One of the things Mike Moffo reflected on when he told us about the 2008 election
was the role of technology and social media in that election.
That led me to consider the degree to which technology influenced the particular
elections we've considered in this MOOC.
In my own, for example, in 1800, newspapers were vitally important.
Newspaper editors were seen not as objective
providers of information, but as political activists and political players.
And newspaper editors played a really big role in that election,
in seeking to get candidates' messages across, and
in disseminating information from a particular perspective.
So the newspapers were very, very partisan and
they were the chief vehicle by which the voters were communicated with.
David, I wondered the degree to which that it was still true in 1860.
>> I think it's even more true in 1860 than it was in 1800, in part because
the steam presses made newspapers much cheaper and much more widely available.
So the number of newspapers grows exponentially in the 1830s and 1840s and
1850s.
So by the time you get to 1860s, both the Democrats and
Republicans have many newspapers at their disposal to disseminate information.
They also have the telegraph, which allows them to communicate in
a way that it hadn't been possible in 1800.
We actually also have things like the Pony Express;
one of the first things the Pony Express does in 1860 is send
the message about Lincoln's election to California.
>> Yeah, and the 1960s, obviously, counts as the era of television.
We've all heard how supposedly it swayed people's minds in
the presidential debate between Kennedy, and Nixon in 1960.
Of course by 1968, Vietnam is widely known as the first television war.
Television certainly does make an impact.
Those iconic images that I was talking about in my lecture about
the election of 1968, the iconic image of the embassy in Saigon being
breached by Viet Cong, that was one of the images that comes across via television.
So for the first time, viewers feel like they are really part of the war
and the war seems much more immediate in what they experience.
So, undoubtedly, that also had an influence on how they felt Vietnam
impacted on their lives, and therefore, on their decisions in the election of 1968.
>> 1980 is still the age of television.
Television was bringing home the Iranian hostage crisis, in particular,
which reinforced disaffection with Carter.
On the Reagan side,
what had been going on in the late 1970s was the development of direct mail.
That was a new technology in the 1970s.
Direct mail offered a new way of targeting voters,
of identifying voters who might be sympathetic with the conservative cause,
and then of cultivating their support in various ways.
I suppose that was an ancestor to the kind of social media targeting that we
see today.
So in different ways, it seems as though there is often a technological dimension
over time in American elections.
>> All of these, I think, are about communicating with voters.
When we think about the introduction of new technologies,
I think there are actually usually two elections we need to look at.
One is when the technology is first introduced,
as sort of an experiment to see whether we can get it to work.
And I think maybe what Mike Moffa was talking about in 2008 with social
media was an instance in which politicians were trying to figure out how to use a new technology,
but then there's always a second election where they actually do figure out how to
most effectively leverage those kinds of technology.
I think we see in some more recent elections candidates who are able to
take these new technologies and actually use them to their full merit.
>> Well, that's right, Mike drew a contrast between 2008, when social media
was still in its infancy, and 2012, when the Obama campaign really exploited it in
a much more effective fashion than they had even four years before.
>> I have similar example for 1968.
I mean, of course, there is the reputation, and
I just echoed that, of TV being vitally important.
But then there are also studies that have been done in the wake of the Vietnam War
really testing in how much people are swayed by television
and actually, it seems that the press has more of an impact.
Because whatever people read seems to linger longer in their minds than
whatever they see on the nightly news.
So very often, the stories that just a few hours later the voters cannot recall,
are the stories that they have seen on TV.
So this, of course, raises questions about the impact of technology.