Social media platforms have been expanding rapidly over the past decade, gaining a significant part of people's every day lives in different aspects. From business to education, social media has transformed the way industries target the public.
In an article written by Jackson and Lilleker (2011), the change in the political domain was examined with the exampleof Twitter as a social media platform in political communication. The main focus falls on British MPs and their use for self-promotion and constituency service.
Elected representatives now have new platforms and ways to communicate with their constituents on a wider scale with timely manners, allowing quick feedbacks and more interactions from both sides. There has been an increase in the use of social media platform such as Twitter by political representatives.
However, there are some downsides to social media. Apart from the misuse or ineffective use of social media by politicians in their attempts to reach and appeal to their constituents as mentioned in the article, the elected representatives can also be harassed by citizens through these very platforms, due to the their open and democratic characteristics. Last year, Connecticut State Senator Beth Dye was reported to take down her Twitter account because of the negative comments bombarding her way after introducing a debatable piece of gun legislation. And this is not uncommon among elected representatives with their experiment of employing social media as a new form of communication.
Thus, despite and fast growth of social media in the political domain as a means of communication and the results that it brings about, there should always be caution and strategies that politicians need to pay attention to when employing them. Not only this is to show the respect to the constituents, but this is also to protect themselves.
You bring up an interesting argument in the debate on social media in politics. Like you said, the usage of social media by politicians 'shortens' the gap between them and the people. This allows people to be closer to the politicians, with potential negative concequences due to harrasment.
ReplyDeleteI think this is also one of the reasons why for instance Obama's staff controls every single press release from the White House. The usage of social media allows for everyone to spread information about someone, and in the case of politicians this can be very undesirable. Of course Obama has the power and means to control the social media intel on him to a large extend, but a Senator from Connecticut obviously won't be able to do this. Maybe this should make us wonder about the negative consequences of social media on democratization?