Are our polititians too comfortable with social media

If the politicians like social media so much, then we must be doing something wrong.

That's the conclusion of Polis' Charlie Beckett after the latest Polis/Channel 4 debate on the future of the Internet.

After seeing a number of community initiatives the politicians on the panel

accepted that independent social media is now part of the political communications landscape. They realise it will be rude, irregular and unpredictable. They even agreed that they should make sure that they and their parties, councils and government should be open to what social media can do for their electors.

but and a big but

I didn’t get the sense that they thought it would really change anything. The ballot box and party politics are safe. The system sees social media as a tool for making the machine work more smoothly, not for a change of gear, let alone direction.

The question then is what needs to change for social media to have an effect on the process of democracy?

Charlie suspects that political social media is too marginalised at the moment and doubts that next election will indeed be the social media election that some people think it will be

there is not the critical mass behind social political media either locally or nationally for it to make much of a real-world difference