Politicians and political candidates get grilled for every blunder they make in life. The American media calls attention to personal misgivings like affairs, shady career moves, and questionable life choices like drinking and driving. The GOP presidential race this year has been full of allegations regarding fraud, infidelity, racism, and shady backdoor dealings. The Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC ran an hour long special about Mitt Romney mistreating the family dog back in the 1980s. A montage of pictures of his dog Seamus ran across the screen while Ms. Maddow tried to convince viewers it was relative to the presidential election. However politicians today are fortunate that they did not have to worry about social media management and personal online marketing when they were young. Now every candidate needs a social media agency.
In ten or twenty years when today’s twenty-something year old people run for political positions it will be interesting to see how the media and the American electorate react to the crazy photographs and videos that will surface. Almost everyone I know has at least one profile on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. Photos and videos are posted after the weekend debauchery and are immortalized on the internet forever. Once something is uploaded online it is there forever. You can remove Facebook tags and delete Tweets but somewhere out there that video of you doing body shots on the bar at your twenty-first birthday still exists.
Some people do not care that there are photos of them drinking, smoking, and worse, on their Facebook or MySpace page. But for those of us who do care about social media management and untag photos like that, there is not much else we can do. The colleague who uploaded the incriminating photo will always have it whether you untag it or not. Pictures are immortalized online all day everyday. Politicians today have an easy time with social media management and personal online marketing because most of them did not create a social media profile until they were already in office or running for office. All the pictures of them partaking in adolescent and young adult debauchery are tucked away under someone’s bed or buried under decades of garbage. From time to time an incriminating photo from a politician’s past will surface and scandal will ensue. But this is nothing compared to what it will be like when my generation gets into the political arena.
Facebook immortalizes scandal on the internet for all to witness. But Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and other social media websites are a cornerstone of our society. Facebook has become an institution that is not going to disappear. Although these websites often embarrass us and depict us in regrettable situations, we have no intentions to delete our profiles and disconnect from social media. So when people run for political office in twenty years will we scrutinize their past as intensely as we do to politicians today?
I feel the answer is no, we will not. The collective social media experience that we share will stay with us as the years roll on. When people from my generation run for office I think the public will be more understanding of the fact that all of us at some point were embarrassed on Facebook. The news will have different notions regarding what is scandalous. Hopefully in twenty years we are more concerned with a candidate’s merits than with the potentially obscene or incriminating Facebook photos taken two decades prior.
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