All Things Cahill

Social Media and Politics – All Lips, No Ears

As the election cycle proceeds, I’ve noticed that the level of monologue in supposed discussions has increased to a fever pitch.  Take Twitter for example; it seems the chatter is now 20% political.  The problem is, I never signed up to listen to what everyone’s political viewpoint is.

I know, I can simply unfollow everyone that’s into political discourse for the moment, but the truth is I like some of the other stuff they have to say.  Too bad I can’t simply filter out a posts with a few words in them.

The problem I have is this: most of the folks looking to “discuss” politics really have no interest in discussion.  Even if they were interested in discussion, being limited to 140 characters is unlikely to be enough to convince anyone to vote either way.

The trouble is so many of us are staking our “personal brands” on our online personas, why would we want to be identified in a way that would potentially alienate 40% of the populace?

That’s right.  We talk about how potential employers look into our blog posts, at our LinkedIn and Facebook pages, so why would we want to share our deepest political views? Even worse, for some reason, everyone seems to think that naturally everyone will agree with them.  Why would you, when even in a landslide win, 35% of your fellow voters will have voted for the other guy/gal?

Maybe we’d all be better off if you just tweeted about what you had for lunch…as long as it wasn’t a cheese sandwich!

Tags: politics online, social media, Social Networking, twitter politics