Week 9 - Internet Politics

One very prominent figured that has successfully used to Internet Tools is Barack Obama. He is one tech savvy politician and I would say that he won the elections partly due to it. He is one of the first politician who so actively used Twitter and Youtube to connect with people. And the people are lovin' it! It somehow bridges the gap and makes the people feel closer to the president. This also makes the younger generation more interested in him because they are finally able to relate and also partly because the younger generation is very active on social media websites. This proves successful because Obama won the past two presidential elections and most of the votes were from people under the age of 35. 

Obama's twitter has currently over 40 million followers today, More than any politicians in the world. He keeps his twitter updated regularly every single day with posts about the country and the things he supports. His Youtube account has over 500,000 subscribers and all these platform are used to engage with the people. He also organises Q&A sessions on Youtube to further reach out to his people.

Okay, enough about Obama. I pretty sure you get how cool/awesome he is as a politician. How about something closer to home? The 2012 Singapore elections. I was never interested in the politics but then it flooded the television, radio and so many of the social media websites. I could not avoid it even if I wanted too. And then in school, suddenly everyyyonneee was so knowledgeable about it. Facebook was particularly prominent because everyone was posting about different political parties and their view on it. 

However, this might be quite a bad thing. For people who doesn't know much about the elections or have particularly strong opinions about it, they might be swayed into voting for someone they dont really know about. 

All in all, I feel that the Internet is good for politics. It gives the whole thing a more human touch somehow in my opinion. It also allows the younger generation to find out more infomation about as we all know, gen-y kids dont really like reading the paper.

Till next week.