Social Media & the Final Presidential Debate

Watching the debates is no longer a passive exercise for the American public.

Although I watched the final 2012 presidential debate on CSPAN’s TV channel, a number of sites hosted live streaming of the debates from the web.

Ustream livestreamed the debate via PBS NewsHour and CBS News.  Various Ustream channels also offered other options for watching and interacting with the debate, including coverage of protests outside the debate halls, commentary from “Show Interrupted’s” Hooter Girls, a drinking debate livestream, and other debate panels.

Instagram takes a look inside NewsHour’s foreign policy team’s debate coverage HERE.

Mashable, a leading online source for news, information and resources for the “Connected Generation”, hosted their own live blog and live stream of the debate on YouTube, including comments from a panel of experts and “viral content hunters.”

YouTube itself, in partnership with ABC, livestreamed the debate worldwide for free.  Various news networks including The New York Times and Al Jazeera provided live, online analysis.

Instead of live-streaming the debate, Tumblr, a popular blogging site in which I personally blog from, live-GIFed the presidential debate.  Having teamed up with The Guardian to further GIF reporting as a successfully innovative form of Journalism, Tumblr live-GIFed debate coverage at Gifwich and across dashboards everywhere.

As expected, Twitter was all atwitter with various #debates coverage.  I participated in the online conversation mostly through my Twitter account (@ShelbyyQ), although I also updated a few Facebook statuses.

Via Twitter, I was directed to HuffPost Live which offered a “presidential debate conversation hub” in the hours leading up to the debate and a livestream that played along with HuffPost Live hosts during the debate.  Conversation topics included, Inside Politics, Comedy, Young Voters, and Women.

Also via Twitter, I was notified of a recently launched iPhone app from GorillaSpot Media, Cliptamatic.  The new app lets users search a collection of video clips from live events, updated in real-time, and select a short clip for sharing with friends.  Although I did not personally download and use the app during the debate, Cliptamatic has raised some interesting ideas surroudning the debate and our culture of social media.

“Since Presidential debates were first aired on television in 1960, they have been defined by ‘defining moments’ that live on in political history,“ said Athan Stephanopoulos, CEO & Founder of GorillaSpot Media.  “With Cliptamatic, users can share those moments in real-time as part of their own debate commentary in what is already the most social media-driven election to date.”

Although much of the debate coverage I looked at and interacted with took the form of pithy posts such as Tweets or Facebook statuses, a lot of media utilized video and fairly innovative forms of social media successfully.