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Political Persuasion
POLITICAL PERSUASION....Matt Yglesias mocks RNC Chairman Mike Duncan's recent burbling about how Republicans need to start using Twitter and Facebook and "the different technology that young people are using today":
I love Twitter. I have two Twitter feeds. I manage one with Twitterific and another with Twitterfox. And of course there's my iPhone interfaces, too. Twitter's neat, it's fun, I enjoy it. But you can't do political persuasion on Twitter and anyone who's at all familiar with either Twitter or political persuasion could tell you that. It's important for political movements to embrace new technologies, but part of embracing new technologies is understanding them and actually respecting what they're for and Twitter is never going to be anything other than an incidental sideshow to political activism.
I'm not so sure about that. It sort of depends on what you mean by "political persuasion," I think. A steady stream of tweets containing ever more apocalyptic messages about (for example) the imminent demise of American civilization due to immigration legislation wending its way through Congress could be effective at helping to rouse the masses to protest. Couldn't it? Matt is probably right that Twitter by itself is something of a sideshow, but all of these technologies put together (Twitter, texting, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) could end up being as effective in mobilizing the 20something generation as talk radio was mobilizing the Newt generation. And mobilization is persuasion, no?
Actually, Duncan's real problem is probably not so much that he's wrong about Twitter, but that he doesn't have any real clue about what Twitter is. He seems to treat it more like a buzzword than a genuine concept. But at least it's a start.
RNC Chairman Mike Duncan's recent burbling about how Republicans need to start using Twitter and Facebook and "the different technology that young people are using today"
Additionally they could start promoting some ideas that actually appeal to people, and building up a track record of implementing them. ... Nah.
The Democrats aren't so far ahead of the Republicans in the technologies I mention, but unfortunately in a duopoly all you need is to be a little better.
I'm not sure whether the problem is the inability of Republicans to communicate or the idea that the audiences they are going after are unreceptive. It's not as if the McCain campaign or the RNC or any other groups were without Internet sites and social networking groups in this election. Even if you accept the idea that there's a smaller group of people who might be more open to using this sort of technology for politics (younger people might be more liberal and are definitely more likely to have a Facebook account), should the disparity have been so large? If it was, it seems like it's not so much how the technology was used, but the message, ideas, and people it represented it.
In other words, perhaps President-Elect Obama said it best when he claimed that you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.
It seems to me you could reduce Barack the Magic
Negro to a series of tweets that were slowly released over the course of a day, raising expectations and interest like an series of consecutive Burma Shave signs.
zomg, it's hilarious to think about a bunch of sixty-something republicans being turned into a human botnet by their information overlords. How apt.
Why does Matt have two twitter feeds, and why does he have to manage them with two different tools?
No need for alarm, boys, these newfangled 'talkies' are just a boorish fad --I personally guarantee it shall never last. That Al Joslen fellow is a fool. A careless, dumb fool, and I'm glad it won't be *my* career his Jazz Singer boondoggle ruins. And on the subject, Mssrs. Farnsworth and Baird would do themselves a great service if they ceased toying with their incessant electromechanical image dissector/projector screen machines, for such a silly toy can never replace the role of sweet, loving Radio in the hearts of the American people.
Well most of them have
Well most of them have started to use twitter now to communicate and make deals. This is 2009, I'm surprise they have just caught on. I do not see anything wrong with that.