Importance of the Internet in Obama´s presidential campaign

In my previous posts there has been a common fact: the importance that Internet and new technologies have nowadays in pretty much any field that I can think of.

This time I would like to focus on politics, because I have just done a project related to cyberactivism, and my group and I decided to talk about the importance of the Internet in Obama’s campaign when he was running for president back in 2008. While doing some research I found out quite some interesting things.

As Kennedy did in 1960, when he used television for the first time in a political campaign, Obama obtained a great advantage from his newfangled usage of the Internet. He was able to reach an important percentage of the young population through social networks such as facebook or twitter, where he got (and still has) many followers; benefited of WebPages like Youtube in order to upload videos of his speeches, so people could watch them whenever they wanted, with no cuts, and had the possibility of sharing them with others through email and social networks; and saved a lot of money in advertising. He also took advantage of it for fundraising, allowing people to donate money for the campaign through the party’s website, in an easy and fast way, and avoided hiring many people for the various tasks that need to be carried out in an ordinary political campaign.

But this has created a wide range of opinions about if he would have won the elections without the Internet. From my point of view, there were more things taking place besides that; Obama is a great speaker, who knew how to reach important parts of the American population such as lower-classed or the young ones, with great ideas that would turn the United States into a much better, fairer and open-minded country (not saying that it was not good, fair and open-minded until that moment). Another thing that in my opinion also favoured him a lot was being surrounded of a great team, whom helped him building a nice campaign that was well organized from the beginning and had a clear slogan.

I would like to know what you think and what your opinion about this is. Do you think phenomena like this could take place in another country´s election, like for example Spain?

Remember that we can learn many things just from a little bit of feedback!