#10 - Collaborative Efforts in Elections

The 2008 election was the first U.S. presidential election since 1928 in which neither a sitting president nor vice president was running for election. This led to one of the most wide-open campaign seasons in the past century. While significantly different than the pandemic distress caused by the Virginia Tech shootings discussed by Vieweg et al, the 2008 Presidential election also caused a great need for clear channels of communication.

In 2008, steps were taken to incorporate technology in meaningful way into the election - more specifically the campaign processes. The primary problem that was to be solved was specifically in trying to engage and captivate a youth audience, a demographic who typically vote in small minority, but were believed necessary in such an unprecedented election. Thought was placed not only in the development of new forms of advertising and ways to "grab" peoples' attention, but ways in which to create meaningful forums for discourse and lasting ties to the constituents that used these new conduits of information. This can be seen clearly in the Obama campaign's use of a gambit of tech-savvy tools ; from an Obama iPhone Application - giving updates of all campaign schedules, tour data, as well as media (photo and video) coverage of the events - to the publicly hosted informative online videos narrated by the candidate and outlining his policies as well as his intended courses of action.

These not only allowed for the communication of information from one group to another, but allowed for pervasive sharing of information. This is therefore in support of Marks et al discussion of the convergence of both of these forms of group-support ITs. In addition, there were many ways in which the community at large created, as well as reacted to online media, such as video responses, viral music videos, facebook groups, and blog posts, etc. in addition to the standard email and phone forms of communication. Vieweg et al. define collective intelligence as an instance where a “distributed group of people who exhibited problem-solving capabilities come together.” These unique, but intuitive ways in leveraging technologies and disseminating them into the general populace and the hands of their primary target electorate - the youth which use those forms of communication most readily, were effective at engaging and communicating with and assisted in creating a new collectively intelligent electorate.