February 27, 2009
Posted by David Karpf
Tweeting their way to victory? Color me confused…
Think Progress had a good piece on Wednesday about the Republican leadership’s new love affair with the Twitter. Apparently, Representative John Culberson (R-TX), thinks that he and his 8,097 twitter-followers are going to retake congress thanks to this powerful new technology.
I’m gonna need some help here.
I only joined Twitter a couple of months ago — the iPhone app makes it an accessible form of entertainment when I’m on the road — so maybe there’s something I’m missing. But at base, it seems to me that twitter is a pull technology. People only see your communications if they opt-in to seeing them. And this isn’t one-time opt-in, like signing up for a listserv that then broadcasts updates to you. It’s more like a discussion forum, which you have to actively choose to go visit on a regular basis. It’s a wildly different structure, organized through network ties and hashtags, retweets and follower lists, but that baseline element remains constant: you aren’t going to talk to anyone through this medium that didn’t already want to hear from you. Sure, it’s now a lot easier to follow someone’s microblogging — without Twitter, I’d only encounter Ana Marie Cox during her visits to the Rachel MaddowShow, but with it, I get a constant stream of pretty awesome hilarity from her. Twitter has made me more of a fan of Cox, as it has David Weinberger (it would’ve made me a bigger fan of Clay Shirky, but I’m already at maximum-Shirkyfan-capacity). Standard new media formulation here: ridiculous lowering of transaction costs –> novel communication patterns.
But can twitter actually be of much use for collective action, particularly mass collective action on the order of a Congressional election? The medium is neat when applied to conferences, letting people comment about speakers and letting conference organizers broadcast changes to the schedule with crazy-efficiency. It could probably be good for nextgen Smart Mobbing too. But congressional Republicans have a 17% approval rating right now. 17% of the population can produce 8,000 twitter-followers, sure, but how many elections is it going to win?
As far as I can tell, the Republican leadership’s strategy hasn’t gotten past the Underpants Gnomes level of sophistication:
1. Start Tweeting a Lot
2. ???
3. Electoral Victory!
Somebody want to help me out here? It this a hilarious example of elites trying to embrace new media while completley not getting it, or am I missing some critical ingredient that could actually make the strategy more effective?
1 Comments
February 27, 2009
I haven’t seen much research or commentary on what the strategy was behind the Obama campaign’s Twitter account, but I did run into 10 Reasons Obama Should Continue on Twitter. (The account has been dormant since the election.) There’s some pie-in-the-sky stuff there (e.g., the implication that the people running a political Twitter account read their followers’ tweets), though some of the reasons may be sensible. “Directing” people to “relevant content”? Okay, maybe. You could always throw out stuff like, “They’re voting on HR 1201 today! Write to your representatives!”
I’d say, then, that the problem with the Gingrich Twitter account written about at Think Progress may be the content more so than the form. It’s hard to imagine mobilizing anybody to action with directionless statements reaffirming general values.
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