Exiled to Main Street: How government's use of social media diminishes public space

• Published date: 01 November 2019
• Date: 01 November 2019
• Author: Camilla Stivers,Justin T. Piccorelli
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1955

ACADEMIC PAPER

Exiled to Main Street: How government's use of social media

diminishes public space

Justin T. Piccorelli

1

|Camilla Stivers

2

1

School of Politics, Public Affairs and

International Studies, University of Wyoming,

Laramie, Wyoming, USA

2

Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban

Affairs, Cleveland State University, Cleveland,

Ohio, USA

Correspondence

Justin T. Piccorelli, Assistant Professor, School

of Politics, Public Affairs and International

Studies, University of Wyoming, 1000 E.

University Ave, Dept. 3197, Laramie, WY

82071, USA.

Email: jpiccore@uwyo.edu

Public administrators have long treated their connections with citizens as tools for

efficiently achieving results. As Dwight Waldo once commented, their key political

concern has been, “How much democracy can we afford?”Increasing use of social

media technologies appears to expand citizen input at greatly reduced cost. On the

basis of phenomenological investigation of virtual citizen–government relationships,

we argue that the political consequences of social media have yet to be noticed fully.

Social media exile citizens to Main Street—everyday life—instead of fostering connec-

tions in public space.

1|INTRODUCTION

Former U.S. President Barack Obama has been called the first social‐

media president (Bogost, 2017). He “used social media as a tool to

educate, to amuse, to spin and, undoubtedly, to shape his legacy …

[T]he year Obama came into office, the White House joined Facebook,

Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, iTunes, and Myspace”(Freking, 2017). It invited

those most adept in the technological sphere (engineers and students)

to help craft tools, services, and bots that would transform the archiv-

ing of presidential materials, which now include Tweets and other

social media posts (Bogost, 2017).

The administration's entry into the realm of social media was no

whim but strategic use of a potent political tool. At the same time,

there is little evidence as yet that the enthusiasm for social technolo-

gies is based on deeper reflection about what winning politically in this

way could mean in the longer run. With rare exceptions (e.g., Zingale,

2013), discussions fail to consider fundamental implications of the

continued use of social media technology to connect administrative

government and citizens and to shape how we think and interact. This

paper examines this aspect of social media in government. Given the

phenomenological basics of technologically mediated social interac-

tion, we ask how social media shape how we listen to and interact

with one another; more fundamentally, what social media use por-

tends for political life in the future and whether this technologically

mediated relationship with the public is the best that administrators

and citizens can hope for.

2|CURRENT LITERATURE

The bulk of current literature on social media and “E‐government”

simply replicates the instrumental quality that much public adminis-

tration literature on citizen–government connections has displayed

for decades. A recent wide‐ranging review (Medaglia & Zheng,

2017) observes that existing research fails to explore the unprece-

dented effects of social media on the relationships among govern-

ments, citizens, and platform providers. Summarizing the content of

government agency posts on social media, the authors find mainly

self‐promotion and marketing rather than efforts to increase partici-

pation and transparency—suggesting what we consider use might be

closer to abuse.

Despite the roots of democratic thought in the notion that a citi-

zen is one who governs and is governed in turn (Aristotle, 1981), ever

since American public administration emerged as an ideology in the

Progressive era, citizen opinion, let alone participation, has been

treated either as a problem to be solved (by severely restricting its

scope [Wilson, 1887]), or as a tool, a source of information about cit-

izen needs, attitudes, and feelings—a stance Waldo (1948) captured

with the wry query, “How much democracy can we afford?”

Government agencies today judge their socially mediated citizen

participation efforts the way they typically judge all contact with citi-

zens: by whether the efforts are “working”in administrative terms,

meaning whether they are “fostering increased government‐citizen

interactions, transparency and trust”(Kagarise & Zavattaro, 2017,

Received: 8 March 2019 Accepted: 31 March 2019

DOI: 10.1002/pa.1955

J Public Affairs. 2019;19:e1955.

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1955

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of9