filter' component of social media is reflected in the personal and informal character, 'between us, in conversation' as Stutzman puts it. He argues that these media are 'identity driven', that is, generated by individuals known in some manner to the other persons within a particular social network. The 'rub', of course, is that the nature of this knowing, the meaning of being a 'Friend' on SNS Friendster for example, is both thin and nebulous (see boyd's elaboration of this feature).
In an earlier post this month, called The Social Media Voter, Stutzman elaborates on how social media are being used in the 2008 US campaign and suggests a typology that he qualifies as a 'brainstorm' rather than research-based construction. Still, this typology has a ring of clarity and, for those of us weaned on various typologies of adoption patterns, familiarity. He suggests four types of social media voters: (1) Window-Shoppers, (2) Toe-Dippers, (3) Communicators, and (4) the Mavans (experts). Persons interested in the description of these categories should consult Stutzman's posting; what is relevant here is that a clustering of social media users in relation to their attention to election-oriented news is possible **and** that there is a increasing shift from consuming to producing such news in the typology. In Stutzman's words, "…the turn isn't consumption of information, but production and communication of information."
Another post from Stutzman, from almost a year ago, entitled 'Authenticity in Social Media', reflects on a conference panel discussing social media and the then upcoming US election cycle. Panelists talked about using these media to humanize candidates and, as paraphrased by Stutzman, to generate "the perception that candidate are actively engaging with digital supporters." He rightly points to the issue of authenticity with regard to social media and wonders whether such political strategy may back-fire – that voter trust may be undermined through such sham-style presentations.
There is, in other words, much to learn about the effective ways in which social media may be integrated into electoral campaigns; some of the comments to this last posting by Stutzman provide nuances of importance, such as one suggesting distinguishing between social media environments which by their nature accentuate socializing and activist networks that have a more action-oriented mandate.
Stutzman's concluding prediction-oriented paragraph merits repeat, in part because of its absolute expression of how tomorrow will be (as an aside, predicting the future is perhaps the most risky of enterprises, resembling more the soothsayer than the scholar) and because embedded in that statement is a hypothesis worth scientific exploration:
"… it is clear beyond a doubt that social media will play significant roles in 2008, 2012, 2016 and so on. The candidates that use social media most effectively will set the precedent that will resound for years to come. I've got a feeling that the candidate that most authentically represents her or himself online will be this precedent-setter, and they'll benefit substantially as a result."
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