Post by account_disabled on Mar 6, 2024 3:43:42 GMT
The Obama phenomenon (fan) starts before the electoral victory. The degree of importance of this person can be measured through a simple Google search. On November 16, 2008, the name George Bush produced a not inconsiderable amount of 41,000,000 results after eight years in office, but according to the search engine Barack Obama it is already present on web pages. In the few months that have passed since Obama's candidacy by the Democrats, he has achieved the involvement of millions of people in the United States (and in many parts of the world, such as Kenya and Indonesia). His figure reached great levels of relevance in the American political landscape at the Democratic Party convention in Boston in 2004; There he advocated closing racial wounds with the following phrases: "there is not a white USA and a black USA, but the United States of America", and he opted for hope, "that of the slaves singing songs of freedom in front of the fire." , that of immigrants who set out for distant shores”… usa flag As the months passed, he gained the support of millions of people.
He even enlisted the support of prominent members of the Republican party such as Colin Powell and former White House press secretary Scott McClellan, who affirmed that Obama had the will and ability to forge a broad political consensus. But the key was those millions of anonymous people who made small donations that, added together, have broken all fundraising records in an American political campaign. Furthermore, this strategy based fundamentally on web pages equipped with images and multimedia has created a true social network of fans inspired by virtual communities such as Facebook Industry Email List or MySpace. In fact, one of Facebook's four founders, Chris Hughes, left the company to join Obama's team. The place of television as the prevailing means of communication, Obama has also (especially) relied on the Internet to communicate with more people and in a faster and two-way way. Some of these social networks had up to a million members, who saw in these mechanisms a more personal interaction where the candidate spoke to them face to face. And the media, especially the Internet, have allowed Obama to build “a new type of intimacy” where reciprocity is not level.
For example, Obama fans appreciated that it seemed like the candidate personally answered dozens of emails, although the reality is that at big events he always made express reference to specific people in the neighborhood who worked with him. As Thopmson describes, “today we live in a world in which the capacity to experience is disconnected from the activity of encounter” (THOMPSON, 1998: 271). The objective was to create a certain feeling of belonging to a community, something that enhances the feelings of the fans. On both the social network MySpace and Facebook, candidate Obama had double the number of contacts than Republican John McCain. The importance of this large number of fans is vital if we take into account that in the United States fundraising is extremely regulated and each person can make a donation of up to $4,400. Furthermore, everything must be registered and be in the public domain. The social media strategy allowed numerous donations to be made easily through the Internet through credit cards with small amounts starting at $15 per month. Additionally, these small donations more powerfully link people to the Democratic campaign.