ABSTRACT
Blogs emerged as 2004 election season must-reads, with bloggers leading the charge for and against candidates and issues. Recognizing the need to use the Internet to connect to his supporters, Senator Howard Dean was the first presidential candidate to create a blog. Dean’s blog and his strategy of using the blogosphere to raise money, mobilize supporters, generate excitement, and spread the word about his campaign was so successful in boosting his popularity that the mainstream media heralded it as a campaign revolution (Nagourney, 2008; Stromer-Galley & Baker, 2006). By the 2008 presidential election, online politics had changed. Most notable was the emergence of social network sites (SNSs)1 such as Facebook and MySpace. Not only were these new venues social gathering spaces, they were also used by campaigners as a means of connecting to political constituents and creating political links among SNS users. Presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama was heralded for his clever campaigning on blogs, social network sites and YouTube to organize supporters, raise money, and get his message out to voters (Nagourney, 2008). In contrast, Senator John McCain was dubbed the “analog candidate” for minimizing the importance of blogs and SNSs. Strategists mused whether his scant digital presence alienated the younger, onlinesavvy voters (Leibovich, 2008). Even though the campaign of 2008 is long over, blogs and SNSs continue as the newest and hottest online arenas for scrutinizing political happenings (Stelter & Perez-Pena, 2008). But the creation of online content is of small matter without a large, enthusiastic audience to use the technology to its full potential. The number of SNS and blog users alone begs the question of what draws them to online sources, especially for political information. The percentage of adults who sought online information about politics or a presidential election jumped from 4% in 1996 to 29% in 2004 to 44% in 2008 (Smith,
2009). Much of that increase is attributed to blogs, which took hold as a strong political presence in 2004, and SNSs, which caught on in 2008. Who are these users and why do they long for social network interactions and eagerly swig down blog content? This study sets out to answer these questions within the uses and gratifications framework. Specifically, this chapter explores the motivations for using SNSs and blogs for political information and compares the demographic and political characteristics of SNSs and blog users who completed an online survey during the two weeks before and the two weeks after the 2008 presidential election.
