Ethan Riegelhaupt is senior vice president for corporate and public affairs at Edelman. Previously, he served as vice president for speech writing and internal communications at The New York Times Company. He was also a senior staff member for New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo. Follow him at @Ethanriegelhaup.I recently wrote a column suggesting that people could use digital tools to help counteract the explosion of negative political advertising coming our way this fall. While readers were generally supportive of the idea, I also sensed a fatalism in their comments about what we could accomplish.
While this mindset is completely understandable, it seems we’ve forgotten the most important lesson from the past twenty years of Internet experience: Profound change is within our grasp if we are able to make the intellectual connection between the power digital provides us and our political aspirations as a community.
Content is a great example of how this can play out. We are quite vocal online about what we want to see and hear. As a result, producers and programmers are responding with innovative new offerings for every imaginable medium. This should make us believe in the potential of our influence, but for too many, a pre-1960s political mentality prevails: What is will always be.
While the dysfunction in Washington, D.C. adds to this dispirited attitude, substantial leaps forward are actually happening. Last week, President Barack Obama decided to come out in favor of same-sex marriage, the day after voters in North Carolina voted in favor of Amendment One, explicitly rejecting the legality of every imaginable relationship outside of the male-female union.
Moments after President Obama told Robin Roberts of ABC News that people of the same sex should be able to get married, social media platforms exploded in excitement. Everyone noticed, including Republicans, who have treated gays and lesbians as a wedge issue for years. The reason they noticed: It was suddenly unclear how this issue would play in the 2012 election cycle.
What made the President’s same-sex marriage announcement even more prominent was a news story that recalled an unfortunate episode from Gov. Mitt Romney’s school days, relating to how he and a gang of his friends went after another boy, who may have been gay, and cut off his hair. The details quickly spread across the web and the Governor immediately apologized. Although he added that he could not quite remember the incident.
What we learned from the President’s announcement and the allegations against Gov. Romney is that the Internet is a useful social monitor. In many ways, the views and interests of the community are being expressed and reinforced by what happens on the web. As a result, historical evolution is being compressed. What used to take X amount of time has decreased.
What does this tell us?
If we believe something needs to change, we have the ability to make it happen. Social media is driving attitudes in the midst of a dramatic political moment in history. Because of this, we should be much more optimistic about what we can achieve and how quickly we can achieve it..
Source BY mashable.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment