Social media have become a well known concept the last decade, and as a tool for politicians and opinions makers they have grown to be a natural part of political campaigning. The Swedish political parties, and the politicians, have become more aware that information written in social media is open to journalists. Therefore they have to be careful not to write anything that can be used against them. Instead they use social media as tools to gain voters. To some extent social media also influence the traditional media. They have become an easy and fast communication channel between journalists and politicians, and sometimes news have been created based on writings in social media. Blogs has also given non-journalists a good platform to communicate their opinions, so to some extent blogs compete with newspapers and other journalist-written media. Social media are still a small phenomenon and not even close to compete with traditional media such as newspapers and TV, but the arena has shown to be influent in raising issues to the public agenda. So even if a small group of people actually reads political blogs they are important in the agenda setting. Almost half of the Swedish population has an account on Facebook, and even more uses some other form of social media. Even thou gh it’s not about politics political views are spread and people express their opinions in different issues not knowing that they are talking politics and contribute to the political agenda. Traditional media still dominates in setting the agenda for politics, and social media has become more of an area for reflection on news that analyzes and comment on journalist-written newspapers, radio and TV. The recent revolutions in Northern Africa were not dependent of social media, and they probably should have happen anyway. But other countries could easy follow the events by reading blogs and looking at Youtube movies from the revolution. In the American presidential election in 2008 Barack Obama was successful using social media, but it was the combination of traditional footwork that made him president.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-78280 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Franzen, Jonas |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för medier och journalistik (MJ) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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