#school captain

Splendid morning,

School Captain Elections are right around the corner. Two power hungry candidates Sophie Cardell & Jeremy Turner are counting on our votes, and you know I am here to judge them.

Shall we begin?

Sophie Cardell

Excluding the nana glasses, Cardell’s pantsuit shows real courage. Her policies on mental health days and forming a LGBTI+ support group have promise. However, Cardell is unintentionally sabotaging herself.

“Social media isn’t accessible on school computers, so it is irrelevant to my campaign”

Still sporting a Motorola flip phone, Cardell lives under a rock with Patrick Star.

In Australia, politics on social media run relatively freely. Twitter has become the “World’s biggest political debate chamber” thanks to the hashtag ‘#Auspol’(Australian Politics) as it provides a sense of homophily. In contrast, North Korea have been caught astroturfing (Keller, Schoch, Stier & Yang 2017, p.564). Astroturfing is the “hidden propaganda by powerful political actors aimed at mimicking typical supporters” (Keller, Schoch, Stier & Yang 2017, p.564). Basically, Cardell could create a Twitter account posing to be a supporter and push her nana glasses agenda.

Cardell’s ignorance will cost her, as political expression on social media “improves the utility of political information seeking” (Dalisay, Kushin & Yamamoto 2015, pp.896). Generation Z will bin your flyer, but they’ll retweet you, attracting new supporters.

My advice to Cardell is to jump on social media, or that Motorola phone won’t be the only thing getting flipped.

Jeremy Turner

Unlike Cardell, Turner realises “politicians can no longer afford to ignore the electoral leverage of the Twittersphere” (Jericho 2012, pp.306). Social media strategies allow politicians to create a brand, and interact with fellow candidates, current issues, and fans. Turner can use platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to collect data and profile users in order to target them (Jericho 2012, pp.308) .

However I didn’t say Turner was using his platform thoughtfully. Instead, he like many politicians are using it as a megaphone to blast opponents and mouth meaningless propaganda (Jericho 2012, pp.307). Turner is the Donald Trump of Shelferry College, if you will.

Both Trump and Turner have chosen an “amateurism” strategy (Enli 2017, pp.54). While Trump relied on his guaranteed media coverage to be heard, Turner relies on his popular ‘Jock’ status and his Dad’s school bribes donations.

Despite this, Turner constantly interacts with the public. This worked for Trump’s campaign as a quarter of his tweets were retweets, with 78% of them written by ordinary users (Enli 2017, pp.54) . He is also taking a leaf of out of Hilary Clinton’s book, organising a Youtube video. The video ‘trend’ has increased significantly since the 2012 election cycle (Enli 2017, pp.52) . Sadly, Turner doesn’t have enough brain cells to replicate a message stronger than Clinton’s Mirrors campaign, which amassed 5 million views.

My advice to Turner is to approach the position seriously, as Daddy can’t buy you manners.

I wanted to run for school captain. I’m lucky enough to have a fair few friends at my school, but I knew that I would have to do something memorable to win. I knew everyone would do funny, inspiring, creative speeches and so I thought about what I could do that would stand out. I was thinking about it for days to try and find even an ounce of inspiration when finally, it came to me.

And that inspiration came in the form of the queen, Taylor Swift.

I sat down and wrote a Blank Space parody about how I wanted to be school captain. Some lyrical highlights included: “got a long list of candidates, and they’re all pretty great” and “you’ve got a blank space, maybe write my name?”.  I got up in front of the whole school with my guitar and sang it. I mean, being the massive Swiftie I am, everyone sort of rolled their eyes and chuckled but it must’ve worked. I ended up winning.

So look at me now Mum, hours of running this T Swift blog and 14 hours of driving to go to her concerts paid off. 

Our daughter is school captain this year for her final year of primary school. Naturally we are rather proud of her. I finally managed to get a layout done of her inauguration. I created the layout with my Childhood Adventures Digital Scrapbook Kit and Childhood Adventures Glitter Splatters, available in both my Etsy store and my robyngough.com store.