Barack Obama

So as you all know, as of Tuesday night we now have a new President of the United States of America, Barack Obama.  I personally could not be more thrilled about Obama becoming our new commander in chief.  With all the excitement about the election, I’ve been doing a lot of research on Obama over the past few days and I came across an article from the Los Angeles Times about how news of Obama’s victory spread like wildfire through Facebook and text messaging the night of the election. (http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2008/11/lebanon-news-of.html).  The article mainly focuses on the reactions of the people from other countries and how excited they are to find out that Barack is our new leader.  One man from Lebanon even said that he was jealous that their country couldn’t have a peaceful leader like Obama. "When I heard the news, frankly, I shivered," said Jamal, who said he congratulated his friends on Facebook after Obama's victory.”  Another girl, Amer Ghandour was lying in bed when her phone started going off with calls and text messages about the fact that Obama had won.  "I was shocked to learn that Obama has made it, I think his charismatic, wise and rational personality will lead to the promised change and not anything else."

 I think it is so amazing that with computer mediated communication its possible to find out anything you want in the blink of an eye.  Some people see this as a negative thing for our society but I think it is a really good thing.  I of course think it’s wonderful that all these countries are already embracing Obama as our new president.  That’s a very important thing for our country’s foreign relations. 

 Unfortunately, I’ve also seen how people have been using Facebook over the past few days for complete and total criticism of Obama and the Democratic Party.  I can’t believe the negative comments that I have read on Facebook about Obama.  They’re already judging the man when they haven’t even given him a chance to show them what he can do for our country.  It’s everywhere; it is on blogs, on people’s status updates and wall postings.  The things that are being said are so vulgar.  It’s definitely an instance where people are using these technologies for negativity.  What really frustrates me the most is that people are so judgmental of other people’s opinions.  This is America and under the First Amendment we all have freedom of speech so it’s tough to see people bashing other people via Facebook for supporting our new president.  I’ve actually been trying to avoid Facebook these past few days because reading these people’s negative thoughts are really frustrating to me.  But all in all I think that it is really cool how people used Facebook throughout this campaign to support both candidates Obama and McCain.  Facebook really got the word out to the youth how important it is to vote and the election last night showed that it worked with Obama taking two thirds of the youth vote.