The answer to that question can now be answered through Twitter, a micro-blogging service that allows users to post short messages known as “tweets” for their followers to catch up on their daily activities. It is quickly becoming popular for people to keep in touch, like Facebook and MySpace. Actually just Monday, Facebook launched its new site, which Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com describes as the Friendfeedization of Facebook. He states that while there were privacy issues being sorted out with the feed, “…it’s also clear that they like what they see at Friendfeed, which expertly combined the idea of an activity stream that was first popularized by Facebook with the microblogging trend introduced by Twitter.“
I knew what Twitter was, but since I don’t use it, I needed to check out how the people at commoncraft explain it, “in plain English:”
What is unique about it is that it creates a sense of community between groups of people (either those you know personally or not) during those mundane moments of the day, by letting them know what you’re up to; letting them know what you are doing.
As Facebook and MySpace quickly became must-haves for political campaigns, Twitter is rising in popularity, but also raising many questions about what constitutes proper communications between the politicians, their constituents, and the public.
Michael Whitney at TechPresident found out that Libertarian Presidential candidate Bob Barr apparently twitters himself, with no staff and no help, unlike other public officials who have staff to make those tweets, such as Barack Obama. Even the bloggers at the annual conference Netroots Nation, spent a lot of the time twittering away.
But Congress is concerned about this when it comes to politicians’ tweets and the new way of interacting with constituents, and as a result, congressional regulations may be used on the site. The House Franking Commission (which also determines the use and rules of taxpayer money with constituent communications) is now trying to figure out what to do with all these stamps! It’s in the process now, as the article states, of updating regulations originally conceived to govern sending postal mail in order to account communicating over the Internet. Already, rules do exist that cover official Web sites and e-mails.
Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) has been one of the leaders in this new way of communications; he held a ground-breaking virtual townhall meeting, answering questions online, including through Twitter. He hopes that Congress will take into consideration how the Internet is changing both daily lives and politics, and can be used for good like accountability: “The single-minded goal needs to be to shine sunlight in every dark corner of the Congress, to make the Congress and the government as transparent as humanly possible,” Culberson said in a telephone interview with CNN late last week. So maybe that’s where some of the rest of the issues lie too?
In researching for my final project, I found that both U.S. Senators of Florida are severely lacking in their social media efforts. Facebook and MySpace have already become staples to campaigns, but neither have an official page. And if a politician hasn’t tapped into that basic foundation, Twitter is not on the horizon. So when it comes to these other Congress members, who don’t rely so much on social media because of the demographics of their constituencies, what will happen to them? Will they be viewed as un-transparent when asked, “What are you doing?” Only time (and the response from the public) will tell.
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