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“The Facebook Election: New Media and the 2008 Election Campaign” Special Symposium

Some political observers dubbed the 2008 presidential campaign as the Facebook election. Barack Obama, in particular, employed Online SocialInteractive Media (OSIM) such as blogs, Twitter, Flickr, Digg, YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook to run a grassroots-style campaign. Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul similarly campaigned using OSIM technology in their organizing efforts. The Obama campaign was keenly aware that voters, particularly the young, are not simply consumers of information but conduits of information as well. They often replaced the professional filter of traditional media with a social one. OSIMs allowed candidates to do electronically what previously had to be done through shoe leather and phone banks: contact volunteers and donors, and schedule and promote events. OSIMs changed the way candidates campaigned, how the media covered the election, and how voters received information. In this special issue of Mass Communication and Society, we seek theoretically driven and empirically grounded manuscripts on the role of OSIMs in the 2008 election campaign. In particular, we seek submissions that explore the subject in one or several of the following ways: