Impact of Social Media on Politics and Elections

The media serves as a form of communication that exchanges the political content. New media has transformed completely over the past few years and it delivers new and altered ways of communication and subjective platforms for politics and political leaders. Newspapers, media, and the internet have evolved rapidly and taken over the whole power in their hands dramatically. This digital mass media delivers every kind of interest to the audiences. The role of media is essentially as important to let people review, rethink and direct their thinking in a way that they can choose their leaders. Eminent role of media can foster sound community building. New media seek to engage the public in political activities, their campaigns, and future agendas. However, according to the author, the new media role is sometimes unreliable and its authenticity can be questioned. Candidates sought to reach voters who were less attentive to print and television news through personal appeals in the media venues they frequented. “Old media, new politics” thrives in the current era whereas Campaign websites incorporating interactive elements—including features that allowed users to engage in discussions, donate to candidates, and volunteers the new media technique. Candidates have incorporated new media into their organizational strategies for informing, contacting, and mobilizing voters. However new media was undercut as it as by the fact that it has no guiding principles or goals. Few other campaigns used advertisements, digital media, including social, blogs, customized messages to target some specific groups and profiles.

The media act as a mouthpiece for political leaders by publicizing their words and actions even when their news value is questionable. However the new media has its own pros and cons, on one hand it provides us valuable information and views of political leaders and on the other hand there is issue with reliability and clarity of the information that comes out. However as according to the author, the American society never obtained an ultimate golden era in journalism but the new era may mark certain positive possibilities for future. The author implies to the concept of technology and role of media that inculcates information through different means. Not only this; but the concept revolves around the strategy of new media being use by political leaders throughout their campaigns.

Social media has a very strong impact in developing, modifying and changing the political efficacy and ultimately vote casting intention of the individuals. Public can have now access to social networking sites and het information about political events and scenarios, and they also can now participate in those events easily. Similarly Political parties also have a platform to get a chance to aware the public about their political campaign and activities. Author has discussed that such forums influence in political awareness and influencing the vote casting intention of youth. Planners and policy makers also use these forums to develop strategies for the elections.

Facebook exposure influences the political participation (i.e. online or offline) of Youth. People who are using these forums more are more affected by them as compared to those who spend less time. She has also discussed that this also has a relationship with age factor and gender. She concludes that people spend more time on digital media then on social media. Thus, traditional media (Digital media) is considered more forceful in terms of political opinion influence as compared to social media.

Media is considered to be playing an important role as a change agent in the world. Media connects the society with the world. Society depends a lot on it for the fulfillment of their various needs either the need of information, entertainment or any other need. Mass media and society relation refers to the knowledge we all have from our own long experiences with media which enables us to understand what is going on, how a medium might fit into our daily lives. Media (i.e. social media, digital media, print media or any other form) affects our mindsets and our perceptions in such a way that we build new perceptions that are shown instead of what we know. What media shows, we perceive it and make our mind sets according to that. During elections or even throughout the year media continuously effects our perceptions about the political parties and voting intensions. Sometimes political parties use media to gain votes or to damage some other party’s image. Our coting intensions are made or broken through media. Social media is a platform where youth participates in politics. First time or even experienced voters are also affected through it. Political parties use such media. The massive exposure to digital and social media gradually shapes the perception of social reality for the audience and cultivates attitudes toward politics and voting intensions.