The Social Media Revolution

Remember all the way back when we were talking about the power of Facebook to foment revolution? We've witness the inverse of that equation in the case of the now very troubled Anthony Weiner. He made sure not to blame social media, but haven't we learned anything from Marshall McLuhan? The medium does effect the message and vice versa.

Even in the more basic social media here, language, the terms are tricky: the ambiguousness of hashtagged slogans ("#WeinerYes), the exaggeration of commitment (followers), the directness of numbers. These are the politician's staples, their basic tools for engagement, and Weiner did what anyone using social media is prone to do: fall into the murky depths of its biases.

All of these tools encourage a certain kind of publicity — a kind of politics, if you hew to the root of the word, in the polis, in the governance of the public — and if we're prone to fall in, we may very well. If we're a politician who's already predisposed to the spotlight — but also enamored of the concept of more direct, even intimate connections with his and others' constituencies — we'll fall hard. And most embarrassingly for a politician, our media will trade its more important stories (like calls for the resignation of Syria's leader) for its interest in a dumb Twitter mistake or for every Congressman's thoughts about the matter (the lesser call for resignation).

There's another bias embedded in these technologies too, and it may be hardest of all to detect: they're new, which means they tend to get us overly excited about their potential. But just as we can be sure that a dictator is going to try to pluck the lowest hanging fruit of any future revolution by clicking onto its Facebook page; just as we can be sure that social media and information technology isn't always simply a good thing, we can be confident that no one's going to launch a more thoughtful conversation about what Twitter (and other massive new technologies) does and does not do for the cause of political engagement, transparency, and privacy.

Connections
A Joke Twitter Feed That Could Change the Way We Understand the Internet
Egypt's Twitter Revolution Is Real and Radical and Revolutionary
Expulsion and Explosion: How Leaving the Internet Fueled Our Revolution
How Malcolm Gladwell Got It Wrong: The Revolution Will Be Networked