“Beware the Smart
Campaign” is an opinion article written for the New York Times by Zeynep
Tufekci. This relatively short article
talked about the technology that political candidates for president had for
identifying voters and how to appeal to them through advertisements and social
media. For this report, we will focus
on Zeynep Tufekci and this article by examining who she is, why this article
was in the New York Times, and the responses to this article about its creditability.
Zeynep Tufekci gained
her PH.D at the University of Texas in Austin in sociology. She tends to be curious about society and
technology and how they interact, hence many people and places calling her a
“technosociologist”. She currently works
at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill as an assistant professor in
the School of Information and Library Science as well as the Department of
Sociology. She is also a fellow for the
Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. Before this, she was an assistant professor
at the University of Maryland – Baltimore County in the Department of
Sociology. She has taught a few classes
in sociology and technology and has written various articles for different
publications, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. She also has her own blog site where she
writes about various articles for discussion.
Besides being trained to be an expert in the field, she also says that
she talks and writes about these subjects because in is what she enjoys.
As mentioned before,
this article was posted in the New York Times.
As it is commonly know, the New York Times tends to have a more liberal
approach on various topics and ideas. As
such, the article itself tends to focus more on the success of the Obama
campaign for reelection rather than on Romney.
However, the article itself tends to take a more objectionable approach,
showing how and why President Obama won through the ad campaign through
technology. In the article, she mainly
focuses on how Obama’s campaign was effectively able to convince voters to pick
him through the use of technology and not political issues. Therefore, even though the audience may have
been a bit biased, Tufekci was able to be objective as possible in her own
writing.
In the comment section
of her article posted, there were 114 comments made by people. In most of the posts, comments tended to
state how they knew this information already and how this was one of the many
ways President Obama was able to win the campaign. While some comments criticized Tufekci for
her critical position on the Obama campaign, most were relatively positive about the
content of the article as true and fair.
In the end, “Beware the
Smart Campaign” is from an intelligent author and has a clear objective stance
to it. This article can be well trusted
and use for analysis in the studies for this class.
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