Obama's Iphone election

Figure 1 : Obama's Iphone application
Source : Zedomax

The tensed battle of presidency between Barack Obama and John McCain back in 2008 sees Obama venturing into a new age of election campaign using the Iphone as a portal. The Obama Iphone application can be downloaded here, it features breaking news, and up to date news from the campaign, plus videos, photos and talking points to convince friends to vote for Obama. (Sherwin, 2008)

Presidential election season is always contentious, but increasingly tech-savvy pundits, campaigners and others have turned to new ways to get the news out. (Cohen, 2008) According to Chris Hazelton (2008), it is a brilliant marketing move by the Obama campaign, which simultaneously targets the demographic that's most likely to have an iPhone and support Obama.

I would agree that the use of Iphone app to reach out to the mass public is a brilliant move by Obama. Besides Iphone app, Obama's campaign uses Facebook, YouTube, and Twiter as well. By penetrating technology, Obama is able to reach out to more, at the same time providing supporters with a platform to invite friends to vote for Obama.

Walsh (2006) states that the use of multimodality, specifically, the incorporation of texts, visuals, audio and other cues are vital components of Internet sites.The launch of Obama 08 Iphone app shows great effort from Barack Obama to venture into the world of technology and touching his supporters. Obama's campaign shows that even political parties are turning to new media such as Facebook, Twitter and now even Iphone apps to reach out the the audiences. With the availability of a range of public communication modes and forms in a certain society in this case - Iphone, Facebook, Blog and Twitter, can only visual communication happen. (Kress & van Leeuween,2006)




Video 1 : Barack Obama's Inauguration Speech
Source : Youtube


Figure 2 : Obama's Facebook
Source : Facebook.com



References

1. Babcock, C 2008, 'Obama Drafts Iphone users to help with campaign', viewed 15th June 2009, < articleid="210605383">
2. Cohen, P 2008, 'Obama Camp offers Iphone App', Macworld.com, viewed 15th June 2009, <>
3. Daily Contributor 2008, 'Obama Uses Iphone to Win Support', Daily Contributor, viewed 15th June 2009,<http://dailycontributor.com/obama-uses-iphone-to-win-support/227/>
4. Kress G. & van Leeuwen T. 2006, Reading images, Chapter 1 : The semiotic landscape : language and visual communication, p. 23 - 24.
   
5. Walsh, M 2006, "Textual shift : Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts", Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 24 - 37