Blog Post #5

Politics and Twitter

For my Rhetorical Analysis I have decided to write on an article in Chapter 6-B. It is called, Does Twitter promote democracy? I chose this because I think it is very interesting how social media plays such a huge role in our society. In this article it talks about how the President of Chile and all of his cabinet members have twitter accounts. Their hope is that it will create more of a democracy and include the say of the people. It also explains to us how President Obama 20,000 letters each and every day. They are filtered through and only about ten of those actually make it to the president. With twitter accounts everyone would be able to speak their minds, but there still would have to be some sort of filter. This article is arguing that it would allow constituents to communicate with the community on a more personal level and actually be able to communicate with them over social media. It may only be possible at a local level but they say it would be a good idea. Some politicians used social media to boost their popularity among the voters. It actually did help some to get elected. Although this may be a good idea, there is no possible way that Politicians would ever be able to respond to these tweets and Facebook messages because there would be so many. We need our politician focusing on the issue at hand rather than staying up all night tweeting responses and reading thousands of Facebook messages. I just don’t see how this would be very productive.