This election, Canadians are harnessing the power of social media with the first ever national Tweetup for Democracy. Leadnow.ca and OpenMedia.ca are co-organizing a cross-country Tweetup to bring people together, online and in-person, to share their thoughts on the parties and their platforms during the 2011 Leaders' Debate.
While the cross-country Tweetup takes place, Leadnow.ca and OpenMedia.ca will also host Debate Watch Parties in Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. From coast to Canadian coast, citizens will come together online and off to make their voices... er... Tweets heard.
"Politics doesn't have to be a one-way conversation. We want to spark a cross-country dialogue where people can weigh in, in real time, about how the candidates are responding to the issues that matter to them," said Leadnow.ca Executive Director Jamie Biggar. "From poverty to climate change, there are many major issues that are being left out in this election. The Tweetup is a new way for Canadians to talk about the issues that matter to them."
Social media, including applications like Facebook and Twitter, has become an important new avenue for democratic participation. While Canada has recently seen record lows in voter turnout, this so-called "social media election" has seen over 72,000 tweets so far. In fact, Canada boasts one of the world's highest rates of internet and social networking usage, a trend which has contributed to the success of online campaigns, like OpenMedia.ca's successful Vote for the Internet campaign.
Steve Anderson, OpenMedia.ca's Executive Director, added: "This Tweetup, like the Vote for the Internet campaign, is about allowing citizens and candidates to interact on a level playing field during this election, and later when public policy is being formed. The use of the Internet for citizen engagement serves only to reinforce its importance in for a healthy, vibrant democratic society. We hope that the leaders will consider this, and have Tweetup participants in mind as they lay out their platforms this Tuesday."
Canadians can participate in the Tweetup by following these hashtags: #db841, #yourcnda, #elxn41, and #votenet. For more information on the national Tweetup, and to see a livestream of the tweets, visit http://www.leadnow.ca/en/tweetup
I'm curious about what exactly is meant by "harnessing the power of social media". Who exactly is being "empowered" by this exercise, and to what end is the "power" being used?
Talking about "the issues that matter" to people is hardly something that is facilitated by Twitter, which is designed solely for the delivery of bumper-sticker one-liners. That's hardly what I would call talking about issues in any meaningful way; in fact, it hardly qualifies as "taking" at all. At best, it's simplistic, impressionistic, and superficial chit-chat.
"Politics doesn't have to be a one-way conversation" says Biggar. And yet, tweeting doesn't make it into a two-way conversation, because the polticians aren't participating. The politicians give their spiel and then we the masses get to twitter amongst ourselves — and this is supposed to be empowering? This is supposed to be what passes for political discussion of important issues? I think not.
A "healthy, vibrant democratic society" (the words drip with irony when applied to Canada) would be one in which we get to have some influence on the politicians. Tossing one-liners amongst ourselves is not going to achieve that.
What are you objecting to, M. Spector, "one-liners" or the fact that politicians aren't participating? If it's the first, you don't have a very good handle on what twitter is, and you also don't seem to recognize the "one-liner's" place in history. I suppose Marx's Theses on Feuerbach doesn't deserve attention? Nor Felix Féneon's Nouvelles en trois lignes? There is a particular generic beauty to the aphorism, the thesis, the maxim whose dimensions far exceed 140 characters. So too with twitter. It's easy for techno-phobes to dismiss twittering as minless chatter, or whatever other pejoratives you wish to toss their way, but the full effect of this interconnected and interactive medium is accretive and sustained.
If it's the fact that "politicians aren't participating" (I repeated your scare-bolding), then I guess you have a very narrow view of what "particpation" means. If you mean responding twitterer's comments with direct tweets, well, I suppose that's true--although many politicians and journalists do exactly that. But "participation" in the broader sense is just as important: realizing which issues resonate with Canadians, and responding to that. If you need evidence, you only need to look as far as Lindsey Pinto's (and the rest of Open Media's) incredible campaign to stop usage-based billing and their other laudable campaigns to fight the corporatization of the internet.
Predictably, the twitterfest produced nothing of any interest to anybody and empowered exactly no-one. Marx's Theses on Feuerbach it most certainly wasn't.
The Tweetup for Democracy both promoted and epitomized the dumbing-down and coarsening of political discourse in this country.
While CTV and CBC were replaying our smug leaders regurgitating their own rehearsed and scripted talking points, the twitter feeds I was reading were calling them on their bullshit. I'm not saying that Canadian tweeps were rewriting Marx's Theses, but you were critiquing the form, not the content (since you hadn't seen it yet). The form has history and, indeed, pedigree.
As for "empowerment," this is a tricky and nebulous word--and I agree that it is problematic that this form of political engagement occurs in a wholly corporatized space (cf. also facebook, MySpace, etc.); but to discard twitter out of hand with a conservative, humanist vocabulary is short-sighted and ahistorical. What do you suggest? Shall we turn to freer forms of political engagement? Write a letter to the Globe, perhaps? Jockey to be a man-on-the-street talking head for CBC? Call in to your local radio show's talkback line?