Group One Final Project Topic
Group 1
Caroline, Anton, Eli, Cameron, Leanardo
A name for your group
NET POLITICS.
2-3 historical questions you are considering answering in your project
1.) How does social media (twitter, Facebook, tumblr, reddit, etc) affect young/first time voters?
2.) How has social media and the internet affected the 2012 Presidential Election? Does social media influence first time voters to vote?
A brief description of the expected scope of your project:
We hope to focus on 2012, but using other elections for comparison purposes, on how young voters (high school seniors/college freshman) are affected by these sites. We feel that we can talk about all the memes, gifs, and twitter accounts that have popped up during the election – including that Big Bird 2012 campaign that started during/after the first presidential debate.
A list of challenges and potential problems that you are having now, or anticipate will arise as you work on the project
Currently we find a challenge to be focusing our generally broad ideas into one big topic – the internet is a huge place and memes fall in-and-out of popularity regularly, and it’s also difficult to gauge how something as abstract as the internet is affecting something as concrete as voting for a presidential candidate.
I have faith you will come up with a great question, and don’t worry about the name. Check out the great ideas section http://ds106.us/2012/08/25/welcome-to-ds106-bootcamp/
I really like your 2nd question. I think you will find a lot of interesting facts about social media and internet role in politics, and how they are a driving force behind the news flow especially for younger people.
Good topic since social media is an enormous industry that will affect the campaign. I wonder if social media leads to a higher or lower turnout # at the polls ?
I am curious as to what specifically you will focus on considering there is so much to talk about when social media or media is general is discussed in regards to any elections.
I think this topic has a lot of potentials. A problems I think its going to tough to draw this connection between meme, post, or gifs on social media platform to the mindset of a voter?
The most fitting topic in regards to the course.
Like you mentioned, it is going to be hard to find concrete factual data that support or reject the notion that social media affects the election. (Although we all know it does.)
This is probably the simplest yet most difficult topic to work on.
In addition, another angle that you can look into is the positive or negative affects of social media on an election. Such as students learning about the running candidate’s platform through memes. It paints a very specific picture from a bias opinion with the goal of getting a laugh.
Good luck, have fun.
This is a great topic, considering that I was unable to vote in the last Presidential election; I was 17 at the time. However, I have voted every year since for state and local positions and I would love to see how new voters base their voting decision on the possible influences of social medias.
I, for one, haven’t been affected much by social medias in my voting decision, as I do not frequently visit them. However, as pointed out in class, lots of first time voters are being influenced today because of the popularity of these social medias.
Also, as a suggestion, it would be even better if you could add another question to be answered while doing your project: Does social media influence first time voters to vote?
That last questions is really strong – I think it fits snuggly under the umbrella of how first-time voters are influenced! Gonna add it to the post – Thanks William!
This is an interesting topic. You should look for some background reading that lays out how social media have changed electoral politics (we can recommend some stuff later in the week), and also try to develop a sense of how campaigns used the media before the Internet came on the scene.
Also– start saving and tagging every example you see. Collect collect collect collect.
I was also considering how collecting so many memes, gifs, posts, tweets can be hard – I know we tried to have a delicious account as a class and a twitter hash-tag, but is there another 3rd party tool that our group could use so we can all tag things we see that’s relevant and all be able to see what we tag?
Nice work, Group One (watch out, you better pick a better group name or the professors will come up with a name for you!).
My overall concern is that your questions do not have an explicit historical component. How has social media changed over time? This “change over time” piece is critical for historians. Whatever question you decide on, it will need to lead to examination of elections before 2012, and most likely include years before the services that you describe in the first question even existed. How can you adjust the question to factor in changes that happened during the 20th century?
As a next step, I recommend that you do some background reading, consulting secondary sources (journal articles, books, textbooks) to see how other historians have dealt with the role of social media. You may find that searching just for “social media,” and certainly when searching for specific tools like Facebook, fails to bring up historical pieces. In this case, you should open up your search terms so you catch earlier forms of social media.
Social Media, if taken literally could be anything from a bunch of people gathering around a TV or just ordinary gossip, right?
What are some sources you suggest for us to start digging to find some of this “old school” social media tools? I’m guessing we gotta look before Friendstr for this! 😉