As the results of the U.S. presidential election hit the nation on the evening of November 4^th, it led many to analyze the strategy and effectiveness behind the winner’s campaign. Undeniably, the Internet was an influential force in this historic race, and has become a part of the evolution of mass media’s role in politics.

It began with families huddled over the radio listening to FDR’s Fireside Chats in the 1930s. Then came the Age of Television, when the famous 1960 debate of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon was heavily influenced by the visual juxtaposition of the candidates. Those that may have been positively impacted by Nixon’s radio speech had a very different effect from the televised debates, where Kennedy’s photogenic look appealed to the masses.

And now we are in the Age of the Internet, where the viral power of the Web has enabled mass political messages to be heard through a plethora of outlets.

As the Clickz.com article title states, Web ads mattered more than ever in the 2008 election. From candidate fan pages on Facebook, to Obama and McCain profiles on MySpace, to personalized YouTube video messages, the Internet is an extremely pervasive medium for reaching the national and global audience in the political sphere.

It is also evident that Obama’s strategic online social network presence may have significantly aided him not only in fundraising, but in uniting his supporters and reaching out to younger, more tech savvy voters.

As NPR’s Scott Simon spoke with Techpresident.com co-founder Micah Sifry, predictions are being unveiled about Obama’s online presence now that he is President-elect. Check out the interview podcast!

So, can we still expect emails signed “Barack”?

 

Capitol Hill in Second Life continues to draw visitors from around the world interested in the political season. In addition to the twitter display I added a couple weeks ago, I’ve added an electoral map that shows most recent polling on a state-by-state basis.

The technology behind it is interesting. I had originally created a display that would be used on election night, with states called and updated manually. I was looking for a site with live feed of current polling data to feed the display prior to the election, and Leon suggested looking at a scraping web service, Dapper.net, that might be useful. Dapper’s library of scraping scripts included one for RealClearPolitics.com that was easy to hook up to the board (via a PHP intermediary I wrote to turn Dapper’s JSON output into a LSL-consumable feed).  However, the page on realclearpolitics.com that Dapper was scraping only had 37 of the states, which made for a fairly impoverished display.

Although I like the realclearpolitics.com methodology for a weighted average poll-of-polls, I looked for a site with all states, and found USAElectionPolls.com Though this site seems to feed out only the one latest poll it finds for each state, and not a weighted average of polls, it does give a complete set. Dapper was very easy to use to create a scrape of the site to output the data as JSON.

I may channel my inner Brokaw and use the map in manual mode on election night, or I might challenge myself to quickly find a site that can be Dapper-scraped and feed the board automatically.

Why does this matter?
Why do you need a display like this in Second Life when you can go to dozens of web sites with electoral maps?  I believe that the strength of an immersive session in a virtual world is enhanced by the continuity of the immersion. Even though Second Life now supports both an in-application web browser window and web content displayed on the surface of objects in Second Life, having an interactive display that can be manipulated by an avatar means you don’t have to shift back and forth from the perspective of the avatar to the perspective of a web-surfer.