FP – Intro/Lit Review/Methodology
Introduction
New media technologies have drastically altered the political world over the years. Not only in the electoral process, but they have changed the way we follow particular politicians or movements. Today we are able to connect instantly, be heard consistently, and make a difference like never before thanks to these new advances in media. There is no better example to demonstrate the overwhelming power these technologies have to offer than the recent election of President Barack Obama. Using strategies that utilized social networking, Obama and his team were able to thrust his image and platform into the online spotlight and start a brand new grass roots movement.
From the average American college student’s perspective, Facebook has become an essential tool for networking, communicating, and working. Politicians realize this, and have been able to follow the growing trend of online communication and collaborating and use it to their advantage. Politically, Facebook fan pages and activity has become another tool to gauge national mood and opinion.
Literature Review – Final Project
Media disseminates many kinds of information to the public through traditional and newer outlets. Politicians, in particular, have to be careful about what information is reaching the public. Representatives’ popularity is not solely based on their political stands, but it is also a factor of the kind light media casts about those stands, their ability, and their character. Voters will perceive the information differently, but the producers of that media can have substantial influence on that opinion. Hanson (2008) critiques of the parties’ interaction with media in the 2008 election. He proposes that they way the media presents people and how they react will affect people’s opinions before they vote. Both of the major parties in the U.S. know the power of media perceptions. John Harris (2006) suggested that historically, Democrats have not responded well to media criticism. However, we have seen that pro-activity in presenting oneself through media can have more weight than responding to how media presents you in the 2008 election.
Talbot (2008) believes that a form of new media was the tool that gave Barack Obama the edge over Hilary Clinton in the primaries, and would likely do the same for Obama against McCain in November. Talbot quotes Carville “This year, it was the network, stupid!” Clearly, many people are attributing a lot of President Obama’s success to efforts in networking, particularly networking by utilizing online tools. Talbot suggests that part of the reason the Democrats had such success with these tools (Web 2.0 technologies) is that the administration used my.barackobama.com as the hub for encouraging political activism on- and offline. The Republican administration underwent some attempts to utilize Web 2.0 technologies. However, blogs ran by McCain’s daughter and their other techniques were less cohesive and involved no central mechanism like my.barackobama.com. Without such tools the party seemed behind the times and out-of-touch with the younger age groups that typically use the technologies (including blogs, social-networking sites, etc.)
For the younger demographic, one may logically assume that highly used media tools such as social-networking sites would be appropriate tools for politicians to reach younger generations of voters. Smith, Schlozman, and Verba (2009) conducted telephone surveys of 18 or older adults in a Pew Internet study. Their research sought to see whether political activism was becoming altered because of the internet. They were specifically concerned with whether more affluent individuals who are the most statistically involved in politics will be replaced with students that are using the internet for political activism. The hypothesis that internet use could alter political participation is understandable, because its ease of use and accessibility make participation possible beyond the scope of only high-income individuals. (Best, Krueger 2005) The results of the Pew study (Smith et al. 2009) confirmed that high-income/highly-educated people are still the dominant political activists whether in the online arena or offline. However, the authors see signs that internet activism will continue to gain importance. Their findings indicated that about 10% (31% of the 33%) of those internet users surveyed said they had participated in some form of political activity on their social networking site. And overall about 19% of the adult population is involved in political activities online. More importantly, they noticed that those that contribute to political activities are more likely to be involved offline as well. This would imply that the theory of Democrats being able to gain support online, and therefore, more support offline because of my.barackobama.com may be legitimate.
Facebook fan pages for political causes or parties allow users to be politically active online as well. However, the authors of this project believe that there are differing levels of activity depending on whether the user is contributing or consuming information. A study by Stolle, Hooghe, and Micheletti (2005) suggest that new media, such as social networking sites, allows for political participation that is more consumer based. This implies that we are likely to see a consumer mentality when it comes to activity on Facebook political sites. However, the content of information gathered through Facebook could be subject to certain biases.
Melican and Dixon’s study, “News on the Net” (2008) posits that there could be a credibility or bias issue when it comes to receiving information online. Their research used psychological theories to explain their hypothesis. The theory of selective exposure posits that people seek out things that reinforce their held beliefs, and as they frequent or support said sources, they begin to perceive them as more credible. Melican and Dixon believe that this is a danger for online information, because of the vast amount of information online. Their surveys did find a correlation between those that found non-traditional news sources such as the internet more credible and scoring higher on a scale of modern racism.
This project’s researchers would like to apply Melican’s and Dixon’s findings to Facebook. We believe that members’ activity on political sites will reflect the idea of selective exposure, meaning they are using the site that aligns more with their political views.
Research Question: Are Facebook users partisan?
Hypothesis: Facebook users will be partisan towards the Democratic party, because of the user demographic is young, college-age people (~43%, Smith 2009) that are commonly perceived as predominantly Democrat and because of the Obama administration’s emphasis on new media utilization during the 2008 election.
Methodology:
The group chose to study the fan pages of the two largest political parties in the nation, Democrat and Republican, with the largest number of fans–”Democrats” and “Positively Republican!”. We decided to compare fan pages instead of groups on the site, because the setups of the two parties’ group pages were too different to compare effectively. The fan pages, however, contained the same sections–one for posts from the page administrators and another for posts by members.
The group monitored activity on the fan pages for a 12 hour period (9am-9pm) on Tuesday, December 1, 2009. We chose this day, because we expected increased activity due a presidential speech on Afghanistan that evening.
We created a point system by which whichever site got the most points, would have the most active Facebook users. Our points system was based on the amount of effort required for different activities. For example, a user most be more interested and invest a bit more time to comment on a post than to like a post, and he would be even more invested if he posted one himself.
Our points system was as follows:
- +4 for a comment by an individual not associated with the production of the page
- +3 for a post by those who run the page
- +2 for a comment on a post
- +1 for a “like” on a post
