By now most of us are relieved that the election is over, but the comments section of the Salient website still live on. New media like it has in recent years with elections around the world featured prominently in the recent VUWSA election. In the aftermath of the election I look at the use of new media by the main candidates.
Salient Website
www.salient.org.nz
Those who frequent the Salient website had their appetites whetted by the initial news story ‘Right-wingers to contest VUWSA Election as A-Team’ as this was the first most saw of the A-Team and save for their obtrusive chalkings in the quad it became the unofficial thread for debate. So far there have been at least 284 comments on the story which is probably a comments record (for this year at least).
One comment by a Lukas Schroeter on September 13, 2007 at 10:46am said; “Stop it stop it stop it stop it!! Really this has gone to far. Salient shouldn’t be a place to slander people. So stop pretending to be me or I’ll get my friends Roger Douglas, Ruth Richardson, and Rodney Hide to come and get all Fiscally Responsible on yo’ arse.” This clearly over the top comment indicated that there was much impersonating and muck raking being done on the Salient site.
The Salient poll which went up on the website earlier than originally planned became the subject of spamming. Loopholes and an initial lack of IP restrictions allowed the supporters of all three Presidential candidates to boost their own votes to not be so far behind the others.
These consisted of allegations by the A-Team that Young Labour sent an e-mail to its members telling them how to spam the poll. Meanwhile Cosgrove’s brother, “had competitive races with some of his mates on who could add the most votes in a particular time frame, cheap entertainment apparently.” The poll as of last Monday was still being voted on despite the election being over. Cosgrove won the Salient poll with 152 votes (41%) with Geoff Hayward getting 115 votes (31%) and Lukas Schroeter 107 (29%).
The low point of the Salient website comments was a posting about death rumours about one of the A-Team candidates which was appropriately removed.
SalientTV
www.salient.org.nz/columns/salienttv
As was expected the VUWSA elections created many stars, many of whom had never been seen before nor seen since. This is definitely true of Angry Tuihead who popped up after one drunken crazed afternoon in the graveyard who felt that he had to speak out about Presidential candidate Joel Cosgrove. Another shady character also came out of nowhere, and no it wasn’t the Reverand Paul Danger Brown, but a pirate that was hanging out at the tavern that is known as the Mount Street Bar and Café. He also wasn’t too fond of Cosgrove as he made a point of as well as blowing on a harmonica in another SalientTV piece along with other pirates in a sea shanty.
The Reverand himself shot a long but detailed video in his VUWSA office where he called the A-Team fraggles implying that they are lazy, consume what others make and destroy things that took a lot of time and effort to construct.
The A-Team were so well organised that they had already produced an infamous Muppet video they were repeatedly showing the same lectures over and over again. They were kind enough to have already used their own bandwidth uploading it to YouTube (900+ views) thus making life easier for Salient’s IT master.
Salient’s response was to produce the Harry Potter spoof video of A-Team leader Lukas Schroeter, Lukas ‘Potter’ Schroeter (284+ views).
SalientTV was also there on election night with the announcement of the results (229+ views) posted as fast as the BBC newsroom, with an elated Cosgrove having to rush off to work on a gig at Bodega (273+views) and Paul Brown saying “Kiss my ass to the A-Team” (70+ views).
Blogs
It’s now a requirement for successful candidates to have a website, and this year’s election was no exception. First off you couldn’t miss www.a-team.org.nz as you would have been forced to walk all over it, literally in the quad thanks to the bane of VUWSA elections ($2 shop jumbo sticks of coloured chalk). Embarrassingly the site on the big day of the launch was down as their domain host was under going maintenance. Slick and well designed, the site was late adding a forum and was unsuccessful in shifting any of the debate from the Salient website over to it.
Joel Cosgrove blogged regularly on www.joel4president.blogspot.com where he mentioned taking Lukas Schroeter to task before a lecture over the A-Team’s infamous Muppet video. He last blogged on September 30; “I Won! I was going to pull a Rocky “ADDDDDRRRRRRIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAANNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” but instead got a hug from Nick Kelly… and a pash from Heleyni. Makes the job worthwhile already, that doesn’t happen everyday. I’ll post some more detailed thoughts as I form and consolidate them… Wooo!”
Successful Education VP candidate Paul Brown also blogged as usual on his bebo page www.bebo.com/rev-bdp which he advertised at the bottom of his ARSE posters. Meanwhile Hayward, despite claiming he had no websites, kept a low profile with a Facebook group seeking support for his re-election as President.
YouTube Video of the Week: Amazing Coordinated Samsung Dance
Only South Koreans could go overboard in corporate loyalty with this amazing coordinated human pixel dance…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X76ZIGQgBWg