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Since early 2008, American University's Center for Social Media has been producing a series of field reports that profile innovative media for public knowledge and action. Published as part of the Center's Ford Foundation-supported Future of Public Media project (www.futureofpublicmedia.net), these case studies are designed to explore how publics form around participatory and multiplatform media projects. In this report, Nina Keim and Jessica Clark examine two linked projects related to the 2008 presidential election: Twitter Vote Report (TVR) and Inauguration Report '09 (IR09).

Smith's community isn't the only smaller city or town to find itself suffering form a lack of local press. While the New York City mayoral election attracts interest from the New York Times, elsewhere the media landscape has changed drastically, thanks to the shuttering of smaller newspapers that were traditionally the source of local political coverage. In some places, social media is being used to try and replace some of what has been lost in terms of professional reporting.

dialogue entre Malcolm Gladwell et Clay Shirky dans foreign affairs: "do social media make protests possible?"

For decades, we've assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with "access" and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the "digital divide." Yet, increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation "choice" leads to a digital reproduction of social divisions. This is most salient in the States which is intentionally the focus of my talk here today.

With new media at hand, elections become a time for innovation, and online engagement can lead to enormous influence

23 Examples of Good Social Media in the Public Sector

I sat down with both the GOP and the Democratic social media team leads to learn more about their efforts for the upcoming election.

""The big takeaway point is you don't [reach the middle] with social media--I've yet to see any evidence that social media is going persuade truly persuadable voters,""

"We will use social media and the latest technology available to fuel the energy and commitment of folks on the ground, community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, house to house, all around the country," said Katie Hogan, a spokeswoman for Mr. Obama's re-election campaign

Communications tools don't organize social movements. Organizers and organizations do. Media helps, but that is all.

Breaking the Weakest Link: An Analysis of How Social Media Falls Short in the Organization of Anti-­Authoritarian Resistance

"Social media is not at all a prime mover of what is happening on the ground," says Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

"The Facebook-sparked protest and 4 February demonstrations in Colombia make an interesting test-case of the burgeoning power of unorthodox media outlets and their potential to rally great numbers of people in a short period of time. The initial spontaneity and synergy are a paradigm example of how technology can spawn transnational political forms; in this the phenomenon both belongs to the past decade of net-based activism and highlights the potential of social networks to make this type of organising even more inventive and sophisticated in the future. At the same time, this particular protest (and this form of mobilisation) exclude the many who do not belong to the technological and transnational elites which they favour. Moreover, by avoiding the classic approaches of civil-society work - including the formation of alliances with NGOs, political parties, human-rights groups, and trade unions - the march organisers disregard traditional forms and institutions of democratic action. In doing so, they privilege a fragmented and highly individualised perspective of reality over one that embodies shared, public action for social improvement. "

par le fondateur de Craigslist