Power to the People

Last Sunday, July 26 I attended a forum hosted by CPU at Sofitel with speaker Obama New Media Operations Manager Mary Joyce. In attendance were politicians (traditional and non-tradional), NGO’s, lobby groups and a few curious fellows like me.

She started her talk by introducing herself and her role in the Obama campaign and warned the audience that she is not an expert in Philippine politics. The talk was brief, the content simplistic, commonsensical but all together brilliant.

As she went on and discussed the strategy they used in the Obama campaign, I saw the excited faces of the traditional politicians but their faces fell when Mary Joyce cleared that New Media is not a cure-all type of media for the election, the online Candidate is only as good as his off-line self. (Remember that not Mccain also had facebook fan pages)

We must remember that new media is media that we do not merely consume, we actually produce it. The content is not merely pushed down our throat, we decide what the content will be. We got a taste of this during the recent SONA, facebook walls were splattered with angered words (bad words after badwords) as people react to what GMA was saying in real time. You get to say what you want and broadcast it and your contacts read it and react to it as if you were conversing in the same room.
New media will bring about a change to Philippine politics, it will give greater and effective power to the people.

Your choice, your shout out.