From U. of Chicago: The MySpace Effect
By Maynard Hutchins
I would like to make a bold prediction: The advent of MySpace, facebook and other social networking sites is going to push the American political scene to the right in about 20-30 years.
With the rapid development over the past 15 years of internet technology, the traditional privacy of life has eroded just as quickly. Photo albums are obsolete; pictures are now kept on hard drives, ready to be instantly copied and emailed to friends and families or posted online. Home movies no longer require bulky equipment, but can be taken with a cell phone and shared with millions within minutes.
While we now find ourselves facing fewer obstacles in sharing our intimate moments with friends and family, we are also closer to sharing them with the rest of the world. Accordingly, it is only a matter of time until a generation of politicians arrives on the scene for which dirty laundry isn’t just something that hung out on the line at home; it was and has been hanging on servers in Silicon Valley, free of charge to see and copy, for years since its creation.
The result will be a political process in which it is much more difficult to create the ‘squeaky clean’ image traditionally demanded of mainstream politicians. Even beyond pictures of college days spent passed out on toilets in Vienna and movies of shenanigans on the El, blogs and other online writings make easily and permanently accessible ideas thoughts which these public figures may later shun or regret.
So what are the long term effects of all of this? The pool of candidates able to muster the requisitely clean background to stand for office will be intrinsically more conservative. It is no controversial position to claim that students who post drunken pictures and movies online and who write childish, inflammatory blogs and articles overwhelmingly tend to be more liberal. As such, when the time comes for our generation to consider a run for office, those able to rest assured of no blights on their background will largely be those who have already been conservatively inclined since their youth. What is more, the more liberal candidates still in a position to run may find themselves forced to soften their position because of previous statements or claims.
To be sure, this is not likely to affect those savvy liberals who have had their eye set on power and glory from the day they set foot on their college campus – but they rarely turn out to be dangerous radicals anyway. But it will certainly have an effect on the Ted Kennedy’s of the world and that ilk. Only time will tell, but one thing is for sure: the massive collection of incriminating, or simply revealing, material online is going to create a lasting imprint on American politics in the first half of this young century.
Editor's Note: A darker path is the possibility that society will learn to accept a politician's dirty laundry as inevitable -- just as the Massachusetts voters have accepted Kennedy's. Time will tell.
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Reader Comments (25)
http://phibetacons.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTkzNDA5NmE2YmNiYmNlMTU0OTY5NmUxMTRlY2EzZTc=
I think that naturally people will become more restrained in what they share with the world (which would be a conservative move). Social trends are starting to favor privacy of the restrained manner. America especially became sort of drunk on the easy availability of so much personal information, and now is starting to feel the effects of it. The legal privacy (pornography, ect.) issue is a totally different matter than the social one. The social has to do with all the high-school esque drama that unfolds when people reveal too much to total strangers. People will wise up and naturally come to the conclusion that airing ones dirty laundry isn't such a good idea. What ever effects that this has on politics will result from a concious social trend to be more private. Not to disagree with you Maynard, but politicians will become more private not out of fear, but because the public has itself become more private. Either way, restraint is a hallmark of good, conservative behavior.
To be clear, I didn't make the claim that 'blogs themselves have the power to move our society drastically to the left or the right'. And I wouldn't. (Also, on a side note, I'm not sure that blogs are good for democracy. Sure, they help spread 'information' and promote 'discussion'; but the vercaity of that information and quality of that discussion is oftern very debateable.)
My argument, rather, had more to do with the issues of restraint that you point out. I think you're right in that these current trends are going to cause people to be more reserved. However, while that is already happening to a certain extent, I don't think it will become a larger trend for quite some time. Specifically, I think that the sudden gush of unwarranted love for sharing information - deliberately or otherwise - has created a big enough thud that the reverberations are going to ring for a couple decades. There will be at least one generation who reaches their 40's realizing they should have been more carefuly in their 20's with online information. (and this is to say nothing of the 'legal privacy' issue)
Again, I think you're right on when you say, "The social has to do with all the high-school esque drama that unfolds when people reveal too much to total strangers. People will wise up and naturally come to the conclusion that airing ones dirty laundry isn't such a good idea." But to clarify my position, I don't want to say that this make politicians <i>become<i> more conservative; rather, I think one could argue that because of all the dirty laundry our generation holds out there today, the pool of candidates who won't face this problem in 20-30 years will probably be more conservative. This effect probably won't last too long, but I think it might create a noticeable ripple for a decade or so down the line.
Cheers,
Maynard
"Also, on a side note, I'm not sure that blogs are good for democracy. Sure, they help spread 'information' and promote 'discussion'; but the vercaity of that information and quality of that discussion is oftern very debateable"
This, I must confess was one of my pet issues a few weeks back. Blogs can go both ways when it comes to helping or hurting democracy. Right now I think that the blogsphere is doing a lot more good than bad. The great thing about blogs is the common, Jerffersonian if you will, style of it all. Blogs inherently encourage immediate reader feedback, and on the flipside provides a much needed foil to the MSM. My big fear though is that the blogsphere will evolve into another elitist force that dispells the desire for feedback and open communication. However, I don't see that happening for a while.
"Specifically, I think that the sudden gush of unwarranted love for sharing information - deliberately or otherwise - has created a big enough thud that the reverberations are going to ring for a couple decades. There will be at least one generation who reaches their 40's realizing they should have been more carefuly in their 20's with online information"
I am perhaps a bit too anxious for trends to bloom, but you're right-- any shift to a more reserved society will only be evidenced after the effects of a wildly unabashed generation are felt. We're probably at the very, very beginning of the end though. Hopefully this shift will be good for literature as well-- no more silly autobiographies or memoirs written by 20 year olds!
And of course all shifts are inevitable. The conservatism of the 80's was largely a reaction to the failed social liberalism of the 60's and 70's. Unfortunately, I still think that we're feeling the harsh effects of the counterculture movement.
janelle
And kudos to that last line.