barack obama

With Barack Obama's victory today being attributed to women voters, it looks like we still live in a quasi-patriarchal world as far as the alpha male territory of social media is concerned.

In the 2012 US presidential election the traditional ways of campaigning- canvassing, fund-raising and character assassination, played the same part they always have. However, this time the tools were the top social media networks and content optimised for mobile devices.

The Gender Divide

Facebook and Twitter were the top names and weapons of choice for Romney and Obama, with Tumblr also gaining increasing momentum to distribute images which reflected election trends. Tumblr's animated gif images make it the perfect medium to ridicule, as the jokes loop on and on.

However, it seems that very few female voices triumph amongst this onslaught of channels, which serve to accentuate male prowess. To some extent this is true both in the design of many types of new media and the gender of those who are top influencers amongst their peers.

US President Barack Obama is currently in England on day three of his first UK state visit, and has already met the Queen, Prince William and David Cameron among many other top British figures.

Mr. and Mrs. Obama arrived in Ireland on Monday and although they were only there for less than 24 hours, they managed to fit a lot in. In Ireland’s capital, Dublin, the President made an already famous speech to re-affirm the ties between the US and Ireland. To huge cheers he started the speech in true rock star fashion:

"Hello Dublin! Hello Ireland! My name is Barack Obama of the Moneygall Obamas, and I've come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way."

He followed this by meeting with a distant cousin of his and then sampling a traditional Irish pint of Guinness, although there was one slight hiccup when the President’s armoured car (nicknamed ‘The Beast’) got stuck on a ramp when coming out of the US embassy in Dublin. You can see the (hilarious) video below this post. On Monday evening the Presidential party decided to leave Ireland a day early to fly to England over fears of the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud moving in on Tuesday.