Social Media: Friend or Foe in the Increasing Digitalisation of Politics?
Callum Loveless
The advent of social media has had a consequential effect upon our generation, essentially creating a subordinate world where you can communicate to multiple people, in multiple places. It loosens the restriction of one-to-one telephone calls and dialect, to allow communication to become plural, which people can then ‘comment’ on afterwards. In a way, it allows the individual to begin the narrative, or ‘hold the floor’, in light of the linguistic term, where they otherwise wouldn’t be able to due to social anxieties or structural oppressions. It equalises the playing field to distribute who has a ‘voice’ in society. Therefore, its role in forming or solidifying an identity, or more narrowly a political identity, is paramount in the age of the internet. However, whether this comes to benefit, or detriment society is a question laid bare to answer.
Social media and the transcendence of information and ideas it harbours, across populations in different geographical locations, is what largely accounted for the ‘Arab Spring’ or ‘Arab Uprisings’ of 2011. Social media allowed individuals, particularly the younger generation who made up the majority of the population at that time, to share their simmering discontent with the corruption and poorly managed governments in many Arab countries, who fostered neo-liberal economics only to keep the majority of capital at the top and create stark inequalities within society. This discontent turned to concrete actions of protest which, through social media, influenced others to follow suit and effectively had a ‘ripple-effect’ across the Arab world. A collective dismay among how many Arab states were oppressing their people was expressed and subsequently shaped the politics in these countries. Therefore, the collective ‘Pan-Islamic’ identity was formed through social media, which brought people together to achieve the similar mission to root out oppression.
On the other end of the spectrum, yet nonetheless significant in forming an identity, Twitter has seen the creation of a sub-culture of tweets which feature nonce formations to reflect the Scottish accent, known as ‘Scottish Twitter’. This type of ‘netspeak’ is humorous in its outset due to its non-standard and unusual formation – ‘Mad how yie get 6 points and a £200fine for being on yer phone yet there’s folk oot there way eyelashes on there motor n getting away wae it’ (@McneilAlexander, 3 March 2017), but nonetheless connect a set of people who commonly find that the written standard-English doesn’t reflect how they actually speak. Social media is thus a source of individualistic expression, which can form its own informal online idiolect, to cement an identity often forgotten in the standardisation of language.
This informality has allowed politicians to utilise social media to appear reasonable and approachable to their electorate, not least by President Trump in the 2016 election and during his presidency. President Trump used the platform of Twitter to conduct diplomacy and politics; he did this to appeal to grass-root voters, albeit strategically or unconsciously, which makes the political narrative more accessible and engages more people in politics. Therefore, the use of computer mediated language on social media platforms encourages the removal of social barriers and creates an equanimity of understanding across generations and social classes, rather than making something like politics exclusively understandable to the elite minority.
However, with the expanse of analytical tools, social media firms like Facebook and Twitter have been able to track what you engage with most, what you find most interesting and what you ‘like’ as opposed to skip pass. It then curates your feed, so that you’re only shown what you enjoy and find interesting. As social media is increasingly being used as a platform for politics, this mode of curation effectively extinguishes debate and polarises communities into distinctive political identities. The spread of ‘fake news’ amongst this, has led to many people believing falsehoods by people they tend to enjoy ‘following’ or ‘liking’, which has had a detrimental effect on democracy and the principle of objective facts. So, whilst social media has been beneficial by making politics more accessible to the wider electorate, it has equally polarised communities into opposing groups which is starting to deconstruct the basis for facts and debate.
Whether this is a wider, more pressing systematic issue that overrules the multitude of benefits that come with social media, including the fact that ideas can transcend hierarchies and social barriers, is arguable. However, what is certain is that social media firms are becoming more powerful and their presence more influential, so this debate won’t be dying down soon.
