I just blasted away close to $2.8 billion in pork-barrel spending in three minutes using veto lasers and I'm only on level 2 with 4 McCains left. Not too shabby, right? This is all thanks to an application for Facebook created by U.S. Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign which, instead of reeling in young people as it is most likely designed to do, serves as a glaring illustration of how poorly they understand the demographic.
"Pork Invaders," as the game is called, is an application that anyone with a Facebook account can install in which the player shoots piggy-banks with vetoes as the piggies move back and forth across the screen dropping small, what appear to be, upside-down crosses at your McCain-logo-box-ship. As you skewer pork with vetoes, you save taxpayers millions, but be sure to keep an eye out for the pork-barrels -- strike down one of those and you're well on your way to balancing the budget and paying off our national debt. And after completing a level, you are rewarded with McCain campaign talking points trashing U.S. Sen. Barack Obama's record on earmarks while trumpeting his own. Check out the screen-shot below.
I doubt this venture into the world of social networking will give Obama supporters much to worry about. The game looks like an artifact of the early 1980s and surely those upside-down crosses will not do much to woo fence-sitting Christian conservatives. Moreover, when you look at just the sheer numbers, Obama has around 1,040,000 supporters on Facebook compared to McCain's 150,000. Still, I want to at least commend the McCain campaign for making the effort to reach out through social networks, but releasing an online game that looks painfully out of date will not only remind voters of the candidate's own distance from youth but may also instantiate McCain's recent declaration of computer illiteracy (see Maggie Barker's post), neither association being particularly flattering.
At NDN and the New Politics Institute, we have done a lot of work to help progressives better understand social networking. Click on the link here to find practical guidance on how to best engage social networks, including a memo written by Facebook's chief privacy officer. Below is a video from a recent NPI event during which Beth Kanter, a professional blogger and technology trainer, shares some of her thoughts on how to successfully utilize social networks.
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