#isdayfive

[internet-and-society-blog]

In America, the presidency has become known as the "rhetorical presidency", because the American presidency has become little more than a tool to spread rhetoric for the common,non-politically-engaged citizen, and persuade them to support the presidency. In order to persuade citizens that the government's actions and objectives are necessary, the president must work up emotions like national pride, anger, fear, and etc. The main tools for this is rhetoric. My artifact shows an example of the rhetoric presidency through Ronald Reagan. Despite the plethora of negative things he did for America, particularly his decisions in foreign policy, he is viewed as a great president. This is because he was very successful in using rhetoric to ease the American population and gloss over anything that could cause great controversy.

This relates to the concept of the melodramatic imagination because it plays with emotional appeal and sensationalism. This is significant because it is important to know how the presidency is ran and how it maintains the approval of the us population.

[internet-and-society-blog]

Emotions can play a large role in voting patterns for a candidate. This article explored the effect of an emotional candidate on a potential supporter. A study was done where the shown an emotional appeal by a fake candidate before viewing that candidates platform. One group saw an angry candidate, another had an anxious one, and another had a hopeful one, then the groups were asked if they would particpate in that candidates campaign through online (contributing money, starting a group to support him on social media, posting comments, etc.) and offline (voting for him, putting up a yard sign, putting on a bumper sticker, etc.). The study found that emotions did gather more support, but only in people that were already educated and politically-engaged people. My artifact relates to the power of an emoting candidate. In the 2008 election, McCain was perceived as an angry old man, while Obama was seen as fresh and hopeful. This difference helped Obama win the election.

This topic relates to the concept of interactivity, as the emotions play a role in how we interact with a candidate. This topic is relevant still because of the same - these interactions help shape current politics.

[khanhdphan-blog]

Social Networking Is Revolutionizing Politics

Revolutionize/Normalization Frame is a suggestion that new media might revolutionize the politics. Some people believe that new media is transforming the politics news while some others think that new media just a tools to help the politic actor done what they should have done.

We can see that there are lots of many sites on social media and lots of politic actors as well as citizen access to it everyday and have strong influences on social media. From the video above, it shows how candidates recently get close to the voter through social media, such as: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube. They are spreading their image to the voters by doing many donation campaigns on social media and have thousand and millions friends’ connection with voters on Facebook. With more or less, we can obviously see how social media gets involve in politic nowadays and sooner or later it will transform the politic. The normalization frame is related to the network, interface and interactivity concepts. It is an interface  between human and machines in order to allow for interactivity between humans. This practice helps to expand the connection and network of people and also enable to share information in order to support for the politic-man's perspective.

[jasonnu-blog]

- Rhetorical Presidency is the idea that communication is the key to governing to affect citizens with an A. To be able to communicate properly, there needs to have an emotional code (how people need to feel about that?) and a symbolic code (How can they mobilize themselves?)

- The picture of America and its president. America is one of the few countries that actually have a president instead of Prime Minister. 

- Rhetorical presidency is related to many different concepts. Web 2.0 is the biggest one. It allows the person who is running for the presidency to have access the fullest access to the public domain. For example: Barack Obama did not have such reputation. However, with such skills and organizing ability, he has utilized the web 2.0 and how people interact with the internet to put himself out there and let people know about him. As a result, he was elected as America President

[almostnuttydinosaur-blog]

In this article, Jones examines the connection between the way political candidates use emotional appeal and the way the audience and potential voters respond. The three emotions studied are anxiety, anger, and hopefulness. Studies were conducted for online and offline campaigns. They also incorporated the political knowledge the participants may have based on the sources of information they may have encountered on a regular basis. Results showed that there wasn't a large difference between online and offline audiences when it came to political candidates using anger to appeal to the audiences. But there was a slight gap between the levels of support when it came to anxiety and hope. It seems the more long term type emotional appeals where more intriguing to both online and offline audiences, though online users showed more interest in getting involved in the campaign. The studies also showed that people who are better informed about the politics are more likely to use emotions as a guide, while less informed individuals tend to be less trusting of the emotional appeals and stop to think logically and do their research. Though emotional appeal doesn't influence all audiences in the same way, it does appeal to a wider audience.

[paigeypaigerrrs-blog]

'The chocolate milkshake, one of America's favorite sweet tooth cravings. It doesn't even matter if you are hungry or not, just looking at the milkshake alone it starts to get your taste buds salivating. If someone offered you a milkshake in return for a favor or something you could do for them you would most likely do it, even if it weren't something you initially wanted to do in the first place.. I mean who wouldn't be persuaded by the ever so delicious power of the chocolate milkshake? '

Now you might be asking why the hell I am going on a on about a chocolate milkshake, but don't worry I promise there is some actual importance to all of this.. just wait. When someone dangles something in front of your face (figuratively) or promises you things you never thought would even be possible could be done, sometimes your common sense just goes out the window and your eyes just see what the final product is - in other words, what's in it for you (by neglecting to look at the logic and rational behind what is being asked of you.) Very similarly when you look at presidential elections, like as done in the article titled Online Emotional Appeals and Political Participation; Young, Hoffman and Jones specifically focus on how different candidates use different emotions in order to persuade voters in their favor. (Kind of like playing into your taste bud receptors by persuading you with a chocolate milkshake.) 

They look at the not only the observer affect, by which experiencing different emotional states can have a wide range on voters, but also how this plays into the candidate affect. By playing to voters specific emotion, a sense of empathy can often be brought on to the voters - which as seen in the past - can actually persuade many voters without them even knowing it. 

[paigeypaigerrrs-blog]

In Gilad Lotan's article titled The Algorithmic Newsroom, he says "An algorithm is a finite list of instructions that a machine preforms in order to calculate a function." But is that really all an algorithm is? Does an algorithm have a bias? How does it really decide what it decides as important news for the audience to see? (Since in this instance we are referring to the algorithm in which social media sites - such as twitter - use in order decide what stories and tweets to display on the news feeds.) 

Do you ever actually think about how those tweets and stories are decided? Lotan goes into more depth on this topic and attempts to depict some of these answers. He discusses the various biases in which many algorithms are laced with and how the general public is oblivious to these biases - they are seen as neutral.This idea relates to that of the Computational and Algorithmic Journalism concept. We see this in that we know that knowledge generates activity. And these journalists and bloggers utilize the 'big data' with assistance from algorithms. They use algorithms because they are meant to solve problems in a way that produces revenue (capital) - the ultimate goal. 

[betharoniepizza-blog]

The article, 'Coproduction or cohabitation: Are anonymous online comments on newspaper websites shaping news content?' addresses the pros and cons of anonymous commenting as well as raise questions of the pros and cons of gate keeping. Some of the pros for anonymity is the equality of sharing amongst users, it suppresses bias comments on racial or any prejudice on other commenters. A con of anonymity is having just the comment and not being able to have an identity to go with this anonymous comment. Gate keeping is the filtering of information in newspapers and magazines by journalists. A pro of gate keeping is that it keeps the information more personalized, a con would be only showing one standing point of an argument or opinion. This picture is a sarcastic example of anonymity online. Basically leaving an anonymous comment is like wearing a paper bag in public, no one can see who you are, what gender you are or race. The concept that best fits with this article is interactivity. Anonymous commenting does not affect news media.