While the debate about the role of young people (in this case meaning 25 and under, or Generation Y: The Millenials) continues, social media become a crucial way for youth to get their voices heard. Scholars tend to argue that youth are more idealistic in their political views because they have never had to pay taxes or perhaps even work a real job. Therefore social policy often tends to be more important to young people than say, fiscal policy or tax laws. For example, in the most recent 2013 election, I could not vote and neither could a large portion of my Facebook friends. However, I saw numerous posts from teenagers about the campaign because for many of them it was their only way to have a voice in the election. Perhaps one of the biggest roles of social media-though Mark Zuckerberg may not have created Facebook with this intention-is to give a voice to marginalized groups, which can be directly linked to politics. Another important aspect of the usage of social media in political campaigns is that it can be a way to target a wider audience of voters since before that candidates would mostly target voters through cross-country campaigns and perhaps television news outlets. The difference between reading about a politician in a newspaper or watching a filtered report on their policies from a filtered program such as Fox News, which is notorious for censoring things with an overwhelmingly Republican bias, and reading a social media post is that if it is more firsthand information. The candidate cannot control what news outlets say about him, however social media gives him a voice to speak for himself.
An example of this strategy in full play would be during the legislative session of Wendy Davis, in which she led a filibuster for 12 hours against a pending vote on abortion clinics. However, it is not limited to the United States, and has existed in other political phenomenons such as the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and even protests in Turkey. Yet part of the power of social media, at least with a networking site like Facebook, is that the political affiliations of a person's friend group can have enormous influence on their political coverage because I know at least for most people my age, they don't watch the news regularly but check Facebook and twitter multiple times a day. Therefore, social media can actually replace news coverage for some, giving them a biased and extremely filtered version of reality.
According to the article " The Political Power of Social Media," the most important role of social media in politics is not actually access to more information, but rather a medium of communicate and dialogue because people tend to feel more comfortable voicing their opinions through the internet than they would face to face. I know for me personally that Facebook and twitter are often tools that I use to communicate my opinion on a variety of social issues. I tend to be a voracious article-reader, and if I see something on the news that I feel is important to be shared (such as the recent shooting of an unarmed African-American teen in Ferguson, Missouri) I will not hesitate to post the link to an article, perhaps with a brief paraphrase of my own interpretation of it, because the way I view it is that the more people who aware of these issues, the more likely social change will occur. For people whose lives may be far removed from government, for example living in an isolated area or even simply not residing in a politically active area, social media can be a powerful outlet to share ideas about politics because, as Shirky describes, "Social media tools are not a replacement for real-world action but a way to coordinate it." They conveniently organize information and ideas in a way that makes politics seem less menacing than it does in more public spheres, and by that I mean spaces such as the news where individuals are not the ones in control. With something like Facebook, a person has control over who they share their information with and how they share their ideas with others.
Baig, Mehroz. "How Social Media is Changing Politics, From Wendy Davis to Anthony Weiner." Huffington Post. September 19, 2013. Accessed September 19, 2014.
Shirky, Clay. "The Political Power of Social Media." Foreign Affairs. January 2011. Accessed September 19, 2014.
No comments:
Post a Comment