Social Media doesn’t rule the City…or I’d have a cape
Soooooo, now that the Red Deer election is over I’m going to comment. I kept my mouth shut and bit my tongue a LOT which if you know me at all, you know I struggle with that. I’m not a resident of the City of Red Deer (I’m Red Deer County) so here is an outside looking in perspective of what I saw go down.
Twitter and facebook were insane. Good gawd people, I’m ALLLLLL about social media, love it (most days) but would it really be a deciding factor for who would make the best leaders for a community? Ya, ya, I get it, it’s a great way to communicate to the people but let’s remember our Red Deer twitter community is not full representation of the entire city. You can tell me there are 1,000 Red Deer tweeps, but how many of those are active? How many of those interact with candidates or even follow them? Not enough to win an election. Not yet anyway. We are still a small crew in the grand scheme of things.
Being on social media does not mean that person is transparent. FAR from it. You can be whoever you want to be on twitter! I’ve seen it…it sometimes makes me sick to see the phoniness of some trying to come across as kind do-gooders when what they do behind the computer is far, far different.
I saw tweets of people calling out candidates because they hadn’t responded to a tweet within 24 hours of them sending it. Really?? REALLY? Come on. And candidates being cut down for not participating on a facebook group page. Maybe they are out in your community actually DOING things. Or maybe their child is sick and they could care less about twitter or a facebook post at that moment. Or maybe their internet crashed. Using that to discredit them is unfair and immature.
I love the twitter and yes, even facebook…but let’s get real here people. It’s not face-to-face, eye contact, connection and honesty. It is whatever the user chooses to make it.
Perspective. Our small community doesn’t rule the City. But if we did…we might want to consider group capes.