Module 8 - The power of the hashtag

I was super impressed with the strategic thinking that paved the way for the Obama 2008 victory (Kreiss, 2012).  What really was compelling for me was the fact that Obama’s strategists acted as intermediaries between the then-fractious new and traditional media.  It also led to the legitimization of new media, the Huffington Post – taking a cue from new media, traditional media outlets such as The Washington Post, WIRED, and even the good old Edmonton Journal has taken to offering blogs to attract its online readers.  Seems as though what was seen as distortive phenomenon has now been disseminated or mainstreamed, resulting in the evolution of the fifth estate as we know it.  It’s interesting that traditional media has taken on the role of reporting and covering SM activity on top of using SM as the ground-level foray into topical investigation.  How far we have come.

Further studying the effects of the Obama strategy would be fascinating for me.  The last Alberta civic elections saw new, progressive mayors take seats in Calgary, Red Deer, Edmonton, and my home in Sherwood Park.  The one thing that all 4 had in common was that they took their campaign to SM and used the cues to develop and shape their platforms.  Both the Sherwood Park incumbent and the Edmonton frontrunner ignored SM, preferring to use old-style hardcopy and traditional media as forms of campaign promotion.  It would seem as though any potential candidate for election needs to first school themselves on the effective use of SM to get their message out.

That being said, I look forward to the potentially upcoming Alberta election and the effect that SM will have on its outcome.  At this point, #PrenticeBlamesAlbertans has had a remarkable effect on the current government’s platform.  Premier Prentice, in the past three weeks, has gone from a Klein-esque platform of cut-and-tax to being open to suggestions from the opposition (Question Period yesterday) with regard to how to manage the province’s finances.  It’s truly awesome for a government to openly admit that it has no idea what it is doing.  The election, so far, has not been called, and I would bet that the Prentice government will hold off on calling one until it sees the demise of #PrenticeBlamesAlbertans, #LookInThe Mirror, and #Killbill202 / #Bill10, three of several albatrosses the current government has around its neck. 

The origins of #PrenticeBlamesAlbertans - the question that was asked, and the hashtag's originator (have to say I have been doing my part to keep it alive on Twitter!):

Other things #PrenticeBlamesAlbertans for: Nickelback. #ableg #abpoli
— Marty Chan (@Marty_Chan) March 5, 2015

Seems that these hashtag movements all start as adhocracies.  It was enlightening to read Juris’ take on #Occupy.  As I read, I was taken by the fact that its evolution has modeled cultural formation – as a culture becomes bigger, it naturally splits off into smaller pods, each dealing with local issues tied into the main theme – that’s maturity, that’s sophistication.  It seems as humans, we are hard-wired to crave leadership, to crave hierarchy, and with that comes sociological organization.  I would like to see #PrenticeBlamesAlbertans as having a proportional gelling effect here in Alberta as #killBill202 did; time will tell whether people care enough to keep the momentum going.

REFERENCES

Juris, J. (2012). Reflections on #Occupy everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation. American Ethnologist, 2(259). doi:10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01362.x

Kreiss, D. (2012). Acting in the public sphere: The 2008 Obama campaign’s strategic use of new media to shape narratives of the presidential race. Research in Social Movements, Conflict and change. Retrieved from http://danielkreiss.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/kreiss_actinginpublic1.pdf