Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on February 1, 2012
Candidate Supporters’ Use of Gadgets as Symbols Reveal Power of Brands
A thread on AdGooroo have declared that the internet (and its younger, tech-savvy partisan users) allowed the Illinois senator to bypass traditional media and claim the Democratic nomination. Recently, the Obama campaign released an iPhone app that helps followers recruit supporters.
UC Berkeley Public Policy professor Jack Glaser told Wired.com in an e-mail that people’s feeling of powerlessness in the election process makes them resort “to all kinds of related (but inefficacious) activities.” And it’s especially true “when they pay close attention” like they are in this election, he said.
Most of the symbols depict Sen. Barack Obama as cutting edge, Sen. Joe Biden as wise, Sen. John McCain as old, and Gov. Sarah Palin as ditzy, and are created by people compelled to express their support.
Still, Glaser says, these are mostly funny “but not too deep.”
Psychologist Brian Nosek of the University of Virginia thinks there’s something more meaningful to this categorization-type of thinking. He suggests the “Obama equals something” illustrations that involve technology could indicate a trend that is tapping into the power of brands.
In an unpublished study by Project Implicit, a public research project where people explore their own biases and attitudes, Nosek reveals they’ve found that “liberals are more pro-Apple and conservatives more pro-Windows … The same is true when the contrast is Open Source versus Microsoft.”
For example, Apple’s slogan “Think Different” is a decidedly unconventional and authority-challenging statement, according to Nosek. “Apple’s brand emphasis on style, hip culture, creativity are all associations that liberals tend to find more attractive than conservatives, and this appeal appears to extend to implicit evaluations of the companies and brands.” So it’s not a huge stretch to say the same type of people would be equating Obama’s barrier-busting candidacy to these same type of gadgets.
Then again, the apparent authority of Apple as a liberal mainstay doesn’t always hold true. Famously conservative pundit and radio shock jock
Rush Limbaugh is a huge Apple fan, as he noted earlier this year in one
of his broadcasts.
All Project Implicit findings are made through the famed Implicit Association Test, which measures the “strength of automatic association between mental representations of objects (concepts) in memory,” and was famously profiled in the book Blink as a measure of racial attitudes.
But the makeup and general interest of the illustrations also suggest that they go beyond political associations, especially the ones featuring the iPhone and the browsers.
Sriram Natarajan, also with Project Implicit, says that if the creative interests of the people who posted these were measured, you’d find similar personality types.
For example, a Flickr user from New York named Andrea posted over 100
of the illustrations she liked best from the Fark site to her own photo
page, in “a fit of boredom and amusement.” A self-described “bleeding
heart liberal,” her favorite illustration is the one depicting Obama as
the iPhone, Biden as a Blackberry, Palin as a toy phone, and McCain as
a lost carrier pigeon.
Natarajan says Andrea’s reason for posting these is likely due to
her savvy understanding of tech culture, even more than just knowing
how to upload Flickr pictures. She is likely a “creative individual” and “probably works in the tech industry and very much plugged
into pop culture,” he said. “It was probably intrinsically rewarding for her.”
Measuring these associations using the Implicit Association Test would be possible only if the people taking the test are familiar with the distinctions between the different gadgets, Natajaran said.
So just like many other internet memes that grow beyond their bounds,
these images tell us more about the people creating them than about the
content implicit in the original images. They also show that people’s election
obsessions easily plug in to their already-established obsessions,
observations, and inevitably, their wish fulfillment.
So when a gadget-happy tech insider sees Obama, they’re likely to envision a multifaceted, high-tech device that will change their lives.
Let’s just hope that if Obama wins, there are no 3G-type, cut-and-paste bumps in the road for his administration.
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by admin on October 14, 2008
