Unless you’ve been living under a rock over the last few weeks, you’ve been inundated with news out of Washington D. C. about the debt ceiling passage. To me, it was interesting (and immensely infuriating) to watch our political process unfold. Perhaps the thing that interested me most was how social networking was used by the participants as leverage to influence the outcome.
It’s obvious that politicians in the United States believe (at some level) that constituents participating in social networks are a force. Many these days have Facebook pages and/or Twitter accounts (although I’m sure that a tiny minority of them ever actually contribute content—just like they have staffers to answer phones and mail, they have staffers who are responsible for the content on social networking accounts). And clearly some of them believe that a “call to action” to social networking participants can generate useful political discourse. Not only did the President suggest to Twitter followers in a speech last Friday night that they tweet their Congressional representatives, his office followed up by issuing a series of tweets providing followers with the Twitter handles of their recalcitrant (and largely Republican) representatives.
Two things happened directly as a result of this effort. First, the President’s account was unfollowed by around 30,000 Twitter members. Second, Congressional accounts were (predictably) deluged by tweets from concerned constituents.
The question in my mind is: did any of that matter? When you make a phone call to a politician, someone answers the phone (or you get to leave an actual voicemail); when you write a letter, someone has to open the letter and do something with it (round file); even when you write an email, someone has to do something with it (even if it’s delete it without reading it). Unlike any of those more traditional forms of communication, social networking isn’t interrupt-driven: With social networking—particularly Twitter—unless someone looks at the social networking site, the message can go completely and utterly unnoticed. When you tweet something to @SpeakerBoehner, for instance, neither he nor any of his staff has to notice it in any way whatsoever. They don’t have to read it; they don’t have to process it; they don’t have to respond to it; they don’t even have to delete it from anywhere (unless, of course, you are managing a Facebook page for a politician, in which case you still have to scrub any critical or embarrassing messages left on the wall). I have to believe that of the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of tweets that were sent to Congress last weekend, not very many (if any) were actually noticed by members of Congress. At most, one of their staffers told them how many messages they got, and if they were mostly positive or mostly negative.
While using social networking is a great political mechanism for getting you’re message out, it seems to be a woefully inadequate means of getting feedback (unless you go looking for it).
