The United States presidential election of 2012 is the next United States presidential election, to be held on Tuesday, November 6, 2012. The Democratic and Republican Parties have held their conventions and technology was featured immensely. At the end of President Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, there were 52,756 tweets per minute with the hashtag #DNC2012. The outcome of the First Lady’s speech at the convention was a peak of 28,003 per minute while the former President Bill Clinton’s speech had a peak 22,087 per minute. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney hit 14,289 tweets per minute at the end of his speech, while the vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan's hit 6,669 tweets per minute.
All in all, globally, politicians have taken on technology during the campaigns, with most leveraging on social media. For instance, Barack Obama is the most followed world leader with 17,115,077 followers, globally in 5th place just behind Britney Spears. Other leaders include the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez is in second place with 3,152,608 followers, followed by the White House, Queen Rania of Jordan and 10 Downing Street who all have over two million followers. In Kenya, a number of presidential candidates have taken on social media; Martha Karua, Raila Odinga, Uhuru Kenyatta, William Ruto, Kalonzo Musyoka and Peter Kenneth. The activities on their accounts though seem to be minimal and are too cautious on tackling pertinent issues discussed on the medium. Most Kenyan politicians revert to “old” technologies such as television and radio to propagate their campaign messages.
Technology can also assist politicians to raise funds during campaigns. Some vendors have developed software suites that scale to match campaigns of different sizes, internet-based fundraising and supporter management packages. The campaign secretariat needs technology to control and manage the campaign activities. The essential tools usually include a website, an email-based Constituent Relations Management system and an online fundraising module. Back in 2008, the Obama campaign online fundraising tapped into a vast number of politically interested ordinary people who could not donate hundreds or thousands of dollars but whose smaller donations can added up to a huge sum. It is also during this time that the Obama campaign utilized the use of text messaging in politics. Frequent updates on the campaign trail and important events would be circulated to the electorate using this medium. Who knows? Maybe in future we will have geo tagging applications that would send political messages based on location.
The main advantage of new campaign support technologies is they allow candidates to accomplish their planned missions efficiently and often more cost effectively, with less staff or fewer volunteers. Video casts have been used in political campaigns with the president candidate Raphael Tuju as one of the pioneers in Kenya. The candidate posted video casts in Sheng, Swahili and English on YouTube during the launch of his presidential campaign. This enabled him to reach an audience on the Internet domain that he would otherwise not been able to reach. However, the some video casts have been to the politicians’ disadvantage. For instance, the puppetry comedy show XYZ exemplifies some of the political traits in a satirical manner.
In last couple of years, a new trend of the use of technology has emerged. Internet activism has rapidly gained popularity. The activists use electronic communication technologies such as social media to enable faster communications by citizen movements and the delivery of local information to a large audience. Social media was heavily involved in the Arab Spring is a revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests that occurred in the Arab world that beginning 18 December 2010. The popularity of viral videos made it easy for people to throw their weight behind campaigns, leading to widespread demos. To date, rulers have been forced from power in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen due to the uprisings. News was spread by freelance journalists via blogs, twitter and facebook as the mainstream media cautiously avoided the risk of venturing in the areas with the demonstrations.
Another wave of Internet activism was in 2010 and 2011, when Wikileaks released huge caches of documents and videos that were highly sensitive. This demonstrated how Internet activism can have a global impact and should not be ignored. During the campaign periods, politicians require expert advice as the dive into the use of technology to capture the youth vote. A simple mistake, like posting the wrong photo, could easily change the political dynamics with the opponents taking advantage of the mishap. At the same time, technology can propel a candidate to political glory in the shortest time. Case in point, would Obama be President if there was no Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or the Internet? No.
