Comments on: Statecraft via Twitter

By: BajaArizona

BajaArizona — Fri, 04 May 2012 21:11:56 +0000

“Social media is often accused of coarsening our public discourse and of making us stupid.”

Chrystia doesn’t spend any more of her article telling us why the above accusation might be true as she is busy making a cogent opposite point. Which is fine of course.

Whether social media is making us stupid is difficult to answer. Certainly it is coarsening public discourse. Before social media or the internet even, if an average person wished to join the public discourse the only avenue was a letter to the editor. Poorly worded or offensive messages would of course have not been published. During “Web 1.0″, it was still necessary to create a website or blog. However, “letters to the editor” were replaced by “comments” sections of websites, such as this one. And that was the first crack. Now for the first time, depending on how well moderated a sight was, anyone could write anything.

Social media has opened the flood gates for nearly anyone to jump into the public discourse and have a chance at making an impact. Which means that ignorant and heretofore edited ideas are no longer held in check but are instead free to roam and sometimes (often?) gain credibility and following. The ignorance isn’t new. It has just found a new outlet. The effect isn’t making us more stupid. It is revealing how stupid we have always been.

Yet kudos to Ms. Freeland for showing us the other side of the coin as well.

By: LoraineAntrim

LoraineAntrim — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 15:15:47 +0000

Communicating via social media can be time consuming, but well worth the effort. The pay-off for political writers is that their views can: 1) gain a larger audience 2)create dialogue and conversation 3) spread ideology and new ideas and 4) offer a window into culture, politics and movements on an immediate and continuing basis. Business leaders have long understood the impact of tweeting and blogging. And any politician who wants to advance her/his web 2.0 presence canlook to some of the top tweeting CEOs as role models. Loraine Antrim

By: SeaWa

SeaWa — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:30:33 +0000

btw, sometimes I just love reading Chrystia Freeland’s angle on things. Not that I agree or disagree, it just introduces a different line of thinking than the hysterical droning (is that an oxymoron?) of most news commentaries.

By: SeaWa

SeaWa — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:27:56 +0000

“Social media is often accused of coarsening our public discourse and of making us stupid.”

Well, it doesn’t make us stupid, we (I) tend to be less filtered and allow my stupid side to show more.

We are used to interpreting and weighing information from a variety of styles of communication. Everything from the emphatic rantings of a person in meltdown to the cold and distant descriptions of an observer of heinous atrocities.

Social Media is simply a new form of communication to be integrated into our communication strategies. The only danger is to those who give it more power than it deserves. In other words, take everything you read with a grain of salt and assume that any comment you read is just a very basic part of a greater world view. A world view you would not be able to determine without extended conversations.