ICTs & Government

This past lecture, we welcomed Aaron Smith of the Pew Research Center. Smith is a Senior Research Specialist who focuses on the role of internet in the political process, technology in civic life and online engagement with government. In class, he discusses the usage of the social media by the government and elected officials. Instead of lecturing us like most of the previous speakers had, Smith questioned the class, taking straw polls and listening to the opinions of some.

One of the topics discusses was Twitter, the social network and micro-blogging website. Smith asked the class how many people were users of the now-famous website and only two out of the twenty one individuals in the class raised their hands. That is equivalent to about 9.5% of the class. Smith, one of the leaders behind this type of research, has found some interesting statistics that show how our small class shows an accurate representation of the larger data. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, about 14% of those between the ages of 18-29 use a Twitter account. While this number is a little higher than the one gathered in our class, there are other variables that the straw poll did not take into account, such as education. As we are all have some college education, using the data found by Pew, the about 9% of those with some education use Twitter. This number is much closer to the one collected by our class. 

While this comparison of Twitter numbers is fun (at least for me as I enjoy statistics), how is it relevant to this week’s topic regarding technology and the government? To answer this question, I will throw out a few more statistics. Twitter and Facebook have over 145 million and 500 million users, respectively. Twitter is growing rapidly with 35 – 49 year-olds making up almost 42% of the traffic to Twitter.com (Nielson). Additionally, Facebook is seeing massive increases in adoption amongst users 35-65. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is women over 55 (Inside Facebook). With numbers like these, government officials, whose job it is to understand and listen to their constituents, should be increasingly interested in getting into social media. There is at least one famous politician that has embraced social media sites and, they have, in turn, welcomed him. His name is Barack Obama. Obama has 9,148,818 followers on Twitter and 22,042,057 people “like” him on Facebook.

An interesting article I found, titled “Using ICTs to create a culture of transparency: E-government and social media as openness and anti-corruption tools for societies” was about the usage of information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as social media websites to establish more transparency and involvement with the government and the citizens. The article discusses the cost-effectiveness and convenience of using ICTs to aid in the use and communication of government officials. (science direct)

There are many ways for government officials to better their communication efforts with their constituents. As social media websites like Twitter and Facebook continue to expand to older markets, the ability for government to connect to people through these sites will only increase. In the end, it will hopefully lead to a more cost-effective and efficient representation of the people in government.