Social media (SM) have entered the world of politics with recent significant political developments. Instances of SM are Facebook, Tweeter, topically-focused Websites, Websites for sharing digital artifacts (YouTube, Instagram), Rich Site Summaries, and social bookmarking sites. Contrasted to old media of TV, press, radio and film, SM can be seen as new media. In politics, new media can do the same things that old media do. But they can do more. Still, what appears a new thing, sometimes can be just the disguised old.
Something New: Crowd Acting
When a political activist tweets, he/she engages in broadcasting, thus replicating radio. When the group with a political agenda posts text and videos on a Facebook, they do what TV has always been doing in political processes. But the difference is that anyone can use Twitter and Facebook to create messages and reach out to a select group or (theoretically) to any of 320 million people on Twitter or 1.6 billion on Facebook. And these other users can talk back to the original sender. These communication and connectivity capabilities are apparently broader than those of radio and TV. Old media are controlled by professionals and special interest working behind them, such as governments, political parties, corporations, think tanks, organized crime, and public relations agencies. Therefore, SM partly replicate old media, while doing something more, expanding capabilities of old media. And this is not all.
Since 2010, Facebook, Tweeter and other SM have been deployed for self-organizing in political developments that resulted in toppling governments and dismantling functional nation-states throughout the Middle East (so called “Arab Spring”). SM also played a role in self-organizing of protesters against the police brutality in the United States during 2015. SM have been involved in the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe, being deployed on all sides – by pro-refugee forces, by their opponents, and by the refugees themselves. It is the nature of SM’s Internet-centric technologies, which couples with mobile technologies (cell phones, Wi-Fi devices), that enables a rapid deployment, self-initiated communication, and emergence of political activism within the crowd and by the crowd.
SM have undoubtedly facilitated entering of the masses into big politics. Internet-bound vocabulary labels these with “crowd” (as in crowd-sourcing, crowd-wisdom, and crowd funding). SM relate to “crowd” where the old media reference the “audience”. Although lacking a high-brow connotation of “audience”, the term “crowd” rejects the passive role of media message receiver and allows for broadening of the actor role (even though somewhat ambiguous).
Something Old Appearing New: InstaSnap Politics
As SM are open media, the crowd has no exclusive hold over it. A political leader owning a Facebook page has “friends” who absorb the content pushed onto them. The leader-mass relationship is also reestablished on Twitter via the division between Twittees and “followers”. Contenders to the President’s Office in the U.S. have millions of Tweeter followers (Donald Trump 8 million, Bernie Sanders 2 million). Barack Obama, the sitting President who started the SM game, has as much as 76 million followers. The number of followers became a measure of political rating in American politics to the extent that some politicians feel compelled to fabricate the figure (Hillary Clinton, also a contender for the throne in Washington, has been suspected of such a practice).
Politicians can, therefore, manipulate SM for promoting their own interest. In this respect, SM are not immune of the spin doctoring that appears pertinent to media in general. Old media have established such a role resolutely with little variation across types of political systems. The press, for example, in multi-party systems divides its allegiance between main political parties. Ownership interest and advertising concerns additionally bound editorial policies. In single-party systems or dictatorships, the press is on even a shorter leash. As for the radio, it has served as a loudspeaker of massive propagandistic meetings and other events to intrude into private homes. This role was diminished with the end of great dictators’ era. The propagandistic role gave way to debates and interviews in which brain washing is less direct. The rest of radio programming is entertainment mechanically appended to political programming.
TV turned political events into a total visual show, expanding over the radio’s audio-boundedness. Whether TV spectacles take form of reports, debates, election races, or unscheduled boxing matches between agitated parliamentarians, TV is after reality construction by occupying the audience’s cognition. The excitement arousing content and emotional appeal are brought to the fore – threat, fight, success, disaster, comedy, tragedy, fear, hope, envy, admiration, craving… The Greek drama and Roman circus blended into televised reality. The rational content is irrelevant – emotional effects count. Like radio, TV ends up with entertainment, but spin doctoring is smoothly blended in it. Donald Trump is a good example for this.
The businessman-turned-politician and aspiring U.S. President, Trump deliberately pushes TV into the domain of entertainment. Trump uses his experience from the successful reality show Apprentice, in which he featured in a role of himself (sort of). As part of his ongoing campaign “Make America Great Again!” Trump appears often on TV screens. Following a bossy style of a business owner from the Apprentice, he piles up a petty talk, pokes and punches his opponents and does everything that has little to do with political issues. In effect, Trump creates a role of the nation’s big daddy in an emerging TV soap titled “American Presidential Elections”. TV actively helps since Trump’s trumping is the way of creating sensationalistic content that makes TV’s manna. As a joint effect, by pushing the medium’s engagement in politics to a grotesque, Mr. Trump confirms that TV is to entertain the political audience as the gladiator arena did in the Roman circus, while real politics remains invisible.
The Trump campaign heavily utilizes SM in the same sensational roller-coaster manner. This may be eye-opening to those who view SM solely as the means of people-power. Trump’s Website, of course, is all biased in support to his owner. What is more intriguing, the site’s front page features links to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube – four power houses of SM. The content of these SM parallels that on TV: self-advertising, petty attacks on the opponents, and blank promises on America’s prospective greatness under Trump’s leadership. No true substance. Vox populi is aired as a normal component of SM, but the crowd wisdom boils down to thumb-up, thumb-down reactions to Trump’s provocations. Again no substance; an exception are posts by Mexicans venting anger at Trump’s idea of enlarging the wall on the American-Mexican border.
Trump’s use of SM proves that new media can serve as the means of mass manipulation by special interest. Thus, SM replicate old media. But they even expand the manipulation capacity as spinning is more direct, cheaper, and potentially more mesmerizing due to special properties of SM. These bring up playfulness, speed, randomness, virulence, excitement, and shocking capability via a multi-format content. For instance, Instagram enables creating and sending visual messages on the spot. Communication and photo/video sharing is virulently fast. The content is also discrete rather than story-like, allowing user to arbitrarily plug in and plug out. These easing effects clean up a space for play, surprise, and excitement, and may attract even the folks uninterested in politics.
Snapchat mimics Instagram, but with temporary messages that erase themselves after a while. By boasting randomness and a shocking capacity, Snapchat infuses thriller-like excitement into the reality show of political campaigning. For the fear of missing a snap and thus falling out of the loop, the crowd members must be on a continuous lookout. The umbilical digital cord is reinforced, and a Trumpian InstaSnap politics enters a harvesting season.
It remains to be seen whether SM will end up by replicating and extending the manipulative character of old media, or perhaps substitute these by empowering crowd-driven politics? (As for Mr. Trump, SM are firing some funny bullets.
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