A President for the Digital Age
This post is part of a series for the Youth Media Blog-a-Thon on the topic of “regime change.”
How can one man move the majority of the country to vote for him? One man can’t, but his network can.
On November 4, 2008 Barack Obama won what will be called a historical election not just because he’s the first African-American president elected in the United States, but also because he’s the first presidential candidate to win the election in the era of digital communications.
Digital communications broadly describes most of the technology you use to get in touch with your friends and family–mobile phones, the internet, social networks such as Facebook or MySpace, YouTube, blogs, text message, email, Twitter–basically any information you share on your phone or online.
Think about it: The last time you got together with friends, how did you organize yourselves? Did you send a text message? Did you email each other? Call? Send a message on Facebook or MySpace? Tweet?
During the 2008 presidential primary and race, the Obama campaign did all of the above.
