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For those of you who have always aspired to run for President but held back because you didn’t have the $1 million to get started, today may be your lucky day. Reality TV producer Mark Burnett and MySpace.com are teaming up to launch the political reality TV show Independent. The show will follow around presidential hopefuls as they interact with the public and the My Space community, with the winner getting $1 million that must be used to finance a presidential run or donated to a political cause. I know some people might think it’s a bad idea to give the MySpace generation so much potential power in a presidential election. But not only do I think this is a great way to get young adults involved in politics, but I hope that at least in some small way this will level the presidential playing field just a little bit. The show, which is currently without a network, is expected to launch in early 2008. More information can be found here and here.
I’m sorry, I love taking advantage of technology and new media as much as the next guy, but to allow MySpace to “cast ballots” to the 2008 election and call it a Primary is just plain wrong. As Mike Arrington, the infamous blogger of TechCrunch, points out – numerous members hold fake accounts and multiple accounts on a site based on trying to have more friends than your real friends.
I’m afraid that the outcome of this “primary” could have some impact on actual votes. It’s too easy to “fix” the outcome of this, let’s say having someone’s entire campaign staff holding multiple usernames ends up voting multiple times. Might give some incorrect findings.
It’s great to energize the slow to act population of young voters, but come on. Has the MySpace Impact had any impact so far? Will this bring new interest to the young voter population? Will third parties be represented, right now the focus has only been on the big dogs – Clinton, Obama? I’ll guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
John Stewart and company covered the New Media aspect of this upcoming election from MySpace to YouTube and Second Life. In fact, many of the aspects they bring up were already covered by 2008 Election Watch here and here (not that we’re trying to brag, ok, maybe we are). But here’s a round up of everything, including the hilarious hacker change on John McCain’s blog, Enjoy!
I just stumbled upon the Fantasy Politics blog and they feature a Fantasy Politics Game for the 2008 election – excellent. How it works is that you pick four candidates (for some reason I choose Wesley Clark, I know, I don’t know why either) and you accumulate points every time your candidate does well in a poll or shows up on important events, gives important speeches, etc. Although after just looking around for a little, I haven’t seen all that many details on how the point system works, but we shall see.
Kindof feels like if you pick Clinton, Obama, Giuilani, and McCain you should be in pretty good shape. But of course I’m picking a few first seats and an underdog (who doesn’t love an underdog story), very similar to my NCAA bracket (hmmmm, can someone remind me again why I picked Virginia Tech?).
If you sign up – let me know what username you’re under and we can compete. Let the games begin! 🙂
On Monday MySpace announced a new portal featuring all the candidate’s MySpace page. We already established that the candidates have MySpace pages, but now the Fox owned organization wants to help make an impact on the slow to move 18-24 year old demographic.
“MySpace hopes to play a ‘powerful role’ in the 2008 elections, CEO Chris DeWolfe said in a statement. The site plans to give users easy-to-use information in a format they can relate to, he said.”
I think getting young voters active and interested is key for the electoral process to prosper. You think the MySpace will help start to get people interested in politics? I sure hope so.
Ah the wonderful world of tech sure can bite you in the ass. This was too funny not to share, a group of Republican Second Lifers (some of which supporting Bush ’08 tags), cyber-vandalized John Edwards’ virtual campaign headquarters.
The NY Times blog post also mentions that McCain had his own run-in with some cyber-problems. After his camp finally posted official sites on MySpace and Friendster, the MySpace administrators had accidently pulled down “unoffical, pro-McCain profiles.” Nice.
But come on, can you beat Republican cyber vandals?
For this upcoming election the virtual world is just as important as the real world. In fact, John Edwards has just set up a “headquarters” in the popular virtual world of Second Life.
The candidates have hired teams of bloggers to represent them day and night and their every move, but when John Edwards plucked two feminists to represent him in the blogosphere, the conversatives started to do their research.
Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon was hired full time on Jan 30th, while liberal blogger, Melissa McEwan from Shakespeare’s Sister, was brought on part-time as a consultant. Soon, right wingers found blog entries from Amanda Marcotte on her liberal blog Pandagon, regarding the Duke lacrosse players, and with her standard biting sarcasm, she stated, “Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it?”
Then due to a glitch in the Pandagon system, the most controversial posts (along with others went missing), and then on Feb 6th Bill Donohue, the head of the Catholic League, issued a press release stating that both Amanda and Melissa were “anti-Catholic.” After this press release, Donohue followed it with other press releases begging for Edwards to fire the anti-Catholic, pro-gay bloggers.
Edwards stuck to his guns, and didn’t fire the bloggers and instead issued a statement that they would stay on board and that they aren’t “anti-Catholic.”
Between the conserative bloggers and Donohue’s religious followers, Marcotte received a number of vulgar, extremely offensive emails complete with threats. She was no longer able to keep her personal blog without ridicule, and was attacked simply for being a woman, and decided to quit the John Edwards campaign.
Most of the above was taken from Marcotte’s Salon article. Prior to her article, Salon.com had reported earlier that the bloggers were fired and then rehired before the news got out, but Marcotte would not comment on this.
It will be interesting to see how effective these new media techniques will be on the campaigns. From podcasts to blogger teams to Second Life headquarters. Was all this attention bad for the Edwards campaign? How loud did it resonate with voters? I just wait for the day when I can IM with their teams directly, and check out their MySpace pages.
Oh wait, I just looked and they do have MySpace pages, now I have an idea for another post… which candidate has the most “friends”?
2008 Election Watch 