It seems like everyone today is a political analyst. With everyone posting their opinions about debates, the election and the candidates on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites, it’s hard to believe that the percentage of voters hasn’t increased since 2000. On average only 55 percent of Americans vote in elections. In the last three presidential elections the average hasn’t changed significantly, even with the election of 2008 which was fondly dubbed “the beginning of new media.”
Despite these facts, we are still under the misconception that the increase in social media has made us all more politically aware. It’s not only citizens either. Even our candidates are aiming their resources toward enhancing their social media profiles. For example, Obama has over 21 million twitter followers and 32 million “likes” on Facebook. Romney on the other hand has 12 million “likes” on Facebook and about 2 million twitter followers. While this disparity could be largely due to the fact that Obama has been in the social media game longer, some people use this as an indication of more people getting involved in our country’s political process.
This election has been the most expensive with campaigns spending about $500 million dollars. Of this amount, Obama spent $52 million on social media and Romney spent close to $27 million. With all this spending, why aren’t more people voting and why do we still have instances where people are googling: “Who is running for president?” on election day?
I have two theories for this. One pertains to the knowledge gap hypothesis, a theory that explains that the distribution of knowledge is similar to the distribution of wealth in society. This means that wealthier citizens who are often already informed are most involved in social media and will receive the information that the candidates put out. According to a wikipedia summary, “as the infusion of mass media information into a social system increases, segments of the population with higher socioeconomic status tend to acquire this information at a faster rate than the lower status segments so that the gap in knowledge between these segments tends to increase rather than decrease.” If the same people are receiving the same information then how can we say that more people are being informed. Just as we at Princeton are in the orange bubble, campaigns are beginning to operate in a bubble of their own. The second part of this theory is well-stated in this Atlantic article by Zeynep Tufekci. She states, “the internet is not the problem; global citizen disempowerment is. It’s not the technology that is failing politics but it is our politics that has failed.” This statement is now more true than ever. While the internet provides the opportunity for interactive discourse between citizens, news sources and candidates, it does not necessarily mean that we are any more informed.
Even though the internet allows for greater fact checking and diverse discourse there is still the opportunity for information to be skewed and unless you are committed to following something as huge as the election, misinformation is still a possible.