In 2014 and beyond, the Republican Party faces a wide gap among younger voters that must be addressed if the party is to maintain its current level of dominance in Georgia and make gains nationally going forward. Recognizing this and that new media are powerful communication tools for younger voters, the Republican National Committee is investing in developing digital media, but the GOP remains solidly behind the Democrats.
This week, President Barack Obama has demonstrated again that his organization is in the lead in the use of social media to reach out to younger voters. The latest social medium to host Obama is Tumblr, which the President used this week to promote his plan to raise taxes to pay for breaks on student loans. From the Washington Times:
The bill, put forth by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts Democrat, would allow many of the 40 million Americans carrying college debt to refinance their federal loans under today’s interest rates, potentially saving them hundreds or even thousands of dollars each year.
To make up for the money lost to the federal government, the legislation would raise taxes on wealthy Americans, and the president called on young people to lead the charge.
“I think everybody on Tumblr should be contacting their senators and finding out where they stand on the issue. By the way, this is something that will not add to the deficit because the way we pay for it is we say we’re going to eliminate some [tax] loopholes right now that allow millionaires and billionaires to pay lower rates of taxes than secretaries and teachers,” Mr. Obama said. “It would pay for itself. It’s a good piece of legislation. It directly affects folks in their 20s and 30s … particularly the young people who use Tumblr — this is something you should pay a lot of attention to. Make sure you are pushing your senators around this issue.”
In Georgia, the Democratic-leaning guerrilla organization Better Georgia beat Obama to that punch, however, using a Buzzfeed-style amalgamation of animated .gif graphics and text to tell a story called, “The real story on how Nathan Deal broke the HOPE scholarship.”
Buzzfeed.com has introduced a new form of storytelling that uses short snippets from popular culture, including reality shows, movies, cartoons, and any other video they can find, to string together into a narrative that is more than its component parts.
Today, GIFs are playing an increasingly important role in breaking news on the web, telling stories through photojournalism and giving us new ways to express our emotions when we can’t do it in person. There’s no doubt about it — GIFs and social media have indeed become BFFs.
So, how exactly did the GIF become such a perfect image format to pass around the Internet anyway? This NY Times article says that people in their 20s likely experience some sense of nostalgia for the awkward clipart GIF images many of us were exposed to in the 90s when we started exploring the Internet for the first time.
As a 20-something, I can safely say it’s not exactly the 90s clipart GIF nostalgia that’s driving all this animated image sharing. Instead, I’d say that it’s the cross between image and video that makes the GIF so incredibly appealing.
Take a look at BuzzFeed and its use of GIFs. The team over there has completely mastered the art of viral sharing, largely through list posts of images and GIFs.
This post, called Life In Your Early Twenties vs. Life In Your Late Twenties racked up almost two million pageviews and over 173K Facebook likes just three days after it was posted. If you take a look through it, you’ll notice that almost every image is actually an animated GIF.
Two million views in just a couple of days? Now that’s power.
Republican efforts are likely to continue to lag, as they remain hamstrung by a fundamental misunderstanding of how innovation works. By centralizing efforts to innovate in Washington, the GOP fails to tap what our policies have repeatedly said, that free markets lead to innovation, not centralized control. Isn’t it ironic?
