Vice-President Joe Biden has joined Instagram, the photo and video sharing service with over 100 million users. His first photo, shown below, won high praise from the media.
Now, 24 hours later, he has over 50,000 followers. In addition to sharing his photographs, they are amplifying his presence by discussing him online (and off). Sample comments posted on his Instagram page include:
the vice-president’s first picture is epic
Love the Ray-Ban aviators, sir!
Cool VP
Biden’s stepped-up social media presence indicates the first of many strategic moves to come from the Democratic Party as they prepare for 2016.
Social media is a transformational communications tool. It enables anyone to broadcast a message to the global community free, easily and instantly. That makes it an empowering agent of change.
If you are interested in a topic and have a social media monitoring system in place, you can follow nearly everything that is said about a topic in real time – and participate in the conversation. (I say “nearly” because no monitoring system is infallible.)
The influence of social media on public opinion cannot be overemphasized. It is also changing the power balance in the Hollywood industry, as this article about the rush among celebrities to hire social media managers suggests. (The more followers a star has, the more fans, hence more negotiating power.)
Social media an important human rights tool
As the Arab Spring uprising showed, social media may be one of the most important human rights tools of our time. Yesterday, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (GC) confirmed that when it announced that the Ford Foundation has enabled GC to launch JustPublics@365. The initiative will bring together journalists, academics, activists and policy advocates who are working to address social inequality — economic, housing, race and ethnicity, immigration, health, and education — through digital media. The program’s first Summit will be held at the GC on Thursday, March 6, 2013.
Coincidentally, Amnesty International executive director, Suzanne Nossel, has called on President Obama to use his second term to advance human rights and dignity, starting with restoring the United States’ own credibility on human rights issues.
Online technology fueled the Obama campaign win, reports Steve Lohr. Customized open source software and cloud computing enabled volunteers to work at their own pace and in their own neighborhoods — without needing to travel to a campaign office. It enabled voters to be identified by precisely assessed data mining. Those are just two reasons why the Obama technology team deserve accolades.
“Often the profiles of volunteer callers and the lists they received were matched,” writes Lohr. “So the callers were people with similar life experiences to those being called, and thus more likely to be persuasive.”
Open source software is free and available to anyone online. Because cloud computing stores data on the internet rather than on any one computer, it makes files available to anyone, anywhere, on any platform they use: smart phones, IPADS and home computers.
The tools and techniques utilized by the Obama technology engineers are promising because they can be adapted in campaigns everywhere: not only in politics but to raise attention for human rights and other issues that affect global civilization. Our hats are off to them.
