Assignment 9: Internet Politics

The title of the political blog I researched is Bloghillary and the URL is http://blog.hillaryclinton.com/. The blog was written by Kate Sokolov and her picture is presented with all of her posts. She uses no pseudonym and her occupation would be considered a citizen blogger. Kate Sokolov’s blog was created in June of 2008 in reaction to a letter sent by Hillary to all of her supporters. This blog has no technorati rank; there were no comments to the posts I viewed and no links.
Kate Sokolov is clearly a large supporter of Hillary, as to all her posts are a positive liking of Hillary. Unfortunately she is receiving no feedback from outside sources on her posts. The tone of this blog is rather upbeat and Kate Sokolov is completely behind the Democratic Party. She keeps up with her posts to almost every other day about Hillary’s whereabouts, what she is accomplishing, and what she wants to. Even though she supports Hillary and she is no longer on the ballet, most of the posts focus on Hillary in an indirect way through using Hillary’s advice and ideas to help the Democratic Party and Obama. Kate Sokolov also posts several videos and news stories on Hillary to help back up her positive posts. On Kate Sokolovo’s blog, there are links to click on if you want to help contribute to Hillary and join the team.
I think that on a whole blogs do affect local politics, they provide both positive and negative feedback and being able to comment on blogs provide even more insight for many political blogs. According to a study, “46% of Americans have used the internet to get political news and share their thoughts on the campaign…” (Smith & Rainie, 2008). People have a need to find out what they don’t know so they have a tendency to research a topic. The internet makes it easy and it provides a way for people to communicate. If a person reads a blog post they agree or disagree with and would like some feedback they could comment on the post. If a person were to comment on one of the posts from the Hillary site that I researched, because the writer is an involved Hillary supporter a person may be provided feedback that would be quite accurate rather than if it was a Hillary supporter that wasn’t involved in Hillary’s support groups.
However, the article The Internet and Power in One-Party East Asian States, they make an excellent point that allowing people access to information and being involved in platforms for discussion can help politically empower populations but could threaten regimes (Hachigan, 2002). I think the same could be said for local politics here in New York. Having people being able to blog and comment on politics empowers them to a degree and depending on the politicians actions in campaigning the feedback provided by blogs it could influence people’s opinions. I thinks its possible that if many people are influenced it may harm certain politicians campaigns with the information that are provided in blogs.

References:

Smith, Aaron & Rainie, Lee. Pew Internet. 2008. The 2008 Election. Retrieved from: http://www.pewinternet.org.

Hachigan, Nina. 2002. The Internet and Power in One-Party East Asian States. Retrieved from: https://ublearns.buffalo.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_id=_2_1&url=%2fwebapps%2fblackboard%2fexecute%2flauncher%3ftype%3dCourse%26id%3d_61661_1%26url%3d.