Elections 2.0

The Web 2.0 and related technologies, “Information Technology 2.0”, are creating profound changes in our socioeconomic structures, political campaigns, cultural behaviors and business environments. These changes had first started to occur in the business-to-consumer space with the use of online social networks, wikis, personal blogs, podcasts and online videos. And over the last few years, the businesses have joined the bandwagon and the cloud computing and on-demand SaaS architectures concepts have become major part of enterprise technology related discussions.

However, over the last 6 months, another change occurred – unrelated to businesses or consumers. The Web 2.0 and related technologies started to make their impact in the 2008 elections political campaigns. The candidates have had their individual websites in 2000 and 2004 elections. However, for the 2008 elections, we have started to see Web 2.0 tools - online social networks, online videos (i.e. CNN/YouTube debates), CampaignForce SaaS application, RSS readers, Blogs, Twittering, and keywords-based advertisements on Google, Microsoft and Yahoo search networks – as new communications channels in addition to traditional TVs, Radios and individual websites. This use of Web 2.0 and related technologies has enabled the 2008 candidates to collaborate and communicate with their supporters and undecided voters in the unprecedented ways. More importantly, the candidates are reaching more people than before and at a much less cost. In the last few months, various industry bloggers and pundits have called this phenomenon as Elections 2.0 and I would agree with them.

Personally, over the last few weeks, I have made following three major observations in these Elections 2.0 campaigns.

First, frankly, I had never followed political campaigns closely until the 2008 campaigns came along. Yesterday, when I contemplated why and how the change occurred, I came out with a single answer, the Google Reader. Why? I don’t watch TV that much. I don’t read print news papers. And in the last eight years, my source of information has always been the online websites. Before I started using Google Reader, I would go each individual news website and only read the sports, business and technology articles. The politics never interested me so I never clicked on those links. Fast forward to today, I only read news, articles and blogs through my Google Reader subscriptions. Over the last six months, my subscriptions started to contain political campaigns related articles and blogs. Why I started read them in the Reader when I had not bothered in the websites? It is much easier and faster and I don’t have to leave my screen as I am rarely interested in details. The headlines over the last six months generated curiosity and I followed the links to read more. I developed awareness, formed my opinion and became more involved.

The second one is the proliferation of online videos in the Elections 2.0 campaigns and debates. I strongly believe that an online short video is the most powerful communication mechanism out of all Web 2.0 technologies. Yes, Blogs, Podcasts and the profiles on the online social networks help but we are still human. We believe more on talk. We change more often when someone talks to us. The online videos have provided a very low cost, yet a very effective communication vehicle to the Elections 2.0 candidates. The most profound result of this? Read the third observation.

The third one is around the involvement of youth in the Elections 2.0 campaigns. It has become clear when it comes to Election 2.0 technologies; the youth (generation X) is way ahead of generation Y and baby boomers. Why? Because the generation X is more collaborative than all the generations before. They like transparency from others. At the same time, they don’t mind expressing their opinions. I had always thought the political choices were very private except when you were in a rally. However, today, I see people – especially younger generation - expressing their political choices in their profiles openly and persuading others to follow their choices. There has never been such an active participation of youth in any elections campaigns before. This has forced candidates to change their tactics. They cannot ignore the youth in their campaigns anymore.

The gist of all three observations is simple. The Internet and related advancements have changed the politics arena as we knew it. This is yet another evidence of the profound non-technological changes that will be made possible using the Internet related advancements.