October 2009 · Volume 91 · Number 9

Social Media: Not Your Grandfather's Democracy

by Rick Cole

Twitter allows just 140 characters per "tweet," including spaces and punctuation. After a Republican member of Congress was ridiculed for tweeting during the State of the Union address this past February, Twitter usage exploded 3,700 percent in less than a year. By the time you pick up this article (or read it online), monthly U.S. Twitter users will outnumber the population of Texas—or possibly California.

In just five years, techcrunch.com reports that Facebook users have zoomed past 250 million. A Nielsen study estimated usage has increased by seven times in the past year alone.

Executive Summary

Web 2.0 has given us blogs, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, changing how we communicate and reshaping our social and personal lives. For local managers, these social media offer new tools for one of democracy's oldest challenges: promoting the common good.

The cutting edge of digital communication brings new danger and potential. It can get nasty and personal on the new media frontier, but there are also exciting new ways to build community.

What local governments can't do is fall hopelessly behind. The fate of railroads, automakers, and newspapers shows what happens to the complacent. It's time to get online and lead the effort to build stronger communities and a healthier democracy for the 21st century.

Yet as blogs, YouTube videos, and text blasts reshape how America communicates, few local governments—and even fewer city and county managers—are keeping pace. E-government remains largely focused on websites and online services. This communication gap leaves local government vulnerable in a changing world. "Business as usual" is not a comforting crutch—it's foolish complacency. Just look at the sudden implosion of General Motors, the Boston Globe, and the state of California.

Yet it would be equally shortsighted to thoughtlessly embrace these new communication media as virtual substitutes for thoroughgoing civic engagement. We're part of a 2,500-year-old experiment in local democracy, launched in Athens long before Twitter and YouTube. In fact, local democracy operated long before the newspapers, broadcast media, public hearings, and community workshops familiar to today's local government managers.

Social Media Build Community

We may live in a hi-tech world, but the basis of what we do remains "high touch"—involving what some of the most thoughtful ICMA practitioners call "building community." Social media offer new tools to build community although they aren't a magic shortcut.

Understanding the potential role of social media in the way we work begins with better understanding the democratic source of our mission of community service.

The council-manager form of local government arose a century ago in response to the "shame of the cities"—the crisis of local government corruption and gross inefficiency.

Understanding what business we are in today is vital—it drives the choices we make and the tools we use. Railroads squandered their dominance in transportation because they defined their business as railroading. They shunned expansion into trucking, airlines, and airfreight. While they were loyal to one mode of transportation, their customers were not. Similarly, newspapers are in crisis because they defined their trade as the newspaper industry. Today's readers don't wait for timely news to arrive in their driveways. They have digital access on their computers and handheld phones. Guess where advertisers are going?

Most local governments suffer similar myopia. Many managers define our core mission as delivering services. But that overlooks the history of why local governments deliver those services. We deliver police services because Sir Robert Peel invented that model in response to the public safety challenges of industrializing London.

We deliver library services because Ben Franklin invented that model in response to the need for working people in Philadelphia to pursue education and self-improvement. Governments didn't arise to provide services—services arose from "government of the people, by the people, and for the people."

Our core mission is not to provide traditional services but to meet today's community needs. To do this, we can learn more from the entrepreneurial risk taking of Peel and Franklin than from public management textbooks.

We face these new dangers and opportunities:

  • Transitioning from unsustainable consumption to living in sustainable balance with planetary resources.
  • Overcoming an economic crisis that is slashing our capacity to maintain traditional services and meet growing community needs.
  • Embracing growing diversity while dealing with increasing fragmentation marked by increasingly divergent expectations about the role of local government.

During a similar period of historic upheaval, the young Karl Marx wrote that "all that is solid melts into air."

Of course, it's possible to underestimate the emerging crisis from the perspective of local government in many American towns and suburbs. The local voting population seems stable, though declining in numbers. The "usual suspects" still populate the sparse audiences at council and commission meetings. The budget is horrendous, but we've seen these cycles before.

In reality, this overhang is typical of the lag between action and reaction, the inertia Thomas Jefferson identified when he wrote, "mankind are more inclined to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

In California, we're confounded by the seemingly unending crisis in political leadership that is squandering our state's credit rating and capacity to deliver vital services. But members of our political class resemble cartoon characters who dash off a cliff—they momentarily hang in the air before abruptly plunging. As the economist Herb Stein wryly observed, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

Civic Engagement and Social Media: The Ventura Case Study

Ventura has a civic engagement manager position but civic engagement is considered a citywide core competency like tech savvy and customer service. It's not something we do periodically; it's how we strive to do everything.

One of our key citywide performance measures is the level of volunteerism in the community—not just the 40,000 volunteer hours logged by city government last year, but what percentage of the population volunteers for any cause or organization: 50 percent versus 26 percent nationally. We strive to raise awareness, commitment, and participation by citizens in local government and their community.

Council staff reports not only list fiscal impacts and alternatives, but document citizen outreach and involvement in each recommendation. There are obviously different levels—from a stakeholder committee that held four facilitated sessions to produce rules governing vacation rentals to a citywide economic summit cosponsored with the chamber of commerce that drew 300 businesspeople and residents to develop 54 action steps unanimously endorsed by the city council at the conclusion.

Effective engagement requires aggressive, fine-tuned, and immediate communication. We address traditional media with a weekly interdepartmental roundtable that reviews what stories are likely to surface and identifies other stories we'd like to see covered. We encourage city staff to quickly post comments to online newspaper postings to set the record straight, respond to legitimate queries, and direct citizens to additional information on our website.

We have two public access channels—one for government, one for the community—and actively provide both with programming. Our most direct access comes from a biweekly e-newsletter that goes out to 5,000 addresses, linking directly to website resources, including the city manager's latest blog post.

Slow at first to embrace Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, we're closing the gap. One councilmember is a prolific blogger and another uses Facebook for interactive community dialogue. We make judicious use of reverse 911 to get public safety information out quickly to residents. We've also pioneered "My Ventura Access"—a one-stop portal for all citizen questions, complaints, compliments, and opinions, whether they come by phone, Internet, mail, or in person.

Global Communication Tools

In the current tough times, we all pay lip service to civic engagement and we all pursue it, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success. But if we want to avoid plunging into the vortex like the state of California (and Vallejo, California, its bankrupt local counterpart), we will need to reassert (and reinvent) government of the people, by the people, and for the people in our communities.

The textbook model puts the elected governing board squarely between us and the public. Elected officials interpret the will of the people. They're accountable to the public. We report to those who have been elected. But in the modern world, professional staff cannot hide behind that insulation. We cling to the old paradigm because we lack a better one.

That's where the real significance of social media comes into focus. These aren't just toys, gizmos, or youthful fads. Social media are powerful global communication tools we can deploy to help rejuvenate civic engagement.

The Obama presidential campaign lifted the curtain on this potential. "Nothing can stand in the way of millions of people calling for change," he asserted at a time when conventional political wisdom doubted his path to the White House. MyBarackObama.com wasn't his only advantage, but he deployed it with stunning effectiveness to raise colossal sums from small donors, pinpoint volunteer efforts in 50 states to the exact places of maximum leverage, and carry his campaign through storms that would have capsized a conventional campaign.

It remains to be seen how this translates into governance at the federal level. But it has direct application to local democracy.

Crowd sourcing is a new buzzword spawned by social media. It recognizes that useful ideas aren't confined to positional leaders or experts. Wikipedia is a powerful success story, showing how millions of contributors can build a world-class institution, crushing every hierarchical rival. "Wikigovernment" is not going to suddenly usher in rankless democratic nirvana, but it's closer to the ideal of government of the people, by the people, and for the people than a typical local government organization chart.

"To govern is to choose," John Kennedy famously said. Choices must be made, and citizens will increasingly insist on participating in those decisions. As citizens everywhere balk at the cost of government, we can't hunker down and wait for a recovery to rescue us. Like carmakers suddenly confronted by acres of unsold cars, we are arriving at the limits of the "we design ‘em, you buy ‘em" mentality.

A crowd-sourcing approach to local government resembles a barn raising more than a vending machine as a model for serving the community. Instead of elected leaders exclusively deciding the services to be offered and setting the (tax) price of the government vending machine, a barn raising tackles shared challenges through what former Indianapolis mayor Stephen Goldsmith calls "government by network."

Citizen groups, individual volunteers, activists, nonprofits, other public agencies, businesses, and ad hoc coalitions contribute to the designing, delivering, and funding of public services. The media compatible with this model are not the newspapers—the local newspaper reporting yesterday's council meeting, for example. The new media are the instant Facebook postings, tweets, and YouTube clips that keep our shifting body politic in touch.

A Boomer In Cyberspace: Does a Manager Belong on Facebook?

Erasmus, the Dutch theologian and scholar, in 1500 wrote, "In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king."

I feel this way in the land of social media—at least among city and county managers. Inspired by the first city manager blog in the nation, started by Wally Bobkiewicz in Santa Paula, California, I began posting back in 2006. Although most bloggers strive for frequent, short blurbs, I've employed blogging to provide a place to get beyond the sound bites (and quotes out of context) in the local press. I seek to provide background, explanation, and context for the stories in the news, along with the trends that don't make the news.

I tried MySpace and Facebook initially out of curiosity. For my first six months, I had only six friends on Facebook. Now I have more than 400, and few days go by when I don't review requests for more. I post at least once a day, usually links to intriguing articles on public policy and photos of my three kids. I resisted Twitter until an invitation arrived from a friend 20 years older than I. If someone in his 80s was interested in tweets from me, I figured the time had come to join the crowd.

I've never made a YouTube video, but several videos of me exist in cyberspace.

The Dark Side

It's not hard to conjure up the dark side of all this. Web presence is often cloaked in anonymity. This isn't new in political discourse; the Founders engaged in anonymous pamphleteering. But the Web can harbor vitriol that wasn't tolerated in the traditional press (at least until recently).

The Web also tends to segregate people. One study concluded that 96 percent of cyber readers follow only blogs they agree with. This self-selection of information bypasses editors trained in assessing the credibility of information. Opinion is routinely passed off as fact.

But it isn't surprising that the cutting edge of digital communication is full of both danger and promise, nor should it keep us from using these new media in our 2,500-year quest for self-government. The atomization that a zillion websites are prone to promote also breeds a hunger for the community of shared experience—both the election of Barack Obama and the death of Michael Jackson tapped into that yearning.

We can foster that by deploying these exciting new tools in the service of building community. Yes, it's risky to be a pioneer, but in a rapidly changing world, it's even riskier to be left behind.

Rick Cole is city manager of Ventura, California (RCole@ci.ventura.ca.us).

 

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