Trust Me It\u27s Going to be Great: A Media Ecology Analysis of the New Political Campaign

The recent proliferation and advancement of mobile technologies, specifically social media, has affected several aspects of American life, including the political campaign. First pioneered in 2008 by then candidate Barack Obama, mobile technologies evolved and proved to be integral to Donald Trump\u27s success in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaigns. The following research applies an interdisciplinary framework that combines core tenets of media ecology with the Yale development model to track the ways in which social media affected the presidential campaigns at each phase. The study found that social media shifted communication patterns allowing candidates to create a sense of community where it did not exist before, as well as altering the significance of preexisting actors in the political realm