Not Your Grandfather's Democracy

The following is reprinted from ICMA Press, and is authored by Rick Cole, City Manager of Ventura.

Twitter allows just 140 characters per "tweet," including spaces and punctuation. After a Republican member of Congress was ridiculed for tweeting during the State of the Union address this past February, Twitter usage exploded 3,700 percent in less than a year. By the time you pick up this article (or read it online), monthly U.S. Twitter users will outnumber the population of Texas—or possibly California.

In just five years, techcrunch.com reports that Facebook users have zoomed past 250 million. A Nielsen study estimated usage has increased by seven times in the past year alone.

Yet as blogs, YouTube videos, and text blasts reshape how America communicates, few local governments—and even fewer city and county managers—are keeping pace. E-government remains largely focused on websites and online services. This communication gap leaves local government vulnerable in a changing world. "Business as usual" is not a comforting crutch—it's foolish complacency. Just look at the sudden implosion of General Motors, the Boston Globe, and the state of California.

Yet it would be equally shortsighted to thoughtlessly embrace these new communication media as virtual substitutes for thoroughgoing civic engagement. We're part of a 2,500-year-old experiment in local democracy, launched in Athens long before Twitter and YouTube. In fact, local democracy operated long before the newspapers, broadcast media, public hearings, and community workshops familiar to today's local government managers.
Social Media Build Community

We may live in a hi-tech world, but the basis of what we do remains "high touch"—involving what some of the most thoughtful ICMA practitioners call "building community." Social media offer new tools to build community although they aren't a magic shortcut.

Read the Full Story at ICMA.

Comments

[J Sharkey]

Oh yeah, it's not like I've already got enough to do...Trying to compress civic issues into a Twitter format just wastes everybody's time. Then, of course, there's always the oh-so-exciting details of everybody's life...lessee, today I took out the trash, fixed a faucet, and tried to catch up on all my email I haven't been able to get to for the last several days...yeah right...