How Social Media Is Ruining Politics
It is turning out to be more encompassing and controlling, more totalizing, than earlier media ever was.
.. If Sanders is a king, Trump is a god. A natural-born troll, adept at issuing inflammatory bulletins at opportune moments, he’s the first candidate optimized for the Google News algorithm.
.. What Trump understands is that the best way to dominate the online discussion is not to inform but to provoke.
.. If traditional print and broadcast media required candidates to be nouns—stable, coherent figures—social media pushes them to be verbs, engines of activity. Authority and respect don’t accumulate on social media; they have to be earned anew at each moment. You’re only as relevant as your last tweet... In the 1920s, radio disembodied candidates, reducing them to voices. It also made national campaigns far more intimate.
.. The blustery rhetoric that stirred big, partisan crowds came off as shrill and off-putting when piped into a living room or a kitchen. Gathered around their wireless sets, the public wanted an avuncular statesman, not a firebrand. With Franklin Roosevelt, master of the soothing fireside chat, the new medium found its ideal messenger.
.. In the 1960s, .. TV placed a stress on sound bites, good teeth and an easy manner. Image became everything, as the line between politician and celebrity blurred. John Kennedy was the first successful candidate of the TV era, but it was Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton who perfected the form. Born actors, they could project a down-home demeanor while also seeming bigger than life.
.. What’s important now is not so much image as personality. But, as the Trump phenomenon reveals, it’s only a particular kind of personality that works—one that’s big enough to grab the attention of the perpetually distracted but small enough to fit neatly into a thousand tiny media containers. It might best be described as a Snapchat personality. It bursts into focus at regular intervals without ever demanding steady concentration.
.. they still view social media as a complement to TV coverage, a means of reinforcing their messages and images, rather than as the campaign’s driving force.
.. In this familiar plot, a trope of modern campaigns, the candidate is first pilloried, then required to make a heartfelt apology, and finally, after the sincerity of the apology is carefully weighed, granted absolution. At which point a new narrative begins.
.. With social media, we seem to have entered a post-narrative world of campaigning. And that greatly circumscribes the power of traditional media in stage-managing races. Rather than narrating stories, anchors are reduced to reading tweets.
.. What is a surprise is that social media, for all the participation it inspires among users, is turning out to be more encompassing and controlling, more totalizing, than earlier media ever was. The social networks operated by companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google don’t just regulate the messages we receive. They regulate our responses. They shape, through the design of their apps and their information-filtering regimes, the forms of our discourse.
.. When we go on Facebook, we see a cascade of messages determined by the company’s News Feed algorithm, and we’re provided with a set of prescribed ways to react to each message. We can click a Like button; we can share the message with our friends; we can add a brief comment. With the messages we see on Twitter, we’re given buttons for replying, retweeting and favoriting, and any thought we express has to fit the service’s tight text limits. Google News gives us a series of headlines, emphasizing the latest stories to have received a cluster of coverage, and it provides a row of buttons for sharing the headlines on Google Plus, Twitter and Facebook. All social networks impose these kinds of formal constraints, both on what we see and on how we respond. The restrictions have little to do with the public interest. They reflect the commercial interests of the companies operating the networks as well as the protocols of software programming.
.. Political discourse rarely benefits from templates and routines.