YOUR GOVERNMENT ON TWITTER
One of the best things I have learned in the past week is that there are actually an impressive number of Congressmen on Twitter. The other great thing is that a lot of them are personally twittering rather than having staffers do it for them. There is a nice nice wiki with the names of known governmental types on twitter. A lot of them seem to only update very infrequently (such as Mark Udall (D-CO)), or have staffers writing their tweets (such as Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner the majority and minority leader respectively). However their are a lot of congressmen that are writing their own tweets and replying to other twitterers. Dan Burton even has two accounts @DanBurton for his personal tweets and @RepDanBurton for official stuff from his press office. The grandaddy of all congressional twitterers is John Culberson from the Texas’ 7th District with almost 1300 updates. Another wild thing is that he follows 3200 people and is followed by 3000. He has also made a splash recently by Twittering and Qikking live updates and video from inside the House of Representatives during what has been called a Republican congressional revolt.
A couple interesting trends in congressional Twittering is that I expected Democrats to be more on top of new web technology but Republicans outnumber them on Twitter (at least from the list above) pretty significantly. From a quick look Republicans also seem to be the most prolific twitterers (discounting feeds that appear to be done by staffers). It also seems that Twitter has brought Democrats and Republicans together on some issues. Basically Culberson and a Democrat ally, Rep. Tim Ryan, want to overhaul rules regulating correspondence from representatives. The current rules are somewhat archaic and are based on the findings of the Franking Commission which was set up to regulate how postal fee allotments could be used by congressmen. The rules forbid posting to any website that contains politicking or advertising (i.e. pretty much every website) in their “official capacity” and posts must include a disclaimer identifying the poster as a representative. The 140 character cap on Twitter prevents that. The rules also apply to blogs, youtube, and other social networking sites.
It is extremely interesting to see how congress keeps up with technology in their personal lives. It is extremelty interesting to see folks like Rep. Culberson interacting quite directly with constituents (and other citizens whether they agree or not).
For example (excerpts put together from twitter feeds):
@johnculberson 1st back up your tax assertion 2nd actually? IMO market can drive it IF we do it right & we’re not.
@jpippert I strongly support alternatives-but without taxing anyone else to pay for it. Let free market & tax credits drive it-but drill 1st
@johnculberson & drill here drill now: listen to T Boone Pickens & his mtg with Obama re dev. alternative energy. http://tinyurl.com/6lvayh
How is that for direct democracy?
this is all very interesting. first:
>> “The rules forbid posting to any website that contains politicking or advertising (i.e. pretty much every website) in their “official capacity” and posts must include a disclaimer identifying the poster as a representative. The 140 character cap on Twitter prevents that. The rules also apply to blogs, youtube, and other social networking sites.”
Why wouldn’t the user profile associated with the account deal with this issue?
secondly: how about the google “feed” of what obama and mccain are reading? obviously a bit different, but certainly related.
thirdly: how bout some international perspective? anything like this going on outside the US? i know there are at least a few vdov readers who are living abroad these days.
It seems to be a widely flouted set of rules… though they are “official.” I am not acquainted with the niceties of the current rules but they seem to be at least somewhat malleable.
The real tragedy is that they seem to be manipulated more politically than practically which is the real problem.
Yes, as my sister the journalist opined today, “Professional journalism is dead,” by which I assume she meant objective/factually based journalism as opposed to the “interpretive” journalism that began to come into vogue while she was still in journalism school. Plus our journalists, much less our populace, are too myopic to see as far as Georgia, in any case–your pappy and yourself happily excluded from this generalization.
But my sister was reacting to the hoax about Palin reported by the mainstream media which was an outrage, whether you care for her as a politician or not. MSNBC had the temerity to claim that it was “a victim” of the hoax, though they did not do a single thing to check out the source which was patently ridiculous on its face. I think that makes them a negligent perpetrator of the hoax.
The supposed McCain campaign insider had said he was affiliated with a non-existent think tank which should have been easily verifiable as false. Another journalist on a talk show dismissed the seriousness of the reputation-damaging false reporting as inconsequential, as Sarah Palin had made other remarks (unspecified) which made the information reported in the hoax believable. So it was her fault.
As a former cub reporter for an award-winning paper myself (okay, the awards were actually for technology, not for investigative reporting), I take a great interest in journalism and deplore the current loss of standards of objective reporting. Though I appreciate that your father is trying to hold the fort and award the best.
Well, I’ve gotten quite a bit off the subject, but there you have it. -MbF
Why my post went under this article and not under the one about reporting on the Soviet incursion into Georgia, I have no idea. A slip of the digit perhaps… MbF
I know a lot of people have been trumpeting the “professional journalism is dead” trope but I see it more as a reaction to the proliferation of new technology. Basically the top ten stories of the day (the ones that it takes no effort to report) that take up 90% of TV airtime are now reported nearly instantly for free online by no less than several million people. This seems to have pushed a lot of big journalism houses into “blogger” mode where they have extremely high credulity at the expense of letting some garbage through in order to report things as fast as possible.
This also seems to bring out one of the things that people love about blogs but deplore in media and that is letting your personal passions and biases leak through.