16 February 2017
Twitter In Adolescence
Is Trump releasing its political potential?
By John Watson
“Tweet, tweet”, “tweet tweet”; those are not quotes stolen from Warner Brothers but the achievements of the Presidential fingers as they race across his mobile phone, reacting to events as quickly as a gunslinger in a Western. Threat to world peace? “Tweet, tweet.” Adverse media report? “Tweet, tweet!” Difficult question to be decided? “Tweet, tweet.” Criticism from an actress? “Tweet, tweet, tweet! And she isn’t a very good actress anyway.”
Much has been said of President Trump’s continual use of Twitter and what lies behind it. Is it symptomatic of a shallow appreciation of events? Or perhaps something more physical, a new form of twitching illness, originally confined to celebrities with little to do but now increasingly infecting the political classes? Is it a sign of over-sensitivity, the need to reply to everyone who voices a doubt or criticism? It probably owes something to one or all of these things, and other similar suggestions will be made if the President’s popularity continues to fall. But perhaps it is something else too: the birth pangs of a new type of relationship between politicians and the public.
In the old days it was simple. The voter chose a party with whose approach he or she broadly agreed and let them and their representatives get on with it. There was a trust here that the representative would not move too far out of line and that broad mandates would be accepted, but by and large the voter placed his or her trust in one politician or another and then left him or her to get on with it. That system has been undermined in two ways. The first, no fault of the politicians but simply the result of advances in technology, is that the availability of instant information online has disrupted the information flows on which it depended. It is no longer the case that the typical voter would pick up his insights into world affairs from the daily paper, often one sympathetic to his broad point of view and thus reinforcing his trust in those who represent them. Now news comes instantly from all angles and in a highly staccato form which often gives a very misleading impression of what lies behind it. Misleading or not, that sows doubt, and doubt about information soon turns into doubt about the decisions being made by elected representatives.
We are all too familiar with the second. The movement of the political elite beyond its mandate has now been well and truly exposed and the politicians are reaping the whirlwind in the shape of a collapse in public trust.
Take these things together and it is no surprise that politicians should be experimenting with new ways of keeping in contact when their voters and the twitter chatterthon is a part of this. If you cannot hold them by convincing them of your wisdom, perhaps you can make them quasi-friends through a continual stream of vapid messages. “Met local charity workers for lunch. What a job they are doing. Great people. Privileged to be associated with them. Good lunch too” has no policy content whenever but is designed to send a series of subliminal messages about the writer. One can hear the electorate ticking them off. Meets local charities:√. Appreciates good people:√. Modest:√. Makes time for lunch to hear about local concerns:√. Spends time outside Westminster bubble:√. Enough of this sort of thing and the electorate begin to regard their representative as their friend – much like their favourite contestant in Big Brother.
Now suppose you were the new President, a man who has been swept to power by the failure of more establishment politicians to keep the confidence of the electorate, a man whose populist approach brought enormous dividends in the campaign, a man whose campaigning has shown him to be willing to do his PR in new ways. What is the choice? You could go back to the traditional ways of interacting with voters with its reliance on authority and delegation, telling them that they can trust you because you are different from the others. “Let’s do it again but do it better,” you might say. Quite apart from any feeling that this is moving backwards, you might be concerned that this involved contact being maintained through the political machine. That is all right if you have “drained the swamp” properly but could go badly wrong if there are areas of the political machine of which you do not have full control and which might not be wholly on message.
Or, as an alternative, you could use Twitter to try to bypass all that and engage with the voters direct, setting up personal relationships with them, sharing confidences, giving a human rather than a political reaction to hurtful comments, bleeding a little, becoming a friend, someone who voters trust because they know you. That has the dual advantage of preventing any distortion as messages are fed through the party machine and of a speed of delivery which means that you can keep pace with rival information sources. Well, if you had been advising Trump which route would you have suggested?
Look at the Presidential tweeting in this light and you will see something different from the shallowness, thin skin or twitching to which it is commonly attributed, no less than an attempt to use Twitter as the primary communication with the electorate in an attempt to create a relationship with them. It may only be a development of much that has gone before in politics but it is on a grander scale – largely because the gap between President and voter is a very large one to bridge. It is a bold experiment and much will change if it really works.
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