Twitter Debates
Thankfully, I still do not have a Twitter account, although I have been publicizing the all-candidates meetings using the one for the cult. I certainly have been reading a lot of Twitter, however; several times a day I have been refreshing the #wrvotes hashtag.
Here is a new thing this election: Twitter debates. The WLU Community Cord has organized a few Twitter debates using the hashtag #ccedebate, and Regional Council hopeful Karen Scian organized one using #wrtth . The organizers seem to think that these debates are great successes because some people ask questions, and they feel that conventional all-candidates meetings are not working because so few people show up.
I am not happy with Twitter debates, and I am not happy with the technological bubble many of these candidates live in. Here is a partial list of my objections:
Firstly, there is the feudalism issue. It offends me that in order to be taken seriously as a candidate it is mandatory for candidates to declare fealty to Twitter and Facebook and whatever other social networks happen to be trendy. (I do believe that it is reasonable to expect candidates to have some kind of publicly accessible web presence, however, even if it is just a Wordpress blog or Weebly page.)
Next, it is not clear that the actual number of people following the Twitter debates is larger than those attending conventional debates, and could well be smaller.
Thirdly, Twitter debates systematically discriminate against those who have poor internet connections or weak computer skills. I am sure that many people in Waterloo's tech bubble feel that such candidates should be disqualified from seeking office, but I strongly disagree.
Fourthly, like regular debates, Twitter debates are synchonous. You have to be on Twitter at exactly the right time to participate, or you get left out. But this is not how technology tools like Twitter are portrayed.
Fifthly, Twitter debates are difficult to follow and difficult to summarize. So far none of the debates I have seen have been summarized in a way that is easy to reconstruct after the fact. Apparently there are some services that can help with this (the word "Storify" came up, but I do not know what that is). Twitter reminds me a lot of IRC for non-nerds, and just like IRC it is difficult to follow threads cleanly. It's really frustrating.
Sixthly, Twitter (and the technosphere) leaves out a vast swath of the population. There are those who do not use technology much. There are those who are not aware of the right hashtags to follow. There are those who are ideologically opposed to Twitter. People from all of these groups are voters. But they are systematically left out.
Seventhly, Twitter (and online communities in general) create echo-chamber unreality bubbles. I think there is going to be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth on October 28 when we learn that the majority of residents don't think like the technological elites do, but by then it will be too late. This affects the kinds of questions that are asked and kind of support candidates think they have.
Eighthly, unless you click the "all" link on a Twitter hashtag you get only the popular (read: retweeted or favorited) results in the hashtag, not all the results. This is not what you want for a debate.
What is the answer to this? My answer has been to compile resources so that even people not on Twitter can get information about the election: http://www.waterlooregionconnected.com/showthread.php?tid=149. But that is insufficient as well, partially because I do not know how to get the word out effectively to others.
I believe that meatspace all-candidates meetings are superior to Twitter ones, which is why I have been trying to organize some. Publicity is hard work, and I am not good at it, so turnouts have been bad, but I am trying. I am also recording the audio from these forums, and posting the audio online so that people who did not know about the meetings can listen online (either by downloading MP3s onto their computers/phones/mp3 players or by streaming the audio).
Recording audio is not difficult. It requires a laptop, a microphone, Audacity and some cables. Any event that uses microphones and a mixing board is pretty close to being able to record good-quality audio for consumption later. Even sticking a laptop with a built-in microphone in front of the candidates is better than nothing.
Uploading audio is pretty easy as well, and http://archive.org offers free hosting for Creative-Commons licensed audio. Editing the audio is a little tricky, but even light editing is sufficient for most all-candidates meetings.
This is no panacea: people who do not have good Internet access will still struggle to get the audio files. But it is much much better than the Twitter approach, in my opinion. Even taking notes and posting textfiles of meatspace debates would be superior to either Twitter debates or livetweeting. But we have convinced ourselves that social networking solves everything, and those who don't do social networking don't matter.