New Media, Campaigning and the 2008 Facebook Election

Thomas J. Johnson, David D. Perlmutter

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317979395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Some political observers dubbed the 2008 presidential campaign as 'the Facebook Election'. Barack Obama, in particular, employed social media such as blogs, Twitter, Flickr, Digg, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook to run a 'grassroots-style' campaign. The Obama campaign was keenly aware that voters, particularly the young, are not simply consumers of information, but conduits of information as well. They often replaced the professional filter of traditional media with a social one. Social media allowed candidates to do electronically what previously had to be done through shoe leather and phone banks: contact volunteers and donors, and schedule and promote events. The 2008 Election marked a new era where the candidates no longer had complete control over their campaign message. The individual viewer in a campaign crowd with a cell phone can record a candidate's gaffe, post it on YouTube or Flickr and within days millions will be gasping or guffawing. The traditional campaign, with its centralized power and planning, although not dead, now coexists with an unstructured digital democracy. New Media, Campaigning and the 2008 Facebook Election examines the way social media changed how candidates campaigned, how the media covered the election and how voters received information.

This book is based on a special issue of Mass Communication & Society.

Introduction: The Facebook Election

Thomas J. Johnson
Amon G. Carter Jr. Centennial Professor University of Texas at Austin
David D. Perlmutter, Ph.D.
Director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication Professor & Starch Faculty Fellow College of Liberal Arts & Sciences The University of Iowa

Introduction: The Facebook Election

During the race for the presidency in 2007–2008, one of the editors of this book, based on a November 2010 special issue of Mass Communication & Society, spent a month reading Barack Obama’ s official campaign MySpace page (Perlmutter, 2008). Its most notable feature was the posting of comments by thousands of people, not all of them supporters of the Illinois senator’s bid for the White House. One of the most striking characteristics of at least some of the comments, which included text and a signature picture file representing the commenter, was their prurient, non-sequitur, and sometimes zany content. One commenter, presumably a young lady, employed a picture of a naked, buttocks-forward, and undulating woman accompanied by text passionately declaring her loyalty to the campaign. Others had cartoon figures in semidress and possible sexual distress; still more included creepy “wanted poster” images and accusations.

Anyone the least bit familiar with the rough-and-tumble world of social media will not be surprised that such weirdness and absurdity erupted front and center on an essentially open website. But the Obama MySpace page, in allowing—albeit briefly—such postings signaled a sea change in at least one way that organized political machines viewed the content that was published in their name and under their banner. Until well into the Internet era, political campaigns were all about message discipline and message control (Perlmutter, 1999; Stromer-Galley, 2000). Since paid media were horrendously expensive, political communication victory for a campaign was measured by the mainstream media picking up of the designed infobyte or visbyte of the day. Control over all content, from bumper stickers to radio ads, was centralized, with only a few power players typically consisting of consultants, managers, and the candidate (and his or her spouse). Many critics inside and outside of the political-journalism industrial complex complained that there was no democracy in democratic politics.

The 2003–2004 Howard Dean campaign, with his reliance on Blog for America, served as a 1.0 prototype, and Obama 2007–2008 as a 2.0 successful model, have proved that politics as we know it has changed in a fundamental way. Immediately, of course, we must put limitations and offer contexts to such a sweeping conclusion. First, over the history of the introduction of new communication technologies, there has always been a pushback by the old. Print newspapers railed against radio and then television as media unworthy of serious journalism. Second, Obama did not win the presidency because of Facebook. All commentators and insiders agree that his nomination campaign especially was a well-run traditional political machine that would have made a 1950s old pol proud. He “got out the vote” (GOTV) door-to-door as well as Tweeted. He gave great fundraising speeches as well as mobilized thousands of independent supporters to start up pro-Obama blogs to raise money and enthusiasm. He lined up union endorsements as well as texted thoughts of the day.

Nevertheless, we are in a new era where the candidates no longer have complete control over the message. The individual viewer in a campaign crowd with a cell phone can record a candidate’s gaffe, post it on YouTube or Flickr and within days millions will be gasping or guffawing. Individuals can create their own blog to tout their views on the campaign or post those same messages on discussion boards, social media sites or Twitter. The traditional campaign, with its centralized power and planning, although not dead, now coexists—sometimes uneasily—with an unstructured digital democracy.

The Facebook election: New media and the 2008 election campaign

In this book political communication scholars examine the way in which Online Social-Interactive Media (OSIM), more specifically social network sites, blogs, micro-blogs (like Twitter), video-sharing sites, and online discussion forums, changed the ways candidates campaigned, how the media covered the election and how voters received information in the 2008 election changed the ways candidates campaigned, how the media covered the election and how voters received information in the 2008 election. We use the term Online Social-Interactive Media” rather than social network sites to characterize social media examined in this book. As Boyd and Ellison’s (2007) classic definition of social network sites indicates, these are sources that allow users to create profiles and establish online connections with friends and acquaintances. This definition characterizes social network sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn, but does not complete account for other social media sites such as micro-blogs (e.g., Twitter), video-sharing sites (e.g. Twitter) and online discussion forums. OSIMs refer to media that rely on what Bruns (2008) characterized as produsage, in which the boundaries between producers and consumers are eliminated so that users create content for each other in communities that rely on user collaboration and an ethic of openly sharing user creations.

While several of the chapters in this book address the question of what are social media sites, in chapter 4 Matthew J. Kushin and Masahiro Yamamoto examine the issue directly. The authors conducted a principle component analysis of 15 political items and five loaded on attention to social media: personal blogs, video-sharing websites, micro blogs, social network sites and online forums and discussion boards.

Four of the five chapters in this text centered on the user of OSIM with two examining content of user-generated Facebook groups and two examining the effects of OSIMs on citizens’ attitudes and behaviors. The fifth chapter took a broader approach by examining intermedia agenda setting among activist media, activist citizens, and campaign ads produced by the Obama campaign and by MoveOn.org.

Past content analyses of social media pages tend to center on characteristics of the author of a social network page (Grasmuck, Martin, & Zhao, 2009) or candidates’ social network profiles (Compton, 2007). Few have focused on users of Facebook groups.

Chapter 6 examines 562 wall posts from college Facebook groups devoted to Obama and McCain in seven battleground states to see how these groups facilitate political dialog and civic engagement through wall posts made by group members. The authors found that political discussion dominated the discussion between posters, as they used the Facebook groups to transmit important information related to the candidates’ campaign, issues and appearances rather than for social purposes. The authors argue that the results bode well for the potential of social network sites to foster civic engagement among young voters.

In chapter 5, Julia Woolley, Anthony Limperos, and Mary Oliver examine the top four Facebook groups in terms of size and a systematic random sample of 129 other groups for each candidate. They discovered that, in line with major media reports, that groups focusing on Obama were more actively used and had a higher group membership than McCain-focused groups. Comments on Obama’s groups were overwhelmingly positive, while for McCain comments were decidedly negative. While the other content analysis stressed the benefits of Facebook groups, the authors here feared that their results demonstrated that while the social network site provides a platform for individuals to express their beliefs, their expressions tended to be partisan and polarizing.

Just as the content analyses offered conflicting predictions about the benefits of OSIMs, so have studies that have explored effects of OSIMs on their audience. Studies suggest that in general, social network sites and blogs may not have much influence on political attitudes and behavior (Cozma & Postelnicu, 2008; Zhang, Johnson, Seltzer & Bichard, 2010), although political uses of SNS (Kim & Geidner 2008; Utz, 2009; Valenzuela, Park & Kee, 2009; Vitak et al., 2010) and blogs (Gil de Zuniga, Puig, & Rojas, 2009) may better predict political attitudes and behavior. Another study found that while YouTube and social network sites both predicted both offline and online political participation, social network sites did a better job predicting other political measures (Johnson, Zhang, Bichard & Seltzer, 2010). Not surprisingly, then, the two studies in this issue that explored political effects of OSIMs reached different conclusions.

Chapter 3 examines the relationship between social network sites, video-sharing sites, political blogs and political cynicism. The authors found that while video-sharing sites and political blogs were unrelated to political cynicism, amount of time spent using social network sites for political information led to lowering of political cynicism. The authors suggested that the reason why SNS predicted lower political cynicism and blogs did not was the strong interpersonal nature of SNS. Two other social measures, the influence of one’s family and friends as socializing agents and being motivated to use OSIMs for companionship, also were linked to lower levels of political cynicism.

In chapter 4, Matthew J. Kushin and Masahiro Yamamoto discovered that unfortunately, OSIMs matter little in terms of political efficacy and situational political involvement (i.e., attention, interest, seeking out and staying informed about elections). On the other hand, a behavior measure examining OSIMs, online expression (writing blog posts on political issues; creating and posting online audio, video, animation photos or computer artwork to express political views; sharing political news, video clips or others’ blog posts online; and exchanging opinions about politics via e-mail, social network sites, micro blogging or instant messenger) did predict situational political involvement, but not political efficacy. The authors suggested their results reinforce studies examining the positive effects of online political discussion and that online expression may have proved a stronger predictor of involvement than attention to OSIMs because expression indicates stronger cognitive involvement.

In the final chapter in this volume, Matthew Ragas and Spiro Kiousis examine agenda setting in the OSIM environment. Researchers (e.g. Chaffee & Metzger, 2001) have questioned whether agenda setting can remain relevant in the Internet age. As the Internet has equaled newspapers as a source of information and people are getting information from a host of sources beyond traditional media, it no longer makes sense to talk about a single media agenda. Similarly, users have more information to choose from as well as more control over what sources they will search out, indicating that the public will increasingly have influence on the media agenda. Ragas and Kiousis demonstrate that agenda setting retains its relevancy in the OSIM world by examining intermedia agenda-setting effects among partisan news media coverage and political action groups, citizen activists and official campaign advertising on YouTube. The setting of their study was the political activist organization MoveOn.org’s “Obama in 30 seconds” online ad contest during the 2008 primaries where they tested for the transfer of issue and attribute salience among political media content appearing in the partisan newsmagazine The Nation, YouTube ads created by the Obama campaign and by citizen activists in the MoveOn.org contest as well as ads designed by the activist organization. The strongest relationship was found between partisan media coverage and the “Obama in 30 seconds” ads, and significant relationships were also found between the MoveOn.org ads and citizen activist-created ads. Second-level agenda-setting effects were discovered between the Obama negative ads and the “Obama in 30 seconds” ads, as well as the Obama negative ads and the MoveOn.org ads. The results demonstrate that agenda setting is alive and well and can be extended to political activist communication efforts and consumer-generated content.

References

Boyd, D.M. & Ellison, N.B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarshipJournal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

Bruns, A. (2008). Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and beyond: From production to produsage. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

Chaffee, S.H, & Metzger, M. (2001). The end of mass communication? Mass Communication & Society, 4, 365-379.

Compton, J. (2008, November). Mixing friends with politics: A functional analysis of ’08 presidential candidates social networking profiles. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the National Communication Association.

Correa, T., Hinsley, A.W., & Gil de Zuniga, J. (2010). Who interacts on the Web?: The intersection of users’ personality and social media use. Computers in Human Behavior, 26, 47-253.

Cozma, R., & Postelnicu, M. (2008, August). Political uses and perceived effects of campaigning on MySpace. Paper presented at the annual conference of the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication, Chicago, IL

Gil de Zuniga, H., Puig, E., & Rojas, H. (2009). Weblogs, traditional sources online and political participation: An assessment of how the Internet is changing the political environment. New Media & Society, 11, 553-574.

Grasmuck, S., Martin, J., & Zhao, S. (2009). Ethno-racial identity displays on Facebook. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 15, 158-188.

Johnson, T.J., Zhang, W., Bichard, S. L., & Seltzer, T. (2010). United we stand? Online social network sites and civic engagement. In Z. Papacharissi (ed.). Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (pp....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1. Introduction: The Facebook Election
• 2. Intermedia Agenda-Setting and Political Activism: MoveOn.org and the 2008 Presidential Election
• 3. The 2008 Presidential Campaign: Political Cynicism in the Age of Facebook, MySpace and YouTube
• 4. Did Social Media Really Matter? College Students' Use of Online Media and Political Decision Making in the 2008 Election
• 5. The 2008 Presidential Election, 2.0: A Content Analysis of User-Generated Political Facebook Groups
• 6. The Writing on the Wall: A Content Analysis of College Students' Facebook Groups for the 2008 Presidential Election
• Index