New Media & American Politics - Pre-2008
From Baruchnewmedia
20th Century Foundation
The Clinton Administration first developed whitehouse.gov in 1994, and continued to tinker the website as technologies increased.
http://www.clintonlibrary.gov/archivesearch.html
This gave President Clinton an advantage in communicating with voters (albeit a small percentage of the voters at that time). The Clinton/Gore campaign also had one of the first Campaign websites.
On July 17, 1996. President Clinton issued Executive Order 13011 - Federal Information Technology, ordering the heads of all federal agencies to fully utilize information technology to make the information of the agency easily accessible to the public. This order merely added impetus to what the Clinton-Gore White House Web site had started in 1994. http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa012201a.htm
New Media Usage
2000
In 2000, new media took on a particular importance with the misconstrued and misstated accusation that Vice President Gore invented the Internet. Still after this hoopla his campaign had a very solid virtual presence. [1]
Also in 2000, Vice President Gore’s campaign disseminated a biological piece on DVD to selected voters. No one can forget the hoopla the 37 days between the election and the final Supreme Court decision presented. Many Americans used the net to research and stay apprised about the new developments, and the Supreme Court decision was posted online as soon as it was determined for the Americans to read.
Complex databases allowed campaigns to model reactions from the public, predict voter turnout, manage both financial and personal resources and adapt political strategies on a regular basis.
For the first time in 2000, the presidential nominating conventions were placed on the internet for everyone to see at their convenience.
Al Gore's challenger Senator Bill Bradley was the first politician to raise one million dollars using new media technologies.
By this year four-fifths of the candidates running for U.S Senate in the major political parties had Web sites. [2]
2004
In 2004, Governor Howard Dean surprised the political community with a unknown prowess to raise money online. Something that hadn't been successfully executed since candidates offered a campaign website. His campaign, and it's supporters, also successfully utilized a new Social Media outlet, at the time, known as Meetup.com. Meetup.com allowed supporters to organize across the country with litle need for logistical organizing support.
Howard Dean's campaign began to use blogs as part of their political strategy. Dean's campaign was the first political campaign to encourage the use of this new media technology. This campaign asked its' supporters to write up thier thoughts in their blogs. [3]
For the first time in 2004, iTunes offered podcasts of the two parties’ convention speeches. Each day of the convention was offered as a podcast free of charge.
Savvy net users organized a Draft Gen. Wesley Clark campaign in 2004 using traditional static websites and new media outlets to encourage Gen. Clark to run for the Democratic Presidential nomination.
By 2004 both major political parties used new media to organize volunteers and to get messages out to their volunteers. The Republican National Commitee used Voter Vault and the Democratic National Commitee used Datamart. These new media tools helped the parties distribute information and it also allowed the campaign volunteers to upload their information.
2006
The 2006 election really began the usage of YouTube as the main host for political campaigns, now a staple of the political culture. One of the most memorable, and popular, videos is of Michael J. Fox, an actor stricken with Parkinson's disease, campaigning for candidate (now Senator) Claire McCaskill. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9WB_PXjTBo
Jorge Ruiz 11:59, 30 April 2010 (CDT)
2007
In early 2007, Chris Hughes, one of the founders of the social networking site Facebook, went to work on Senator Barack Obama's new media campaign. Hughes handled the campaign's social networking website; http://My.BarackObama.com Through this social network supporters of the Obama campaign could join with other groups locally, sign up for updates and set up their own personal fund-raising websites.[4]
