Tag: pew

The Internet and the 2008 US election: participation and/or fragmentation?

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has just released a report on the role of the Internet in the 2008 US election, which analyses trends in how people consume political news & information and the ways they use the internet to engage with politics. Here are some of the key findings:

More than half  (55%) of the voting-age population has used the Internet to get involved in the political process during the election year (74% of Internet users).

The survey findings show that the Internet has become a paramount tool for people’s engagement in the political process, not only as a source of information (60% of Internet users have gone online to look for political information in 2008 compared to 22% in 1996), but as a tool for active participation. 18% of Internet users actively engaged online by posting comments on the campaign on online forums such as blogs or social networking sites and 45% watched online videos related to the campaign.

Young voters  (18-24 year olds) showed the highest levels of political involvement online. They engaged heavily in the political debate through social networking sites: two-thirds of young people with a social networking profile took part in some form of online political activity. Continue reading “The Internet and the 2008 US election: participation and/or fragmentation?”

The Internet is first source of campaign news for young Americans

The Pew Research Center for People and the Press has just released a new survey on the role of the Internet in the 2008 US campaign. The report shows that almost half (42%) of 18 to 29 year olds learns regularly about the campaign from the Internet, double the number in the 2004 campaign (20%). The age divide between young and older people in looking for campaign information online has also doubled since 2004 from 13 percentage points in 2004 to 27 percentage points in 2008 (it should be noted though that the proportion of 30 to 49 year olds and 50 year olds and older turning to the Internet has also grown since 2004, although not as dramatically as amongst 18 to 29 year olds – showing that the Internet is increasingly becoming a source of political information amongst the general population, even though it is still lagging behind TV and daily newspapers).

The Pew findings also show that traditional online news websites such as MSNBC, CNN and Yahoo remain the most visited sites for political information seeking, but amongst young people 37% of 18 to 24 year olds (and 27% of those younger than 30) have gotten campaign information from social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook (compared to 4% of those in their thirties and 1% of those 40 and older), showing how these online spaces have become an important space not only for entertainment but also for more civic minded activities. Two caveats, though….

…there’s a feeling amongst pundits and young people themselves (as many of the young people we interviewed for our Digital Natives project voiced) that membership in political groups on Facebook is so low cost that it is actually meaningless: joining a candidate’s group is like putting a bumber sticker of your favourite candidate on your car. But does this translate into actual offline participation/higher voting turnout? Also, Pew reports that 59% of web users under the age of 30 have come across campaign news online while they were actually looking for something else. Is this kind of exposure better than no exposure at all? Should we consider as political engagement only the one that is costly and face to face, like canvassing and campaigning door to door in the rain or is this exposure to online news a good starting point?

(cross-posted in Digital Natives blog)