New Media: Revolutionizing the Political Campaign

As you may have assumed by the title, my project will center around how new media is in the process of revolutionizing how political campaigns are run. My project will seek to explain three main principles, the first of which is what result will the massive increase in information to the American Public alter political campaigning? In former campaigns, the spread of information was by comparison tightly controlled, you heard a candidate speaking on TV or the radio or you might have watched news covering the candidate. But with the introduction of Blogs on the mass scale, each and every person's opinion can be heard, and the reliance on "Standard" news sources is broken. Some may say that blogs will open up the reputation of political candidates to rumors and speculation, but in my project I will explain that in the long-term it can democratize the spreading of information. One can now log onto their favorite political blogs, or check facebook and twitter to see what is being said about the candidate, so the average American will gain a higher proportion of information from people with similar traits to himself i.e friends and acquaintances. Expanding upon this, I will also look into how New Media is increasing the amount of people involved in politics. As the barriers to information are torn down, demographic groups will expand and increase in variety, forcing a more complex and centrist approach to political campaigning. The next and last issue is Political Financing, in your standard campaign a political candidate accepts public financing by the government, which then puts strict controls and how he/she can use the money to run the campaign. In the 2008 Presidential Election John McCain was burdened by the controls Public Financing set as he was unable to spend anywhere near as much money on advertisements as he liked. While Barack Obama, through a New Media powered grassroots campaign was able to forgo Public Financing and use more money in any way he desired. New Media will shift the power of the purse to the people, and reduce, at least during the campaign, the influence of lobbyists and special interests.