Social Media, Spreadable Media, and the Political Atmosphere

     A study published two years ago by the Pew Research Center shows that there has been a huge increase in the amount of older people that follow political figures and their campaigns on social media. Campaigns are being transformed digitally, just as the rest of the world is adapting to an increasingly digital age. To stay relevant, political figures are forced to have a solid and favorable presence on the internet and various social media sites. I believe that many of us can see this through our own recent social media experiences, whether our connections be to our families or others form the "older" generations. The public is growing more comfortable, regardless of age, with social media outlets as a place to utilize the one-to-many information relationship that these types of sites are providing to users. Alternately, one can think of this shift in the way of Jenkins in Spreadable Media, that social media has changed social interactions and has normalized sharing in such a way that social media users are able to change, adapt, and re-spread ideas freely, even in a political context.
   

     The most surprising increases, to me, have been from 30-49 year olds and 50-64 year olds. I remember when social media was first emerging, and my relatives were complaining that screen time with phones and computers were taking away from face-to-face interactions, particularly in those my own age. At this poit, it seems like an adage to be told not to allow the screen to become your antire life. With these widespread attitudes of disdain toward my genereation from elders and our use of the digital atmosphere, it is surprising there was not more push-back in the use of mobile social media by these older dempgraphics.

     However, social media is not a fad. It's not "going out of style" anytime soon. At this point, I find it hard to imagine all social media disappearing. Social media use has warped society in such a way as to so fundamentally change the way we communicate as humans. Social media has changed the atmosphere of the digital age and as facilitated instantaneous sharing, and in some cases, oversharing. However, this sharing can be used in political senses as well as in the sense of everyday life. Hashtags on twitter in response to different contemporary political comments include #DumpTrump and #CrookedHillary.

     Jenkins again explains in Spreadable Media that individuals have to choose to share this media, otherwise it isn't spreadable. Simple enough, right? The use of social media, in this case, was most likely spreadable in nature. These individuals of the more reluctant older generation that use social media outlets probably shared their interactions and opinions on these outlets, and others took their opinions into consideration when deciding whether or not to make accounts. How meta. 

     In cases of spreadability, I wonder if the same could be applied to politicians and their campaigns? Was Trump's rise to infamy due to the inherently (in my opinion) embarassing nature of his comments? What made his followers take him seriously? In addition, what kind of impact has social media made on thsi rise, in comparison to the campaigns of 2012, or even in local elections of 2014?

     Social media has become a widely utilized outlet for political campaigns due to its demographic: younger people, as seen in the graph as the spread of political connection through social media for 18-29 year olds. These connections to news outlets and other sources for political campaigns have essentially "burnt out" one third of social media users in a much more recent study by the Pew Research Center. I believe this is particularly obvious, even in our own classroom. Many of the women in this very 211 class are reluctant to talk about anything political when we discuss social media news, though the news surrounding the election is completely relevant and even important to discuss in a scholarly setting. 

     Being exposed to opinions, even those that differ from your own, is important, as we have touched in our brief discussions of the internet's "filter bubbles" in class, However, that is a discussion for a different blog post.