Having become an important feature of many citizens’ daily lives, the Internet increasingly used as a focal point for protests. The whole idea of being anonymous allows us to express our thoughts freely. However, there is a connection between actively participating online and having offline ramifications.
Especially, it became increasingly important in campaign politics, developing digital activism. (Herrnson et al, 2007)
Barack Obama case study with Facebook identifies the beginning of the digital public sphere formation. During the times of US president elections, Barack Obama dominated the social networking site by hiring Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes in the early 2007, who was Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard roommate. As a result, in 2008, it has been identified that Obama had 17million Facebook supporters, compare to Sarah Palin only having 2million (whereas McCain did not have Facebook at all as he was taking more traditional campaigning methods). This is not a coincidence, this is due to Obama tacking the right way to win publics’ voices; allowing the politics to directly get involved in the social networking medium.
At first, it was Rupert Murdoch owning most of the media; this time around Obama is shown a definite influence on Facebook. Latest news state that Facebook wants to offer a potential media relations chief job to Robert Gibbs (former press secretary for President Barack Obama) however the final conclusions are not made yet whether he would take the job. (The Independent, 2011)
There is a question to whether those bodies should get involved with social media at all, as they will try to limit the freedom of speech and information. We live in the democratic society; therefore, it is a big issue. On the other hand, Obama possibly tries to get closer to the public sphere and the generated online discussions for the benefit of improving the USA.
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