I'm officially downgrading "twitter in a teacup" or, as Nancy Scola branded it, "twitter dome" from a kerfuffle to a mere brouhaha. Capping an exciting day of flying tweets (Let Our Congress Tweet counted 356 tweets tagged #LOTC08 this morning) and crashing blog posts, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally weighed in.

After demonstrating her social media quals by pointing out "I have a blog, use YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Digg, and other new media to communicate with constituents," Speaker Pelosi's letter finally gets to the meat of the matter, saying "inaccurate rumors have been circulated asserting that the suggested standards allowing for web video outside of the House.gov domain would affect Member blogging or use of sites such as Twitter."

There you have it - the rumors are inaccurate. And I take some comfort in knowing that Speaker Pelosi reads @shelbinator's blog. (I assume it is in her feed reader, right next to LOLcat of the day.) There is some more detailed discussion of the aftermath on the Open House Project list including of Rep. Capuano's response to the response to his letter that set this whole thing off.

Two important lessons we should take:

First, two-way, timely, frank, communications with Congress is a big deal for both parties. Moreover, there is already a core of aware, connected people, willing to improve communications. We should build on this.

Second, who owns the infrastructure matters. The issue is broader than "are Congresspeople misusing public resources by sending campaign snail mail masquerading as official business." As Mark Tapscott points out, people are smart enough to recognize the ad next to a YouTube video doesn't mean an endorsement. We take for granted that communications with our elected officials will be mediated by commercial entities be they the Washington Post and New York Times or Fox News and Comedy Central. In our new age of social media should we continue to trust these intermediaries? Why should we rely on CNN (owned by Time Warner) and YouTube (owned by Google) to decide which of our questions get asked in debates? Even if twitter were stable enough to support meaningful political discourse is it the right place? Why can't our public square be controlled by the public?

[Thanks to scriptingnews for the Fail Whale image.]

Congress | Nancy Pelosi | Nancy Scola | Open House Project | Twitter
Dave Witzel's blog | email this page | delicious | digg | technorati