I’ve spent most of this summer in another country, so Internet news and social media are the primary ways election advertising has been reaching me—or not. And here’s the thing: you can find anything you want on the Internet, and a lot of things you don’t, but you can also tune out most of what’s out there, unless you want to hear it. In Oxford, I don’t have a TV and I do have a lot of homework, so I haven’t been getting much American news. I have quite a few e-mails from Obama’s team sitting guiltily unread in my inbox; I see their messages on my Facebook wall. I read the articles my friends post. But Facebook is neither as smart nor as inclusive as it could be, and this tends to cut to everyone’s disadvantage.
Recently, I learned that Facebook can allegedly figure out your political leanings by counting the number of times you click on “conservative” pages your friends post as opposed to “liberal” pages, and then precedes to put the political posts of the “side” it thinks you disagree with farther down your newsfeed, so you’re less likely to see them…which cuts down on the opportunity for healthy debate and discussion and asking genuine questions about other views. What it doesn’t seem able to figure out is how to do this in the ad bar, and I can tell you, I appreciate much much more seeing an interesting conservative article or viewpoint expressed by a friend whose thoughts I value than a “Hate Obama? Blergh blergh blergh SOCIALISM!” ad on my sidebar. Again. You’d think because I’m subscribed to Obama’s campaign page, they’d be able to figure out that showing me Romney ads of any kind, and especially anti-Obama ads, is more likely to piss me off than make me change sides, but it’s their money, so I guess it’s their prerogative…it’s just not very effective.
The point is that simply because the information is available on the Internet doesn’t mean people are accessing it. Signing up for an e-mail list or a Facebook page is easy, but it doesn’t mean people are reading the e-mails or going to the page. It’s surprisingly simple to isolate oneself within a bubble on the Internet—and things like Facebook secretly hiding your friends’ opposing views make it hard to know whether or not you’ve insulated yourself, and to what degree. My father also posts an unusual number of political articles on Facebook and Twitter, so I’m probably also seeing more political news, even slanted toward my own views, than other people—but again, it’s almost impossible to figure out how much information you’re not getting online.
I think Obama’s use of social media works best on Facebook: quick bytes of information, mostly things the President has accomplished or the personal story of someone who will be helped by the Affordable Care Act or who has been hurt by a policy Romney endorses, in a brief paragraph accompanied by an image and a link to more. It’s quick, easily skimmable while scrolling down one’s newsfeed, and makes its point succinctly—and it’s exactly the length and depth of information most people want to read. It also serves as a reminder of the proximity of the election, which hopefully reminds people to register to vote—and then actually vote.
What’s not working well for him is the e-mails; we all know Joe Biden, Michelle Obama, and Hillary Clinton aren’t really our friends, and while I understand the desire to make each voter feel important, ugh. Doesn’t work for me, and I usually won’t open the e-mail unless the subject line discusses something particularly interesting. Opening an e-mail, reading the often less than eloquent text it contains, and doing what it tells you to do is a lot of work for the average person to put into receiving a message; this is why I think the Facebook brief information/picture/link option works well. It also has “like” and “share” buttons built in, which spreads the message quickly to the friends of each person subscribed to the Obama campaign’s page. Much simpler. Also, the e-mails often come with downer headlines—in my inbox right now are “Romney defeats Obama?” and, from the President on his birthday, “This birthday could be the last one I celebrate in the White House.” Who wants to read that e-mail? I, for one, don’t; I think most people engaged enough in the campaign to have signed up for a candidate’s e-mails are aware of the closeness of the race and feel a sense of urgency about the situation—otherwise, they wouldn’t be actively campaigning for one or the other, would they?
I think most people my age feel the same: we’re sick and tired of bad news. We know the score, we feel that this election is high-stakes no matter which side we’re on, we’re probably angry/annoyed with both of the candidates for some reason, though we’re likely to prefer one over the other anyway, and, frankly, we aren’t sure we care about the candidates’ problems. I mean, sure, one of them isn’t going to get the job, but it’s not like either is going to be unemployed. Basically, reading even the subject line of most of these e-mails makes me preemptively exhausted and burnt out.
So…sorry, but instead of reading your e-mail, I’m going to send another resume out, or spend some more time studying for the GRE and the LSAT, or sell my soul to the Devil to pay for grad school instead of writing my thesis on Doctor Faustus because his seven bajillion degrees probably cost, like, 5 dollars in 15th century Germany… but despair is, as his tragedy tells us, the unforgivable sin; despair begets apathy, or is begotten of it. So apathy is what we must avoid, which doesn’t mean read every e-mail from whichever, if any, campaign, you subscribe to; it means glancing at the political messages your friends post on Facebook, reading the articles linked to on Twitter, searching up articles on each candidate on your own (and posting those that teach you something for your friends to see, if you find the information useful or important, the facts animating and urgent). All the social media in the world counts for nothing if, in November, you don’t rejoin the world of the real and cast the vote so worked for, so deliberated through, so predicated on the information found in the virtual world. Pressing a button or putting pen to paper in the reality of the voting booth is still the most important thing. If social media serves to remind us of that necessity, it is doing its job, whichever box we check on Election Day—so long as it draws us out of, rather than pens us into, our comfortable Facebook bubbles.
