Web 2.0 Essay (First Draft)

Obama Caught in the Web by Bradford N. Smith

Steven Johnson and Brian Willaims’ articles portray two very different opinions about Web 2.0. Rather than Web 1.0, which was organized around pages of information, Web 2.0 is focused on the people themselves. With Web 2.0 today, people can write blogs, film youtubes, and are able to look up just the things that interest them. Johnson’s position on Web 2.0 is that it is a great step forward for us, no longer restricting people to the information they are given alone. As Johnson says in his article, “There are no experts or the users themselves are the experts.” It is with these new available resources, people are now able to focus on what matters to them, and affects their lives. It is because of this that Williams opinion differs. His belief is that everyone is “talking at once”, as in, there is an overload of information in this new Web 2.0 that people just don’t need to know. With all the personal opinion pieces and news for specific areas alone, people are hearing less and less of what is outside of their own realm, making them more and more secluded from the rest of society. It is for this reason that Williams thinks we may miss out on things important to world because we are too focused on ourselves. Although people are beginning to focus more on their own interests, because of Web 2.0, Barack Obama was able to establish a community of supporters who helped him win the Presidential election.
Much like Johnson said, with this new Web 2.0, people are being given the ability to tell the world what they know. In the past few years, as Johnson says, “placebloggers have emerged who write about their neighborhoods and the issues that are most important to the people living in them”. With people writing about local news that the major media most times ignores, they are providing an excellent service to people who are interested in knowing about what is going on near them, rather than what CNN.com is saying, for example, about things halfway across the world. Another thing Web 2.0 allows is for people to keep updated with friends and family. A decade ago, keeping in touch with old high school friends was a basically impossible task. For the most part, you didn’t hear anything from anyone until the next reunion came around, but today, with Web 2.0, you are able to keep updated every second of every day. Your friends post a new twitter, or a new youtube video, or even leave you a comment on facebook, which have become a quick and simple way for people to stay in contact. It may not seem as personal as a phone call, but it is keeping friendships and families together, which is a definite plus for Web 2.0. Another development with Web 2.0 is the emergence of “internet phenomenon”, which is a locally developed piece of the Web that spreads across the nation, or even the world, and reaches a vaster audience, because of Web 2.0. One important Internet phenomenon came about prior to the 2008 United States Presidential Election. As it looked more like Hilary Clinton would be the democratic nominee, Barack Obama set up a website called my.barackobama.com which built him a community of supporters through its Web 2.0 style and design.
My.barackobama.com was designed as a site where supporters could come together to discuss important political issues and plan events in order to raise money for Obama’s campaign. Developed during the beginning of the facebook trend, it allowed users to make friends with supporters they knew or wanted to know, as well as the opportunity to form groups consisting of people in their local community. In these groups users were able to discuss upcoming fundraisers, opportunities to give back to the community, and even things they felt the President needed to do for their town. It got many Americans who may have otherwise been not as politically active, to do what they felt was right, because the site put the issues upfront and from the perspective of somebody local. It also provided users with constantly updated information of events in the area, giving people more of an opportunity to participate than when they would have to just hear about the events on television or the radio. The site also contained direct links to other Web 2.0 items of Obama’s campaign, including his Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and Flickr. With the increase in support and awareness, groups of people came together and created such other Obama Web 2.0 phenomenon as fightthesmears.com and Obama Girl, whose song “I’ve Got A Crush on Obama” garnered vast media attention, getting her (Amber Lee Ettinger) appearances on Saturday Night Live and in Maxim magazine. This was all great publicity for Barack Obama and enabled him to raise an enormous amount of funds for his campaign, and win him the democratic nomination. Without Web 2.0 existing to allow Obama supporters to form communities and connect in ways not able through the mail and other media, it is unlikely that Barack would have been able to get enough support to win the nomination, and subsequently the election.
Social networking sites are the reunions, phone conversations, and main means of communication for a lot of people today. Therefore, Web 2.0 is one of the best ways for people to spread their thoughts and ideas to the local public, and even further, to the national and world audience. Web 2.0 has allowed every John and Jane Doe to become the reporters and authors on everything from the war to the local bake sale. It is for this reason that people are becoming more and more worldly, giving them the chance to look at stories from every perspective out there. As limited as it may seem people will be as they decide to examine further only what interests them, they are in fact expanding their knowledge by being given the opportunity to examine things from different views. With the greater amount of local viewpoints out there, more and more larger media corporations are picking up on their importance. People prefer to hear what is going on in their part of the world, or how big issues are affecting their community, so they are turning more to the aspects of Web 2.0 than the news websites of CNN, MSNBC, etc.
When times to vote come along, it is important for people to know how they feel about the specific issue on the table. As much as larger news media discusses these issues, they all have a certain bias, so people prefer to look to their own community to get other opinions and the facts on how these issues will exactly pertain to them. Barack Obama’s website my.barackobama.com provided people with just that opportunity. They could post on local, national, or even global forums discussing the most current issues affecting them, and they could read about what others had to say about them. It was this new ability that gave a lot of the site’s users a reason to go onto the site, and it also was a major factor in their deciding of their choice for President. The website itself offers many ways for people to get involved in politics and the issues that we are facing, including, “Spreading the word to friends and neighbors about the President's approach on the big issues facing our nation, like health care, energy and education.” As it says on the sites “About OFA” page. Since users were able to talk directly to other people who shared their views, many communities were born out of this site, and even the politicians themselves got the opportunity to talk directly to voters. This allowed the spread of local ideas into the national government, and got many important issues noticed that might have otherwise been ignored. Web 2.0 as applied by my.barackobama.com is definitely a great example of what a positive effect Web 2.0 has been on society. As my.barackobama.com states, “Nothing is more powerful than your voice in your community.”