Drinking from the Firehose: Why Obama Should Stay the Hell Off Twitter
Last week, a brief tempest in a teapot brewed up when Barack Obama mentioned in a townhall on his China trip that he’d never used Twitter himself. The whole thing blew by pretty quickly, largely since I doubt that too many people were genuinely surprised that The Leader of the Free World hasn’t played around with “his” microblogging feed. For one thing, Twitter barely existed when he started running for President, and he’s apparently been a bit busy in the intervening couple of years.
But I’d also argue that Twitter is fundamentally a bad match for a Chief Executive, for exactly the same reasons that so many other people are drawn to it. Like the rest of the social media universe, Twitter is effectively unfiltered, with a low wheat-to-chaff ratio even if you’re careful whom you follow. In many ways this is a strength, since part of the fun of the service is that you get access to so much information and opinion coming in from so many directions.
2 comments November 24th, 2009 Trackback Bookmark on del.icio.us
