Third Place
2009 PENN STATE ESSAY CONTEST
Corinna Munn
The Internet as the Voice of the People
Imagine a house without a foundation. An airplane without its engines would work just as well, or an election without the voters. That would be a democracy without the demos: a government of the people, for the people, by the people, without the people. A democracy,
America’s cherished and championed form of government is literally ruled by the people. For a country with such a diverse history of struggles for universal voting rights, however, interest in elections and voter turnout, especially among the younger demographic, has been woefully low in recent years. Now, it seems that politicians have finally struck gold on where to reach their constituents: the Internet. The Internet, and especially social networking sites, is frequented every day by the “common people” who supposedly make our government run, and especially teens and young adults who have a whole life’s worth of elections ahead of them. The use of social networking sites to gain support for political campaigns will be ultimately beneficial to politics as a reinvigorating force of democracy since the Internet provides a level playing field for every voter, alongside the big money constituents and professional campaign advisers who usually run the show.
The Internet allows politicians to reach a wide demographic on “home turf” of the voters.
Millions of Facebook and MySpace users feel comfortable organizing events and groups which would be impossible to organize in any other way. With the click of a mouse, 100, 200, or over
300 people can be invited to a virtual group or a rally taking place in the “real world.” The people who receive the invitations will suddenly have more information available to them, and will have the opportunity to spread the word to their own friends in ways they might not have realized were possible. As a Facebook user, I receive a new invitation to some sort of boycott or protest almost every time I log into the site. Without Facebook, I’m sure I would never have found out about any of those events. The effectiveness of online organizing has been proven by the success of Barack Obama’s online campaign. The winning candidate was the one with the overwhelming online support; his group “One Million Strong for Barack Obama” was far more popular than other candidates’ groups, and on election day I saw countless status updates reading
“So-and-so is getting the vote out for Barack Obama!”, which was an automatic update any
Facebook user could sign up for. The profile updates were not the creation of Obama’s campaign, however; it was an application created by an ordinary Facebook user. Similarly,
Youtube was an effective tool for campaigning. While television time is too expensive for the average citizen to buy, anyone with access to a computer can upload or watch a Youtube video.
The most popular political advertisements on Youtube get as much viewing as the ads run on television by the rich organizations supporting a candidate. The majority of these Youtube and
Facebook users are young voters, and having their virtual worlds permeated by politics is bound to rouse their interest. On November fourth, that held true; the election had the highest turnout in decades, including among the younger demographic, and Barack Obama won by a wider margin than is usually seen in presidential elections.

Like any good thing, the shiny and attractive Internet coin is two-sided. The Internet can be used to spread misinformation, and politicians can’t afford to forget the power of face-to-face persuasion. People aren’t going to be won over by an invitation to a Facebook group. That’s not what online organization is aiming for, though. Its effectiveness lies in unifying the base and getting out the vote. In an election which will determine the direction of the country and even the world for at least four years, and in which a fifty percent turnout is decent and a few thousand votes can swing the results either way, every vote is vitally important. People cannot afford to think “everybody else will vote, I don’t need to because I’m just one person.” That’s not how a democracy works. If this election is to serve as a precedent, social networking has an undeniably permanent place in the future of politics as the voice of the people, and it will be for the better.