New Media Tools in Political Campaigns

Time has proven that new technology has changed the way that individuals used to carry out their daily businesses. One great example is the change in the way that political campaigns used to be run. In the article New Media & Society, Cristian Vaccari provides an overview about the way that traditional political campaigns were run and their transformation due to innovated social media tools, something that Farrel and Norris called ‘postmodern campaigning’ (pp648). Vaccari’s article provides information up to the 2004 presidential campaign. However, even thought this article provides evidence that campaigns have changed from 1996 to 2004 thanks to the new social media tools, these changes cannot be compared to the ones provided by the current 2008 presidential campaign. This campaign is using new social media tools not available back in 1996 and 2004 like Facebook , YouTube and are using the geo-targeting search engine like Google. These new internet tools have radically changed the way campaigns were run and this empowers both the individual and collective voice (Shifman, D. 2008)

Negative Advertisement in Presidential Campaigns

The article “Decision 2004: The war for the White House” offers a similar picture of what is currently happen in this 2008 presidential election campaign. Both campaigns had engaged into a war of negative advertisement between the presidential candidates. However, during this current election a shift has occurred thanks to more technology accessibility for the people. Now more people can make a direct contribution to this political campaign war by sharing their opinions and creating content throughout blogs, social networks and video sites. This way, shifting the power toward people and taking it away from corporate media’s agendas.