Obamanator

In today’s day and age with technology developing at the speed of light, the use of social media on the internet affects almost everything we as humans do. Politics is one of the million things that trend on social media networks and is talked about all over the world. These days when the presidential election rolls around all forms of social media get attacked by people stating their opinions on who is the best candidate for the job. New voters may be easily swayed by the political views of their peers to vote a specific way. With all the memes, videos, and pictures degrading politicians, people can get the wrong ideas about the running candidates. With our project we have come to the conclusion that social media has a big affect on politics. Whether it’d be a good thing or a bad thing, candidates would be smart to use social media to their advantage and win over the votes of the undecided voters. Although the internet is a huge impact on politics today, it will only continue to be used in the future. In the link below, it shows a young girl named Sally who is now eligible to vote. Let’s see how she handles the situation.

 

Social Media On Politics

 

The internet has recently encouraged individuals with the same opinions, or no opinions whatsoever, to come together to either make their opinions stronger or, for the ones with no opinion, begin to take a side. Opinions on celebrities, fashion, politics public figures, events, religions, brand names, and lifestyle are being shaped by what the in crowd is saying online. Throughout the years, the power of this conformity has flourished online, to the point where the influence of online communities could change a person’s beliefs altogether, or even influence. The purpose of our final project was to show specifically how social media effected people’s opinions about the candidates during the recent election(2012.) While looking at who won the 2012 presidential election, we noticed something. THERE WERE MORE MEMES TARGETING MITT ROMNEY RATHER THAN BARROCK OBAMA! Was this a contribution to Obama’s presidency? It’s important to look at what was going on, on social media first.

These debates had spawned a variety of slanderous, sometimes entertaining, forms of media that expressed messages about the candidates. These messages were either positive (in favor of the candidate) or negative (against the candidate.) Sites like Tumblr, Youtube, Reddit, and Memebase began spreading photos, gifs, and video that expressed resentment towards Mitt Romney. These messages eventually made their way into more mainstream social communities like Facebook and Twitter and eventually into the real world. In alot of cases the individuals who “liked” and “retweeted” this content had no idea what the candidate’s ideals were or what they planned to do about issues such as the economy or controversial laws. What mattered was how the masses viewed the candidate; as if the whole situation was just a massive fashion show where no focus was on what the candidate was saying, but only on their appearance and word choice. By the end of the election, Mitt Romney was seen by the public as untrustworthy and indecisive.

LINKS TO EXAMPLES OF THE VIDEOS:

Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up?

Mitt Romney Style!

 

As we seen in the video, things like this has a HUGE impact on “undecided” voters, such as Sally. So was this really a fair race? People can post Meme’s on websites, and others can comment on them and help people form certain opinions. The conclusion we drew was that Obama had an advantage during this race amongst the younger generation because the memes did not target him as much therefore leading us to believe people were more so focused on the bad about Mitt Romney.

 

One thought on “Obamanator

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *