Something I’ve recently beeninterested in is whether or not social media and social networking sites can actually enable or influence real political action. Political engagement has been my main research focus in another class I’m taking this semester. I thought it was interesting that Danah Boyd (2008) said that when mostpoliticians and activists talk about using social networking sites, they’rereally talking about using it as a “spamming device,” or what Crawford (2009)calls the “broadcast-only” model. She says that just because someone wants to reach millions of people, it doesn’t mean they will do so effectively because if nobody is interested in hearing what they have to say it doesn’t matter that the information is out there for millions of people. As I’ve discussed before,if someone is not motivated to learn or seek out well- informed information, they just won’t. It won’t matter how much information is widely and readily available on the Internet.
Additionally important here is the idea of being tuned in. Often as Crawford (2009) notes with Twitter, we utilize a type of “background listening” with the updates and messages we choose to receive and follow. Having Facebook and Twitter and other applications readily available and accessible on our phones and other mobile devices often means being tuned in 24 hours a day. But just because we’re “tuned in” doesn’t mean we’re processing everything that we’re fed, and more often than not, as Crawford notes, we end up scanning and discarding, or tuning out lots of material. And while some of us are active media consumers, who look to switch up and maintain a healthy media diet, most will just search through the tidbits that momentarily hold their interest or mirror ideas and thoughts they already have. That brings me to the next somewhat obvious, yet still unsettling issue raised in these readings.
Just as marketers use platforms like Facebook and Google to track our media consumption habits and target us with ads and information tailored specifically to what they think we want to see, we also tend to seek out opinions of others just like ours. Boyd notes that politically engaged people tend to know and converse with other politically engaged people like themselves. Likewise, uninterested, disengaged people typically associate with people just like themselves. As Boyd puts it, “social network sites create cavernous echo chambers as people reiterate what their friends posted” (243). I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve watched “Friends” on Facebook mindlessly repost statuses ranting about this political debate or that politician without any sort of insight or rational basis of opinion.
I don’t know that I’d call Boyd’s view a dystopian one, so much as a “cyber-realist” one on the effects social network sites can have on political engagement. I do, however, have to remain optimistic about the effects that social media has and could potentially have in mobilizing citizens to real political action. Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential election is the best example of social media at work and being used in the right ways to mobilize groups who had otherwise been politically disengaged. As Malcolm Gladwell wrote, the tools of social network sites have reinvented social activism. I would also argue that it’s changed how people can come together and collaborate to campaign for issues or candidates that are important to them, and have also offered politicians and other leaders the access to connect with a global community.
But again, the most disturbing topic I feel like we’re continually faced with each week as we read is the issue of privacy (or lack thereof) on the Internet. As Boyd (2008) tells us, public and private are merely guidelines on the Internet because “there are no digital walls that truly keep what is desired in, and what is not, out” (243). Boyd & Ellison (2008) ask whether or not law enforcement has the right to access information posted on social media sites without warrants. As the article I linked here last week mentioned, the FBI is already well on its way there.
There is still plenty of room for growth and change in terms of how social media can influence political engagement. I believe the key to using social media to influence future political views will depend on how the message is crafted. It can’t be simply thrown together and put out there like a spam message. The messages must be powerful and have purpose. Without that power and purpose there will be no memorable change, making social media little more than an afterthought in the political process.
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