Hello Hello, this is your special correspondent reporting to you from the crazy Tea Party Madness, we are throwing tons of tea into the Hudson River, come join us! Just kidding. It was a big week for the Tea Party movement, it was their anniversary on February 27th. Funny how we’ve only started to hear about them in the past few months.
What is the Tea Party?
- The Tea Party is composed of mainly, white conservative Republican men who starting grouping together after the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,
- What has made this group unique is the their use of technology in promoting their cause. They have using mostly, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Blogs and also Fox News which has been the only television network that has reported this cause the most.
- They are a grass roots movement, so most of there collaborating is done online and through viral marketing.
A timeline of events for this week:
2/27 – One year anniversary – groups are preparing for Tea Party Tax Day April 15th.
This week Speaker Pelosi acknowledges the Tea Party movement and their willingness to fight for their cause – via FoxNews
“Glenn Beck thinks the elite media is marginalizing the tea party movement because they think the participants are “just stupid people with pitchforks.” Beck told Fox & Friends that the movement was just going to get “stronger and stronger.” via FoxNew
Also, Arnold Schwarzenegger criticized the TP movement as something that will “twinkle and disappear” yet it is now spreading to the United Kingdom where many are creating events to gather and vent. Many of these reports were done through individual blogs and of course Fox News.
So how are these groups mobilizing?
First it began with a cause, and some believe hatred for their President and his race. (eeeek) Then the word spread as people decided to congregate in churches, groups and started tweeting about the movement. Then the sites went up. One site that I have been watching all week is the Tea Party Patriots.
When logging into their site you see a couple of options which are very important: As you can see in the list below – there is an option to blog, as well as tweet on behalf of the cause.
Join Us
Read How Start a Tea Party
Find a Tea Party Near Me
Download April 15, 2010 Banners
Post/Tweet To the Patriot Feed
Join Discussions
Post to Contract From America
Read Our Blog
3 MAIN MEDIUMS/NORMS:
Facebook -The Tea Party Patriots Page has over 96,000 fans alone.
Twitter – Tea Party Patriots - 1200 followers
YouTube – TPP Channel - 204 Subscribers
What does this all mean?
I have take one small faction of the Tea Party Movement, the Tea Party Patriots, joined their ranks an looked over the mediums they are using? Now why would they take this route? Maybe they are taking a page out of Obama’s book by starting with something that doesn’t require main stream media to endorse.
The new media age enables users to collaborate (as I mentioned in class last week). The Power Theory that Benkler discusses also is a good example of how these users are interacting. One person sends out a thread to a “not so interested” group of people, but they still skim over it. One of those people decides to broadcast that information, which then creates a domino effect. It is similar to celebrities no longer using publicist but their twitter feeds,
ASSUMPTIONS
A) It’s cheap
B) It’s unedited
C) More people will pay attention to it if their a humanistic quality (you feel personal closer to the users)
Another analysis I tried – Google – Tea Party – 35.1 million hits today
As you can see below I have also done some twitter stats for you all – for TPPatriot, the one group I am focusing this week’s research on.
The first graph is tweets per day:
The next graph is daily aggregated tweets:
The final is tweet density
To conclude – this is my analysis on TPP Patriots and their use of twitter. They use a twitter feed on their own site called the Patriot Feed where I have been updating my status and reading other users comments.
New Media = Tea Party, without these form of media/technology I don’t believe the Tea party would exist. This week a new movement has erupted called the Coffee Party as well.
If anyone is interested in attending a tea party event with me, please let me know!
