Social Media and Political Mobilization in India

Author(s):  
Piya Sinha

India is considered as the largest democracy in the world. The proper functioning of a democratic system depends upon its electoral politics and election result is the outcome of the mobilization strategies adopted by the different political parties of the country. Thus political mobilization is particularly important in any democratic politics. This paper seeks to understand how the mobilization strategy has been redefined due to the entry of social media into politics. There is no scope to deny the fact that conventional media still play an important role in political mobilization. But the coming into being of social media into politics has made things more interesting, politics more democratic and the electoral system more inclusive. The political leaders irrespective of political parties are trying their best to utilize the social media platforms for their electoral benefits. The paper is evaluating the role of social media in political mobilization as different from conventional media with the expectation that doing away with the fake news will make this new media a prospective media in the near future.

Author(s):  
Hans Ruediger Kaufmann ◽  
Agapi Manarioti

If ‘to be social' is the sum of people's online interaction intentions, that can be monitored by marketers but not coerced, how can we make best use of these powerful new media? The answer lies in understanding the internal, psychological needs that are fulfilled by the social media and how they are demonstrated and testified by liking, sharing and engaging in general with specific pieces of content, while rejecting others. In this environment, marketers are called to develop a “brand as a person” strategy, in order for their brands to mingle and interact with consumers beyond the traditional marketing communication framework. In this chapter, we explore and discuss the strategic use of the social media as a concept that needs to be thoroughly understood but seemingly hasn't been yet by a large majority of marketers.


Author(s):  
Christopher Grobe

Social media platforms have made confessional speech both ubiquitous and mundane. What, you might ask, is the value of a solo voice amid all this aggregated clamor? This coda begins by comparing several examples of new media art, all of which take others’ social media output as the raw material for art: Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s data-visualization site We Feel Fine (2005), Penelope Umbrico’s Suns from Sunsets from Flickr (2006–present), and Natalie Bookchin’s Testament (2009–present). All of these projects use social media to think through contemporary relations between the individual and the social or political. And so I end by considering what they might have to tell us about confessional politics as they’re practiced in the age of social media: e.g., Occupy Wall Street’s “We are the 99%” meme, the “mattress protests” against campus sexual assault started by Emma Sulkowicz of Columbia University, and a public forum held at Amherst College during the antiracist Uprising of 2015. All of these protests began as local acts, but then reached the world via the Internet. What happens when confessions like these travel through channels that have made confession so mundane?


Author(s):  
Corinne Weisgerber

This article calls into question the social media empowerment narrative and the underlying idea that social media platforms are empowering everyday netizens to have their voices heard. The author argues that social media technologies may simply privilege only those Internet users who are new media savvy and have leisure time to participate in the so-called digital democracy. While social media systems might have lowered the entrance threshold for civic engagement, hurdles such as the growing competition in an attention economy, the odds of standing out amidst millions of other individual voices, knowledge of new media technologies required to achieve visibility, and time demands make the social media empowerment vision more difficult to attain than the architects of the empowerment ideology have made the public to believe.


Author(s):  
Dilan Ciftci

This study advances the findings that political party social media adaptation and social media attention have contributed to the election campaigning in North Cyprus. The 2018 general election success could be understood by looking deeply into the social media attention of political parties and electorates. While the sample that has been chosen for this study shows different patterns in their content of the social media shares, it is true to say that this study put an emphasis on the elements of political ads through social media account. The findings show that political parties in North Cyprus have communicated through social media, especially in horse-race periods compared with the other periods.


2020 ◽  
Vol 338 ◽  
pp. 431-442
Author(s):  
Assem Kalkamanova

This paper focuses on the role of social media in the rise of the protest movements and political mobilization in Kazakhstan. The country has been seeing an increase in the social networks based civil activists since recently. I argue that the emergence of the Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan that operates only within the realm of social media platforms promoted political activism and civil protests in the country. Most importantly, I argue that in contrast to the conclusions of the Kazakhstani court’s decision in March 2018, the movement leader’s Facebook blog reveals no violence either towards the government or some specific political elite. Using text mining methods, I analyzed the texts of his Facebook posts from the announcement date in 2017 till the end of 2019: the rhetoric of the position of the Democratic Choice is informational, first, and protest calling, second. Also, the analysis of seven most popular political Youtube bloggers shows that the people’s discontent with injustices and undemocratic polity manifested in the poignant interest towards the creator of this system, Mr. Nazarbayev and his closest circle. The SMM software allowed to find out the areas of Kazakhstani politics that are of most interest to the audience of Kazakhstani political activists.


Tripodos ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 151-165
Author(s):  
Mārtiņš Pričins

Over the last decade, the implementation of campaigns by political parties and their candidates on social media platforms has become an integral part of political communication. Political communication studies have long indicated that elections are becoming personalized, with more focus on party leaders or individual candidates. But studies on communication by political parties to understand the identity of parties and their potential in communication with voters remain relevant. The aim of the paper is to analyse the visual election materials of the political parties from Latvia on the social network Facebook during the 2019 European Parliament (EP) election campaign. The research period is two weeks before elections. The subject of the study is election materials on Facebook accounts of the parties representing the national parliament of Latvia. A codebook for analysis has been developed, containing common and specific variables, designed to explore the verbal and visual dimensions. The results of the study allow us to draw conclusions about the changing success of new populist and traditional parties, as well as to look at the role of Facebook in elections in a little-studied country.


Author(s):  
Nilnur Tandaçgüneş Kahraman

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the heterotopia phenomenon in light of utopian function defined by Ernst Bloch that has created utopian movements from past to present. This is in The Principles of Hope and based on new cultural policies of a developing network society. It aims to make a contribution to the literature of cultural studies regarding new media by dealing with the ethos of phenomenon via sociologic, philosophic, and marketing perspectives. To this effect, the relation between the social network, one of the productions of cultural policies that are closely related to social media platforms nowadays and the consumption culture, is the focus of the study. In the analysis, the study deals with zumbara.com case, a time banking project based on a gift economy that is chosen in regard to the topic.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-402
Author(s):  
Benan TOPBAŞ

The way these main media organs are included in new media outlets, video journalism has been examined. For this purpose, content analysis of the videos produced on cnnturk.com.tr Youtube and social media platforms, which have both traditional and new media organs, was performed. An institutionalized interview was conducted to make the content analysis results more meaningful. In the research, the social media planning of online news videos was examined and what kind of content they had was revealed. Research On cnnturk.com.tr, online news videos are from the pool of CNN TÜRK channel and from agencies, and the channels where readers and viewers react the most are Youtube and Facebook. The site cnnturk.com.tr, a new media organ, shared the online news videos broadcast from the CNN TÜRK channel, which is the traditional media organ, on platforms such as Twitter, Youtube and Facebook, and enabled the videos active in the traditional media to adapt to new media channels.


If ‘to be social' is the sum of people's online interaction intentions, that can be monitored by marketers but not coerced, how can we make best use of these powerful new media? The answer lies in understanding the internal, psychological needs that are fulfilled by the social media and how they are demonstrated and testified by liking, sharing and engaging in general with specific pieces of content, while rejecting others. In this environment, marketers are called to develop a “brand as a person” strategy, in order for their brands to mingle and interact with consumers beyond the traditional marketing communication framework. In this chapter, we explore and discuss the strategic use of the social media as a concept that needs to be thoroughly understood but seemingly hasn't been yet by a large majority of marketers.


Author(s):  
Ikegbunam, Peter .C ◽  

Nigeria and Nigerians have witnessed different kinds of electoral frauds since the return to democracy in 1999. Counting from the 1999 general election in Nigeria, the 2019 general election is the 6th general elections conducted in the country. Unfortunately, none of these elections have been considered to be free and fair as there are always public outcries from one end to another against the results of the elections as a result of lack of transparency in the process. Drawing from this background, this study, examines whether heavy use of WhatsApp platforms by different political parties in the election encouraged popular participation and effective monitoring of the electoral processes. The study which examined a total of 318 respondents sampled from select WhatsApp groups of the two leading political parties adopted the survey research method with the social media engagement and technological acceptance theories as its theoretical framework to ascertain whether the use of WhatsApp platforms by political parties encouraged popular participation among the electorate and determine if WhatsApp platforms were helpful to parties in monitoring the 2019 general election as well as its processes. Findings revealed that WhatsApp use encouraged popular participation and electoral process monitoring. The researchers recommended that the political parties and the electoral umpire should engage more in the use of social media platforms in passing information during, on and after election to encourage transparency in leadership.


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