Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Use, Misuse, and Abuse of Social/Digital Media

As Dr. Levinson discussed in this chapter, the Obama administration utilized multiple social and digital media outlets in order to build their campaign.  The obvious benefit of this is reaching people incredibly quickly across the country to present the ideas and objectives of Obama's cabinet.  However, I think this is only a part of what helped spread awareness of Obama's goals and lead to his eventual victory.  As we know, Obama received great support from the youngest age bracket of voters.  I think a related aspect of this is the appeal to young people via social and digital media.  This means more than just his ability to reach those people, but the young people felt they could related to Obama and get behind him.  I think a subconscious part of this is that young people saw the Obama administration as fresh, young, new, and cutting edge...much like the new new media to which this generation is accustomed.  Obama's "Change We Can Believe" campaign aligned nicely with his use of social and digital media (progressive change our generation had already seen).



Another subject I want to touch on is cyberbulling of today.  Of course we all hear the stories of kids harshly ridiculing classmates on websites, posting inappropriate pictures of their victim, or sending the victim vicious messages.  These types
 of stories in the news typically end in the student leaving school or the bullys being punished.  However, a new site called CollegeACB.com has enabled anonymous cyberbulling across college campuses.  Students submit threads about whatever or whoever they would like, and anyone that visits the thread can comment on it.  Since it is all anonymous, people have no hesitations in throwing out names and accusations. Of course people can potentially be pinpointed to a post from a specific computer, but this detective work is imperfect since people can use library computers, for example.

2 comments:

  1. can you relate these two points?

    ReplyDelete
  2. There is a lot of personal responsibility that comes along with using new media. We ultimately decide whether it is used for good or evil!

    ReplyDelete