Overview. By Lee Rainie, Aaron Smith, Kay Lehman Schlozman, Henry Brady and Sidney Verba Overview The use of social media is becoming a feature of political and civic engagement for many Americans. Some 60% of American adults use either social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter and a new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project finds that 66% of those social media users—or 39% of all American adults—have done at least one of eight civic or political activities with social media. Overall, there are mixed partisan and ideological patterns among social media users when it comes to using social media like social networking sites and Twitter.
The social media users who talk about politics on a regular basis are the most likely to use social media for civic or political purposes. Some of these activities are more likely to be pursued by younger social media users compared with the social media users who are ages 50 or older. SOCIAL MEDIA: Online Activism. Digital Democracy | Educating 21st Century Citizens. What should the digital public sphere do? Earlier this year, I discovered there wasn’t really a name for the thing I wanted to talk about.
I wanted a word or phrase that includes journalism, social media, search engines, libraries, Wikipedia, and parts of academia, the idea of all these things as a system for knowledge and communication. But there is no such word. Nonetheless, this is an essay asking what all this stuff should do together. What I see here is an ecosystem. There are narrow real-time feeds such as expertly curated Twitter accounts, and big general reference works like Wikipedia. There are armies of reporters working in their niches, but also colonies of computer scientists. I asked people what to call it. I’m just going to call this the “digital public sphere”, building on Jürgen Habermas’ idea of a place for the discussion of shared concerns, public yet apart from the state. 1. 2. 3.
Each of these is its own rich area, and each of these roles already cuts across many different forms and institutions of media. MobileActive.org | A global network of people using mobile technology for social impact. Awaaz De. Featured Stories | VozMob. MIT Center for Civic Media | Innovating civic media tools and practices together with communities. Vojo.co. #SM4DPS | vojo.co. Politics and Social Media: Election 2012. It was a long campaign season for Americans and it is almost over. The 2012 Presidential election was promoted, advertised, debated and polled – and with November 6 th finally upon the nation the candidates and their supporters make their final social media pushes.
Overall, the candidates focused on getting people out to vote and proactively encouraging others to do so as well. Both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney highlighted the necessary information for voters to determine the correct voting stations across America. On Facebook , the candidates pinned the information to the top of the page, and are promoted it heavily from their websites, making the content easily shareable for voters. The same is true for Twitter, although President Obama‘s campaign promoted (via Twitter advertising) the hashtag #VoteObama as well as a promoted tweet featuring voting location information. Both Presidential candidates this election have embraced social media, although arguably to different extents. Citizen feedback for the digital age, by Code for America. Twitter Gives Saudi Arabia a Revolution of Its Own.
#SocialChat Discusses Social Media and the Presidential Debates. On Monday, October 15th, the social media marketing brain trust also know as #SocialChat gathered to discuss the impact of social media engagement for this presidential election cycle. Following is a recap of that chat on Twitter. Q1 YouTube will be streaming the next Presidential debate tomorrow night. Will you be checking out that option? Several of the participants in the chat were very interested in checking out the debate on YouTube.
The second screen phenomenon has certainly been taking hold of the political process in the US this election cycle. Q2 What do you think of the content being created on #Tumblr about the vice presidential debate? Just the level of content being created all over the internet has taken off this year over 2008. Q3 Facebook says the VP debate scored a 6.79 on its Talk Meter. The political discussions on facebook have certainly been heating up. On Monday October 22 we will be featuring guest, David Adler of Adler Law, on the topic of the law and social media. Michelle Stinson Ross. Actually… Social Media and Political Engagement.
Social media and the Arab Revolution - Opinion. [Editor's note: Professor Srinivasan will be discussing the issues raised in this article on The Stream @19h30 GMT on Monday 29, October. He will be intermittently joining the discussion in the comments section at the bottom of the article.] The Internet can make that which is on the opposite end of the world seem very local. Yet this can both distort or amplify reality. For example, while the recent “Innocence of Muslims” video served as a catalyst for the dissatisfaction felt toward the lack of Western support toward the Arab world, the protests and riots would not have occurred without YouTube and Vimeo. This raises a key question: Have the revolutions of the Arab Spring done more for social media than vice versa? We may forever debate the importance of social media in the uprisings of 2011 in the Arab world’s most populous nation. How do we step away from these binaries?
How has technology changed power in Egypt? I believe in four major ways: 1. 2. 3. 4.