Abstract
Alexander Hamilton, the first US Secretary of the Treasury, did not mince his words when he bluntly assessed the much-debated notion of using the wisdom of the crowd to inform governmental policy decisions. The masses, Hamilton complained, “are turbulent and changing. They seldom judge or determine right.”1 Hamilton believed that experts knew best how to govern the populace; he wanted the processes of government regulated centrally. At the other end of the dispute stood Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton’s fellow Founder (and, ultimately, nemesis). Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, contended that it was every citizen’s duty to engage in shaping fundamental policy decisions, because codetermination of government policy, when all was said and done, was not only a natural right but necessary for democracy to function effectively. For Jefferson, “It is an axiom in my mind that our liberty can never be safe but in the hands of the people themselves.”2
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Notes
Morton Frisch (ed.), Selected Writings and Speeches of Alexander Hamilton (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1985).
Thomas Jefferson to George Washington, 1786. Quoted in Henry J. Perkinson, Two Hundred Years of American Educational Thought (New York: David McKay, 1976), 44.
Within political science, several books have highlighted the impact of the Internet on elections. Phil Howard’s New Media Campaigns and the Managed Citizen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) provides an important analysis of the shadows of data created by campaigning;
Costas Panagopoulos (ed.), Politicking Online: The Transformation of Election Campaign Communications (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009) includes detailed empirical analysis of the Internet in the 2008 election.
Bruce A. Bimber and Richard Davis’s Campaigning Online: The Internet in U.S. Elections (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) follows the same tradition, as does
Kirsten Foot and Steven M. Schneider’s Web Campaigning (Acting with Technology) (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). Our focus is much less on election cycles and much more on the governance process, except where the former intersects with social media for citizen engagement.
Needless to say, there are many other conceptualizations of the relationship between the government and social media information flows. For instance, Nam proposes a tripartite division: purpose (image-making or ideation), collective intelligence type (professional knowledge or innovative ideas), and strategy (contest, wiki, social networking, or social voting). Taewoo Nam, “Suggesting Frameworks of Citizen-Sourcing via Government 2.0,” Government Information Quarterly 29, no. 1 (2012): 12–20.
For a broader review of these topics, see Stephen Coleman and Peter M. Shane (eds.), Connecting Democracy: Online Consultation and the Flow of Political Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
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© 2013 James E. Katz, Michael Barris, and Anshul Jain
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Katz, J.E., Barris, M., Jain, A. (2013). Situating Social Media and Citizen Participation in the Obama Era. In: The Social Media President. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378354_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378354_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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