There is a widely held view that the Obama campaign used social media in a revolutionary way to raise money and build their organization.  I support this view.  More generally, I believe that social media like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter have the potential to increase our capacity for self-government.  Used effectively, social media and the internet can enable citizens to receive information faster, with less hierarchy, and organize for action more quickly and efficiently.  But we have a ways to go.  Political blogs have been criticized many times as being echo chambers where like-minded individuals congregate to take pleasure in having their world-view validated by others.  There is some truth to this charge, although there’s nothing wrong with people who have similar views coming together to discuss issues and talk about how their political goals can be achieved.  This kind of activity has been occurring in America since revolutionaries met at the Old South Meeting House to plan the Boston Tea Party.  Please note: I am not comparing bloggers to the Sons of Liberty!  But what happens when people have their biases reinforced over and over again by people with almost exactly the same views?  What happens when liberals rarely interact with conservatives, and vice versa?  Well, sometimes, this happens:

Obama has already failed. His first two months are the WORST in HISTORY for a new president. His policies are concrete CYANIDE. The market has increased the rapidity of FAIL in the last two weeks and if there was any remaining SANITY in this country, we would storm the White House and the Moron Congress and physically remove them, tar and feather them, and run them back to their idiot electors in their home districts.

That was courtesy of a really venomous yet entertaining blog I found the other day via Twitter, mean ol’ meany.  Clearly, there’s a lot of anger here (all those words in CAPS), and yet I’m still LOLing from the posts on this site.  I even got into an argument with @meanolmeany before writing this post.  I admit it was a lot of fun.  But my point is: it could be that the blogosphere has encouraged this kind of rage and hatred.  At least, that’s a hypothesis that much smarter people than me have raised many times before.  Liberals are not innocent, of course.  Aren’t a lot of political blogs–Daily Kos, for example–just the same kind of thing as mean ol’s?  Indeed, if I’m honest with myself, doesn’t my own blog come close to propaganda for Barack Obama at times, try as I might to fight it?  These are the questions that keep me up at night…No, not really.

Recently, Marc Ambinder wrote about this problem and offered some suggestions (also see Glenn Greenwald’s follow-up):

Here’s a simple way to increase intellectual cross-pollination on the web: honest bloggers of the left and the right should try to interview at least one author/historian/politician from the other side of the aisle at least one a month.  So — Media Matters shouldn’t just criticize Bernard Goldberg; they should interview him. Glenn Greenwald should, I don’t know, see if Jack Goldsmith from Harvard would chat with him online. Bill Kristol should interview Jane Mayer.  Pajamas Media needs to interview Democrats and Democratic experts, and not just each other, or Joe the Plumber, or Sen. Jim DeMint. Righties interviewing righties has gotten so boring and repetitive; lefties fawning over lefties is lazy. Who’s going to be brave enough to reach out to an ideological or intellectual opponent, promote their new book, or interview them?

I have another suggestion: liberal political bloggers need to join Twitter and start talking to all the Meanys out there.  Conservatives can do the same.  I know there’s a lot of confusion out there about Twitter, but I believe it’s one of the most powerful tools for political discussion and organizing that has been developed on the internet so far. In the short time I’ve used it, I’ve found Twitter to be a much better platform for engaging opponents of one’s views than the blogosphere.  Here’s why.

First, with blogs, it’s all too easy to just focus on the blogs that agree with our worldview.  It takes a lot of time to read posts on blogs, and let’s face it, most of us are just too busy to read the opposition’s blogs in the same way we read blogs that share our point of view.  Or, we just don’t want to hear what those idiots on the other side are ranting about.  The micro-blogging nature of Twitter allows you to see little bits of idiocy restricted to 140 characters so you can react immediately in your own 140 characters, instantly skewering that conservatard’s/libertard’s dumbass tweet.  Hey, I’m not arguing that Twitter is going to make our political discourse any more civil.

Another advantage is that Twitter is a mix between an enormous chatroom and tens of thousands of “microblogs,” so that by using hashtags such as #topprog or #tcot, it’s very easy to find groups of liberals and conservatives chatting with each other.  It’s easy to start conversations with people in these groups.  If you like what they are tweeting, you can follow them and basically have an RSS feed deliver you their “microposts” in real time. This makes it very easy to find people who are interesting that you can immediately chat with. Or, you can find wingnuts that need to be taken to task for spreading lies.  For instance, a lot of crazy right-wingers on Twitter are spreading the “Obama is not a natural born citizen” lie.  It may not do much good, but confronting these people on Twitter does at least force them to defend themselves in real time and may cause a little bit of shame.  With a blog, anonymous commenters or bloggers can write something false or stupid and just walk away from the computer and hide.  Twitter makes that a little bit harder to do.

Third, Twitter has an advantage over Facebook and blogs in that you can connect with a truly vast group of people that you’d never come into contact with in any other way.  I’ve interacted with strangers from Alaska to Hawaii to England to Australia, liberals and conservatives alike.  This enormous social network creates many possibilities for political discussion and interaction.  It’s possible to meet entertaining yet loony cranks like @meanolmeany or more reasonable conservatives who are not going to spew hatred towards the president.  The possibilities for meeting lots of strangers who think differently are much greater on Twitter and may allow for more reasoned debates between political opponents.

Finally, while Twitter is full of geeks (myself included), many of them seem to be social enough to meet up frequently at “tweetups.” That makes Twitter a mix between Facebook, blogs, chatrooms, and Meetup.com.  I’ve been to two non-political tweetups so far this year, and I’ve decided to organize my own political tweetup in Boston soon. This makes real organizing possible in a way that is much more efficient than blogs. You get to know the people who you want to invite using Twitter, and then it’s that much easier to get them to show up for events or actions. There are substantial advantages in this regard for political candidates to use Twitter to recruit volunteers and supporters. This is much more sophisticated and dynamic than a slowly changing blog or, even more static, a website.

So those are just some of the ways that Twitter can be a very effective means of breaking political boundries.  Let’s have a cross-pollination of ideas via Twitter so that we’re not just talking with our fellow partisans.  It could be that, by talking to people we disagree with, we will sharpen our own ideas by having to defend them in a public forum to a hostile audience.  That will contribute to an ideal of deliberative democracy that there seems to be a strong desire for in the country at this time. On the other hand, it is also possible that engaging people who we think are wrong and/or stupid could lead to an all out postmodern civil war (twival war?) in the blogosphere and Twitterverse. But, that sounds like a good time, doesn’t it?