Barack Obama- a friend of social media

The project for excellence in Journalism analyzed the websites for the 2008 presidential candidates for compatibility with social networking. Apparently, "Candidate Web sites have fully embraced politics as a two-way conversation with voters. Twelve sites also offer the opportunity for visitors to turn that dialogue into grassroots action (organizing their own events, fundraisers, etc)." The data shows that the democrats have the most interactive sites, led by Barack Obama, then Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and Bill Richardson.

Obama's site was the most successful in engaging voters and allowing participation. Factors contributing to his standing at the top include open comments, citizen blogs, and interaction with social networking sites like Myspace.

SXSW and social media. A match made in interactive-hipster heaven.

While browsing through the lineup for the 2008 SXSW Music Festival, something occurred to me. While I volunteer for the music portion, and am interested in the film portion as well, there is a very important facet of the conference I vastly overlook, the interactive festival. Sure, it doesn't offer the drawing tactics of famous musicians in a commonplace setting, or actors attending star-studded premieres. But just because the interactive fest isn't the most glamorous of venues, doesn't mean it lacks in interest and crowd pleasing offerings.

I work the music panels at the fest, and thought there might be some decent interactive panels as well. As it turns out, the interactive portion of the festival boasts significantly more for professionals. A list of panels by category shows 17 on Social Media alone. One of the keynote speakers is Mark Zuckerburg, founder of hugely popular networking site Facebook. One of the panels that I found particularly interesting, as well as incredible applicable to our class, is entitled "Harnessing the Power of Social Networking on Your Intranet". Led by Bill Cava, Chief Technology Officer for Ektron, the panel focuses on how social networking can make your company's intranet a collaborative tool, for creation and delivery of business documents. Social networking, in this capacity, can be used as a tool to provide feedback between employees and to assure consistency of message.

In the wake of the Digital Axle extravaganza...

I'm wondering... does this social media thing have the best of intentions? We're now singled out as those "kids" who fail to check their facts. Obviously, none of us in fact meet those descriptions, but the two-dimensional sphere of social media has us pegged that way. Sure, we're "kids" essentially, in that (probably) none of us own property, have children, or any sort of real responsibilities. We are, however, intelligent, coherent people, who (almost) have a college degree, and do research so to contribute relevant information to our class blogs.

A myspace profile has various blanks for personality traits, as do our blogger profiles. Age, sex, location, etc. Sometimes there's a section for favorite books, one for movies, and even a place to input a favorite song to play for visitors. Sure, you can write about your political party stance, hopes, dreams, whatever. But does this really say anything about you?

We put ourselves out there, labeled by these social media profiles, and not one of us is represented to the full extent of our potential. Is that good? Do we feel the need to veil our identities behind a mere 6 point image profile? I'm not saying that we should put all sorts of information on the internet. Of course I stand by the fact that we should keep things to the imagination. I just worry that our "digital selves" don't do us justice.

This whole Digital Axle thing has really bothered me. Mainly because I hate it when people label without justification, but really because I think it's entirely contradictory. Check our facts, huh? A classmate's bold post upsetting the CEO is just as bad as brazenly labeling an entire class as one incompetent body. I never blogged about the Digital Axle issue initially, because to be honest, I didn't find it that intriguing. The aftermath, however, has really struck a nerve. I hate to harp on this, and I'm not trying to take the activist stance, but I'm merely pointing out how social media has its downfalls. We're not bad people, we're not incompetent, but without further research, the internet can portray anyone in that light.