Political Innovation – Blogosphere

With the increasing use of the internet and its increasing prevalence within our everyday lives, it would be rather detrimental if politics didn't include themselves within the sphere of 'blogging'. Not only does this form bring global recognition but more importantly – with this specific post – blogs are becoming a vehicle that produces a new communication sphere that does include political commentaries (Lim 2012, p.128).

The internet, specifically Web 2.0 (Bruns et al. 2011; Ritzer & Jurgenson 2010), is an innovative, non-traditional media form that appeals to the ‘internet generation’ (McCrindle, p.19). For example, Twitter has become a political platform that is used globally on a wide scale and is also used by people of various ages. More clearly, Twitter is seen as a ‘microblog’, being a “derivative or miniature version of a regular blog” because of its use of short comments (Larsson & Moe 2012, p.730).

This topic is quite important right now considering the campaigning for the Australian Election that is being held this week. Both the Liberal and Labor parties are making use of Twitter for their campaigns. According to Larsson and Moe (2012), blogs are essentially used as a “campaign gimmick” (p.732) but also as a means to engage with the wider public to “disseminate information” (p.732-33) given that Twitter only allows for 140 characters in its text box.

Aside from that, political blogging with Twitter as its media form provides “new opportunities for online campaigning and electorate engagement” (Larsson & Moe 2012, p. 730). This statement implies that the running leaders, for example, are embracing a new media form that fundamentally allows a broad scope of acknowledgement nationally.

Both the Labor and Liberal parties utilise Twitter to supply information about where they are, what they’re doing as well as information about their policies, tolls and what they aspire to contribute for the future.

Image Courtesy: Twitter

 Image Courtesy: Twitter

Moreover, through political blogging, particularly through Twitter, it enhances the citizens’ contribution with “political participation” (Lim 2012, p.129) as they are able to directly ‘tweet’ either opposition with their distinct thoughts. It’s a very valuable form of information because it especially appeals to a generation that is incredibly dependent on the internet. Political blogging provides a sense of humanity (I believe) because as citizens we're being given information that is coming straight from the sources (by their individual accounts).




References


Bruns A, Burgess J, Highfield T, Kirchhoff L and Nicolai T 2011, ‘Mapping the Australian Networked Public Sphere’, Social Science Computer Review, vol. 29, no. 3, pp. 277-87

Images: Screen shots of Twitter pages put together


Larsson A O, Moe H 2012, ‘Studying political microblogging: Twitter users in the 2010 Swedish election campaign’, New Media Society, vol. 14, no. 5, pp. 729-47


Lim, M 2012, ‘Life is Local in the Imagined Global Community: Islam and Politics in the Indonesian Blogosphere’, Journal of Media and Religion, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 127-40

McCrindle, Seriously Cool: Marketing and Communicating with diverse generations, p.19

Ritzer G, Jurgenson N 2010, 'Production, Consumption, Prosumption: The nature of capitalism in the age of the digital 'prosumer'', Journal of Consumer Culture, vol. 10 no. 1, pp. 13-36