New friend request: Hillary Clinton

Many have long bemoaned the gap between the political establishment and the younger generation that will replace it. ABC News partnered with the poster child of that generation, Facebook. The media giants added a politics application to Facebook that will allow users to follow campaign correspondents, polls and debates.
“There are debates going on at all times within Facebook,” David Westin, the president of ABC News and a new Facebook member, told the New York Times. “This allows us to participate in those debates, both by providing information and by learning from the users.”
Posted by Kristin Mehler

4 Comments

  1. political_mom
    Posted December 2, 2007 at 5:28 am | Permalink

    I hate facebook, it looks like the whole thing was designed for middle school kids.

  2. thinkfirst
    Posted December 2, 2007 at 7:38 am | Permalink

    So, my 14 year old grandson is now going to shape the future of America? Not really. He’s on Facebook to chat with (and try to impress) his friends,(?). Gee ABC must be desperate.

  3. Pedant
    Posted December 2, 2007 at 11:47 am | Permalink

    Obviously the writing’s on the wall for Old School communication corporations’, like ABC, part.

    Facebook (or more likely what it evolves to in the decades to come) provides content that will be to our youngest generation’s intragenerational communication medium what sit-com content provided by television programs like The Andy Griffith Show, M*A*S*H, and Friends were to the preceding generations. My generation used to gather around the water cooler ostensibly to discuss last night’s Mary Tyler Moore episode, but of course lots of other societal norming was done there as well, much of it unconsciously. The key difference is that Facebook provides the content AND the water cooler.

    Facebook or its functional analog will be (already is, in fact, for our youngest workers) the virtual water cooler around which America gathers to solidify societal norms, especially for new parents. ABC would die if it lost its business of selling advertisements by providing 10 minutes of content between their display. That content is obviously available to be discussed the next day around water coolers, but its real, aggregate role in American society is actually much larger than the sum of the parts. Facebook is just one of the next ways to sell access to the content Americans will use to shape things to come.

    Kind of a no-brainer on ABC’s part.

  4. Kev
    Posted December 2, 2007 at 8:24 pm | Permalink

    Facebook is for high school guys to find high school girls to date. Mostly guys that have a hard time getting a girl at their own school- because everybody knows him- so they go to Facebook and they look up a girl from another school where they don’t know him. That way he can get a date and impress his friends with a pretty girl. Until of course she gets to know him. But then again Wichita has plenty of high schools for a kid to work! But for political stuff?? Hell no. No kid is thinking about Hillary, Rudy or Obama. They are thinking about some girl at school or Hannah Montana (aka Miley Cyrus).