Journal Entry 3

Politicians, Forums and Social Networking:
As you may or not be aware at the moment there is a general election coming up quite soon in early may. As a result of this the politicians of the major and fringe parties are trying to get as many as votes as they possibly can but to do this they will need to spread their policies around the country as quickly and as effectively as they possibly can. One way that fits these criteria for politicians is the use of social networking websites in terms of the supporters of the parties acting almost on their behalf. The politicians put certain policies up for the public to look at and compare to other political parties. As a result from this, there are many forums created by people who are followers of one of the political parties and trying to make people convert to their particular political views or try to persuade people who are undecided on who to vote for.
This allows the politicians to view any polls that are going on at any particular time on the internet and to see how they are doing at any particular time in comparison to the others parties. There are also newspaper polls, by which members of the public vote in numerous ways. Newspapers usually tend to favour one of the political parties and express their opinions within the newspaper and also try to persuade the readers of that certain newspaper. This could mean that people knowing the views of a newspaper may buy or not buy it because of this. For instance, ‘The Sun’ now favours the conservatives, whereas it used to favour the labour party. However, with recent trends it shows that labour are on the decrease in terms of popularity, ‘The Sun’ perhaps realised this and switched its views.
This links in with what we have been looking by linking two aspects together. One of which is forums and social networking, the other is the use of digital media to as it was ‘spread the news’. Many years ago politicians did not have this privilege that they have today. As there was not that many ways apart from newspapers and radio to express their policies to the majority of the public they perhaps could not get to as many of the votes as they wanted because of lack of opportunity. Also compared to the past I have noticed that politics is in every type of media form and is quite a big talking point when there is a general election, even on sport programmes politics is mentioned.
Moving on to what I might do in the future regarding politics. If I supported a particular party then I would more than likely try to get others to see my point of view and vote for the party that I was voting for. From my experiences, regarding how politicians use social networking as a form of free labour almost, these forms of digital media obviously help them when it comes to elections and persuasion.