Watch out for that Facebook entry

Staying on the subject of political debate,Jonathan Freedland writes in today's Guardian that"The internet will revolutionise the very meaning of politics".


Firstly

Thanks to Google-owned YouTube, any careless remark will now be caught on
camera (probably built into a phone) and distributed round the world in minutes.

Remember Hilary Clinton trying to sing the Star Spangled Banner?

Secondly your past is not longer the past

David Cameron and George Bush should give thanks they
were students before the age of Facebook; otherwise the wild excesses of their youth
would have been thoroughly documented, available for all to see years later.
Thanks to the internet and easy search, we live in a permanent now,
when any mistake, any reckless remark, even some past teenage ramblings on MySpace, are just a click
away.

And it's not just politicians but potential employers who trawl through the land of Facebook,Bebo etc.

Jonathon goes onto add that it is not all bad news as the resource of the internet can be used to mobilize support and publicize campaigns and continues

"At this week's Hay festival, Charles Leadbeater, currently
writing a book on the internet's transformation of creativity, explained
how we are moving from the passive consumers of the 20th century to the active
participants of the 21st. That had to be good for democracy, he said, because it
would give more people a voice, good for equality, because it lowers the
barriers that once excluded all but the elite from taking part, and good for
freedom because it allows people to express themselves."

The downside is that technology

could undermine a crucial aspect of politics, the power
of people to act as a counterweight to governments and big corporations. If
we're all broken into small units - "parties of one," as a web guru puts it - we
will lose that combined strength.