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| The new-age digital president | |
| Leslie D'Monte & Priyanka Joshi / New Delhi November 6, 2008, 0:46 IST | |
Tech sense of Barack Obama appeared to endear him to younger voters.
The internet and social networking tools have played a significant role in the election of the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama. The McCain campaign in 2000 — when he unsuccessfully challenged George Bush for the Republican presidential nomination — was an early example of using the internet to raise money online.
Obama, on his part, has refined the digital act further — a fact revealed during his presidential announcement speech in Springfield last October when he said: “Let us be the generation that reshapes our economy to compete in the digital age...”
Youth media practitioners and Obama realised that the power of the internet to share stories is the key to mobilise youth and others. The results show. For instance, now over 280,000 people have created accounts on barackobama.com.
These users, in turn, have created over 6,500 grassroots volunteer groups and have organised more than 13,000 offline events using the site. Over 15,000 policy ideas have been submitted through the website. Through Obama’s leadership, many of the presidential debates are freely available online for mash-ups, commentary, and other uses by ordinary citizens, bloggers, and others.
The expectation that a President “gets it” regarding IT is a fairly new one. So when, Obama announced via the microblogging site Twitter that he would alert his supporters via text message immediately after he chose his running mate for vice-president, followers like Shruti Avdhani (studying in Chicago), found common footing.
Avdhani, who is also a Facebook campaigner for Obama, was drawn to Facebook when she heard about it from her friends. On Facebook alone, there are 18 million young people between the ages of 18-29. “Everyone was discussing the campaign and Obama’s policies. I decided to join the camp,” she says as a matter-of-factly.
Barack Obama’s e-campaigning elicited intense interest from young voters after he encouraged them to exercise their creative urges online, instead of simply dictating his ideas to them.
“Obama is the first ‘YouTube politician’ because he gets that you can’t control internet,” says Ethan, who came to India six weeks back to pursue an assignment with a local NGO.
This Obama fan regularly watched videos on Youtube and even downloaded several of Obama’s speeches. He quips, “I have been witnessing Obama making history online.” Ethan adds, “Today you send a text message, get on Myspace, send out an e-invite for online applications and Obama’s campaign was all about this.”
Brooke Beasley, an American who has been working with an Indian NGO, believes the youth media practitioners at the Obama camp have been at the forefront of using communication tools and online social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, cellphones, internet, film, video, podcast to generate momentum.The Obama campaign reportedly also paid for in-game advertising in Burnout Paradise — a Xbox 360 racing game.
Obama has proposed the creation of the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that the American government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will have a specific focus on transparency, by ensuring that each arm of the federal government makes its records open and accessible as the e-government Act requires. The CTO will also ensure technological interoperability of key government functions.
On the fundraising front, supporters have made more than 370,000 donations online, more than half of which have been under $25. Users who have set up personal fundraising pages online have raised over $1.5 million.
Obama also supports network neutrality legislation while expressing concern over the possibility of “toll charges” foisted on sites by greedy “network providers”. He has also proposed the creation of a modern, online answer to Sesame Street called Public Media 2.0.
Obama wants a national broadband policy that includes a formal redefinition of “broadband” from its current low of 200 Kbps. The goal is for broadband access to be a utility like phone or electricity.
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