Social Media Sucks!

 Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa 
Let's get the easy part out, social media has at best limited electoral influence. To be specific twitter has no influence, Facebook has some, Blogs ? ha ha good one. That said, if people are banking on social media for electoral deliverance, Boy, they are for rude surprise!

Social Media can at best play marginal, complementary role. It can't even dream of supplanting traditional political campaigning including voter outreach. But oh, traditional is so boring, let's talk about shiny new things instead.

This misconception about electoral relevance does point to a more serious problem though. That of misunderstanding the role and potential of social media in Indian context. People simply do not understand how to best leverage social media, this is why their participation is at best tactical, at worst  self referential. 

Therefore most of contemporary social media interactions can best be summarized as chasing the news cycle.

Cycle starts with a scandal/outrage/foot in mouth statement, the worthies devour the topic du jour like ravenous wolves, superficial commentary shreds it, until there is a new one, and the cycle continues.

This ceaseless and frankly tedious process obscures other possibilities such as in short term social media can be used to co-ordinate, in medium term it can be used to organize and in long term it can be used for dissemination, thus providing a stable and distributed platform for body politics.

But where confounding narcissism masquerades as profundity, possibility is the first casualty.