It’s no secret that almost every high powered political
figure has a twitter account.
In the recent Federal election, both Kevin Rudd and Tony
Abbot had an account and used it to reach out to those in the community who don’t
necessarily read newspapers or watch news. The twittersphere has been a greatly
used tool in the political world because of its strong ability to informally
address a formal issue.
On August 11, the date of the electoral leaders debate,
twitter was swarmed with political business as the debate took place. In fact,
Rudd and Abbot had previously started the debate over twitter weeks before even
leading into the actual event.
The only ‘downfall’ if you want to call it that – is that
the world of microblogging does in fact stray away from the idea of
professionalism. Sure the content that is posted on those accounts have to be
respectful – but in most cases if the tweet isn’t during the time of a
political debate or an election then twitter is used as more of a
conversational tool than a political tool. While microblogging in general has
evolved towards becoming ‘more conversational and collaborative’ (Honeycutt and
Herring, 2009: 10) retweeting and the engagement of the community with the
political figure doesn’t always happen.
Studies have found politicians to mainly use blogs as
‘campaign gimmicks’ (Lilleker and Malagón, 2010: 26) which takes away from the
genuine and humanised feel of their twitter accounts. For example, Kevin Rudd
and Barack Obama still use their twitter accounts on a daily basis. Possibly
because they are already established political figures. Others who are in the
political world do not use their accounts to interact with the community – only
when need be.
As a global media form, twitter in the 21st
century is just as important as the daily printed newspaper. Society is ever changing
and this leaves us with updated forms of global media. What once was television
reaching to the world, is now a single tweet that millions can see within
seconds of uploading.
Reference list:
Honeycutt C and Herring SC (2009) Beyond microblogging:
Conversation and collaboration via Twitter. Paper presented at the 42nd Hawaii
International Conference on System Sciences. Waikoloa, Big Island, Hawaii.
Lilleker DG and Malagón C (2010) Levels of interactivity in
the 2007 French Presidential candi- dates’ websites. European Journal of
Communication 25(1): 25–42.
Olorf Larsson, A. and Moe, H., 2011 ‘Studying political
microblogging: Twitter users in the 2010 Swedish election campaign’ New Media
and Society, vol. 14, no.5 pp.729-747.
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