Dancing in the Dark or: Social Media in 2004

Last month I blogged about the 2008 Presidential candidates battle for online dominance. Since then, I have been having flashbacks to my college senior thesis. At that time, and still now, I was interested in the functions of popular music in modern society. After months and months of research and a (21 year old's) lifetime of participation in the music scene, I concluded that:

• In the past, music connected to social movements was able to perform political functions in society to spread progressive ideas and rally people together under a common cause. The commercialization of the music industry turned the music into a commodity that could be sold for a profit. Once rock music became incorporated into the mainstream, it lost its ability to offer a radical critique of society. This was the state of rock music beginning in the 1970s as songs and musicians were incorporated into the entertainment industry. The state of the country over the past four years inspired the formation of organizations that linked music and politics. These organizations became extremely active during the 2004 presidential election campaigns in rallying musicians and fans, producing and distributing CDs, and organizing tours and events across the country. The current state of the music industry, with commercialization and mass distribution, worked to their advantage to help spread ideas to a diverse and concerned youth generation. The ways music was used in the 2004 election deviated from how it was used during past social movements and demonstrated music’s political function today.

Despite all the organization I saw around the 2004 Presidential election, the end result (4 more years) was not what many of those organizations were working toward. Although I had not heard the term "social media" four years ago, I think that it was the key ingredient missing in 2004.

After witnessing the different ways that the 2008 Presidential Candidates used social media in this past election and seeing the results of those differences, I see what has changed since 2004. Back in 2004 MySpace was the hot place for musicians to be but not Presidential candidates, Facebook was still thefacebook.com and was only open to Zuckerberg's Harvard classmates (until the fall of 2004 at least), Friendster was still kinda cool, LinkedIn was getting started, Flickr just launched, LiveJournal and Blogger were around but not used by Presidential Candidates, YouTube was not around, Digg was not around, noone was Tweeting… what did we do?! How did we all connect?! I guess we didn't, at least not to the extent that we do now.

With the availability and popularity of networks like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. my senior thesis would be quite different if I was writing it today. The "organization" that I saw in 2004 that helped communicate a message and form a community has turned into all of us through the social media tools that we all use today. This could turn into a 10 parter!

- Rebecca Roebuck

Tags: election, facebook, music, social media, social networks, twitter