Slashdot Mirror
Social Sites Offer 'New' Way To Experience Presidential Debates
News.com notes that the social sites have been burning up in the wake of the debates, as users create more content than it's possible to follow. Facebook specifically set up an area for debate viewers to post messages and take surveys during the events. Some participants found it a bit worthless, and the article refers to the experience as 'information overload'. "No doubt, the political twitterers must've felt empowered to know their Soundboard comments were being beamed out to an audience of potentially millions of Facebook users, and, if plucked by ABC's designated Facebook-monitoring reporter on TV, millions of offline viewers as well. Still, it's a little unclear whether the comments will prove all that useful for campaigns looking to boost their candidates' standing."
Presidential debates rage over whether a steaming mug of frosty piss is better served chilled. Have your say now!
What percentage of voters are affected by Social Networking sites? What percentage of the MySpace, Facebook and YouTube audience are old enough to actually vote? My guess is the answer to both these questions are relatively low numbers.
/. firehose on any given day. Mercifully, they don't usually make the front page.
I'm thinking is that this is a one-time phenomenon. By the time of the next election MySpace and Facebook will probably be oh-so-yesterday. Though I understand the candidates need to appear new-fangled and not miss out on new channels -- especially free ones.
The average Fox News viewer isn't affected by this at all -- though (sadly) they sure can affect the vote.
I'm also thinking that the Paultards rabid activities are actually counteractive. They are much worse than spammers. There's even on average five or so Paultard spamvert articles in the
If only anybody cared about presidential debates...
At Christmas I was talking to my grandfather about the 1930s. He was mentioning how much American politiking has changed since then. In particular, he talked about how the candidates then didn't have the huge teams that they do today. The politicians themselves did much of the grunt work, and interacted directly with the voters.
One thing he said is that it made the politicians seem more real. These days, a normal American citizen would have very little chance of meeting face-to-face with their representatives, especially at the higher levels of government. But in those days, such meetings were quite easy to arrange, especially before an election. He recalled meeting with one candidate for office. During their meeting, the candidate got a bad case of diarrhea. He told me grandfather straight out, "I'm about to shit my pants full of liquid. Excuse me." So my grandfather did, and was so impressed by this candidate's honesty that he voted for him.
I just don't think we'll ever see something like that from a politician today. And with YouTube being an outlet for embarassing videos, politicians today seem less likely than ever to appear at non-scripted events.
Facebookers opined that Hillary Clinton is "onto Barack like a Rottweiler" one moment and "has about as much experience and common sense as an avacado [sic]" the next. Ron Paul is a "looney" to some, but "the only one who understands economics" and "the only logical and realistic choice," to others.
So, put it that way, people say anything and its opposite about candidates, and we hardly have any way to quantify what they think as a whole. So we can (pretty much) qualify what people think but not quantify. Sounds like a problem.
Here's what I wish would exist on the web, sort of polls in which no poll choices would be defined by the poll creator, but would emerge from what people say. I'm going to use TFA's Mitt Romney example to illustrate the idea : "Mitt Romney, who arguably endured the largest share of attacks during the Republican debate, drew mixed reviews: everything from "the only one who understands insurance," "looks younger than 60," to "is getting creamed," and "lost this debate.""
Basically, from such a polling system's user input would emerge dominating trends, for example "Only Romney understands insurance", "Romney lost the debate", "Romney looks young", and people's input would be categorised under these self-grouping ideas and thus you could both qualify and quantify at the same time what people think and agree on.
Unfortunately the "grouping user input into a few categories" thing might be the difficult part.
You just got troll'd!
There is no way the poster is intelligent enough to type. Clearly though logging on was too challenging.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I agree, the country is in a sad state of affairs when the citizens believe that race or sex has anything to do with a person's ability to reason or make sound decisions. Please go back to the Klan and let the people with intelligence make the choices.
Just as a side note, I am a white male.
This won't make much of a difference this election. However, when the votes are in, the stats are made and the candidates see what demographics voted for who and why... there will be significant changes in future campaigns. See Ron Paul with a stranglehold on digg and Barack Obama with a significant group of young voters coming out to vote. This is new and different.
The more u.s. politics can extend into the younger audiences, the more likely college students will get out to vote, changing the face of politics... This is a good thing... I think if the younger groups were active 8 years ago, we wouldn't have seen kerry as a candidate and wouldn't have seen bush as a president.
I saw that last time I checked to see if I got an message from Ms. Mount Holyoke but I thought I would rather be bitten by a vampire
Added Pressly: "Oh, and by the way, milk is nothing but liquid meat."
I thought the median-age facebook member was still in middle school..
Well, perhaps it's worth noting that in 1932 only about 33 million people voted in the Presidential election, while in 2004 the figure was closer to 110 million. Takes a bigger organization, with more layers, to reach four times as many people.
More importantly, in the 1930s many people tended to get their voting patterns from local organizations that more or less owned their vote, e.g. unions and "machines." FDR worried quite a bit about keeping the "machine" and union boss vote. Harry Truman was selected as his veep in part to get that vote (Truman was widely understood to be the protege of the Pendergast Kansas City machine). He more or less dumped his much more intellectual (and socialist) former veep Henry Wallace, who was more in tune with him (and arguably the country) on the "issues."
So the amount of actual true personal interaction required -- which might usefully be deployed to change someone's mind, whose vote wasn't already "owned" -- was pretty modest in the 30s. To put it another way, there were a lot fewer voters who had the option to vote as they pleased, and it took a lot less personal effort to reach them. You'd really only need to reach the bosses, the key players, those who could tell fleets of other people how to vote.
Today's elections are far more direct candidate-to-citizen appeals. Machines and union endorsements hardly matter at all; people tend to make up their own minds independently, and directly from what they see and hear on the tube. To reach 110 million voters directly requires, indeed, a massive, tightly controlled communications heirarchy. And, not surprisingly, the average amount of personal time the candidate can give to each of 110 million totally independent voters is measured in microseconds.
It's called "Watch the debate with other people, turn your head and talk to them" - social site just offer the ability to talk to people who can't spell.
http://timcol6.freehostia.com/
Basically, that sounds like Slashdot tags, but with a little more information about how many people actually tagged a candidate that. I figure that something like that would really confuse some people.
:]
I mean, what would the media think if someone like Hillary Clinton got tagged "mafiaa"?
I noticed the new "Debate" feature on Facebook the other day and decided to take a look. In my opinion, this feature would be a lot more useful if it had been released two or three years ago when Facebook was just college students and the level of discourse was much more civilized. Now that Facebook is open to anyone, the debate goes to the lowest common denominator, so it's about as much fun as reading Youtube comments.
You obviously haven't read your history.
And you've got a very strange definition of "successful government".
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
YoutUbe comments Are Very Fun to Read you fucker!!1!
screw the front runners. they don't represent you.
Good thing we'll always have high quality thoughtful deep comments to read on Slashdot.
You obviously didn't understand yours, and the fact that you lamely linked to a generic Wikipedia article rather than attempting to state a point proves it.
Rome didn't have enough nukes to destroy the globe, and the US government (an evolution of the triumvirate model) is far more advanced in terms of legal and philosophical underpinnings.
And really, the fact that it isn't Rome is what makes the USA so special. Rome burned itself out expending all its military power to overthrow the world. The USA is a benevolent superpower. Should the US actually strive to become what its noisy detractors claim it already is, and follow the Roman model, it could and would take over the entire world and rule it.
That's what doomsday power affords you, and it's the key that all previous megalomaniacs lacked. The US possesses it, but shows Stoic restraint.
The US is powerful, rich, socially stable, innovative, fat and happy. It's recognized around the world as the place you go to follow your dreams. It truly is the land of opportunity. Only jaded U.S. liberals and Eurotrash disagree.
I don't know what your definition of "powerful" is, but I would venture to guess that if pitted against one another militarily, the USA would kick the Roman Empire's ass. Tanks, fighter jets and bombers, GPS targetting, guns, automatic rifles, napalm, nukes, satellite tracking, unmanned aerial surveillance, night-vision, radio communication, radar, guided and long-distance missiles .... the Romans wouldn't stand a chance. In terms of land area and population the USA is also MUCH larger than the Roman Empire was even at its peak. The USA has also seen more technical innovation and scientific progress over its much shorter lifespan than was seen under the Roman Empire. We cannot compare duration of existence because we don't know long the USA will continue to exist.
So by what measure are you comparing?
The Roman Empire also happens to be a poor champion of your underlying point, given its patriachal nature, discrimination of women etc. Under Roman Law, the man (and btw, they were white) was the head of a household and family, and was accordingly granted much power in this role that is unthinkable today - for example, for much of Roman history, it was even legal for a man to kill his wife or children. So another powerful patriarchal white male society actually would seem to reinforce the GP's point rather than rebuke it.
Somewhat like the link in my sig.?
-metric
Now that Facebook is open to anyone, the debate goes to the lowest common denominator
I'm sure it doesn't help that the demographic is wide open, but there's unfortunately very few forums anywhere I've seen that don't tend that way. You have to start with a critical mass of well-informed, thoughtful people who have a minimum of axes to grind... and even then, you'll see outbreaks of simplistic thinking, petty attacks, and trolling. College students are a half-decent bet, but since a good number of them are still basically adolescents, it's no guarantee.
In particular, though, I think Facebook has a specific problem that's bigger than the open demographic: the UI and culture both seem to encourage lots of little soundbite/bumper sticker expressions. Substantial and nuanced stuff just doesn't emerge in that circumstance, for some of the same reasons it doesn't emerge in political advertising or nightly news coverage.
Tweet, tweet.
for much of Roman history, it was even legal for a man to kill his wife or children.
Sadly, in many places in the world today, a man killing his wife or children is likely to get a slap on the wrist at most, if the wife or child "dishonored" the family.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Here's what I wish would exist on the web: Empirical data and the dissemination thereof. This whole "web as a social tool" is simply turning into another leash like television, where we get to be inundated with ads and the same bullshit we're spoon fed on TV, in the newspaper, magazines, billboards (well I don't have cable and conveniently have no local reception at my house).
They aren't viewing the web a new useful tool just another way to slap their mantra all over everything to swing the tools out there who don't realize the Republicrats are the same party.
I really don't want any more opinion polls, exit polls, or overly broad trite bullshit being put all over the web. Too bad we're already fucked. What's worse is the "nerd" crowd seems to be reveling in it because now they're little clique-y thing is just as hip and cool as football games were.
I want to qualify people's opinions through the election of candidates that will actually do something. Not by "Do you think Fred Thompson looked tired and puffy eyed?" Why do you want to even try to "qualify" that crap ("Romney looks young") as a useful opinion?
No sig for you!!
and i might add to that "dishonoring" falls under shit like not wearing that fucked head gear.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Thats Interesting but I think sites like this one: Politicalsocial.com seem to be more focused on bringing news, and long term information. They might stay around for a while.
Presidential campaigns are not the time for people to be "sounding off." Presidential campaigns are the time for LISTENING! Opining on any site about a political campaign is pointless, if not counterproductive. I watch the debates to determine for whom I should vote. Unless people can ask a direct question to a candidate, they should keep their hands off the keyboard and their mouths closed. I am not interested in a person's opinion on the race unless that person is part of a scientific poll or focus group. Besides, I doubt that the social networking sites are populated by the great political minds of our time.
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http://www.ronpaulwarroom.com/?p=375#comment-889
AND THIS:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=informationhighwayma
RR
so facebook is owned by microsoft...... facebook spies on what you do and what purchases you make and displays them for everyone to see..... facebook is doing government advertising....... and its favored by slashdot?! Im confused......
The guys that cut Kucinich out of the debate. Surely to prevent any "information overload" that might divert public attention away from the front runners of their choosing. All before the very first primary. I would hope that there will be noise about that on the social sites.
What?
Don't blame me, I voted for non-chilled.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
Ironically, I often wish other sites had Slashdot type moderation.
expandfairuse.org
The VoteMatch site (http://eenvandaag.nl/index.php?module=PX_Story&type=user&func=view&cid=465) determines your political preference through statements from the largest democratic and republican candidates taking part in the preliminary US presidency elections. You can answer the statements by clicking on agree, disagree or don't know. You can add extra weight to any statements you find especially important. In a separate screen you can choose which candidates you would like to include in your result calculation. In the result screen you can see the candidate you agree with most. In descending order you can how the other candidates match your preference. Next to it, you can also see the other candidates' opinions on the statements and can click on for an explanation. Helps you to vote on content in stead of a pretty face.
Maybe peeked or seen sound bytes on the network news. Seems to be a lot of hoopla about something no ones ever seen. Dead silence when Jay Leno asks the audience to clap if they've watchone of the 24 debates.
Sure - maybe this is a good thing... or just more of the same. I mean these debates are on television, radio, hell they're probably broadcasted in morse code. The fact of the matter is as sad as it might sound, the large majority of young Americans simply aren't interested in these presidential debates. This is evident in voting percentages from the following years. Why would anyone think a debate through a social networking site will change this.
Quite frankly, in my opinion, I think just about everything to stress the importance of voting that can be done, has been done. We can drag these people out of their homes if need be, but the facts remain, I'd rather someone who choses to remain ignorant of the issues not vote at all.
OT I know, but your story about political diarrhea reminded me. Did anyone else see what they were calling the debates "Two Parties, One Night" and immediately think 2 girls 1 cup? Politicians shitting out their rhetoric and the press eating it up while the candidates continued to vomit into eachother's mouths. Sorry, now you can continue with your discussion of a less disgusting "new experience" of the debates thanks to the internet, I just wanted to share mine.