Today, seminar guest speaker Zeynep Tufekci pointed out the startling reality of technology’s, and specifically, social networking’s, increasing influence in the offline world with an anecdote: after this year’s first Presidential debate, people who did not simultaneously watch Twitter feeds perceived President Obama to have had a somewhat off night, while those who monitored and actively participated in the concurrent Twitter conversation felt strongly that President Obama performed very badly. The reason? Within the first ten minutes of the debate, the phrase “#whatswrongwithobama” had been tweeted and re-tweeted so much as to create a cascading, back and forth conversation among popularly followed and influential tweeters, allowing them to collectively generate a sentiment which through network effects amplified itself so much that by the end of the debate, the consensus was that Mitt Romney had won the debate by a landslide. At first glance, this result is not significant for the offline world: a self-contained community like Twitter’s reaching a collective opinion could be nothing more than a product of Twitter’s being comprised of elites and journalists with similar opinions. However, the impacts on offline politics are far more important. We now have a new spin room in politics; while in the past, television pundits decided winners of debates based on journalists’ interviews of campaign spokespeople after the debate, it is now the case that television pundits generate opinion based on a far broader base: the opinions of tweeters.

This phenomenon can have both positive and negative effects for democracy. One could argue that because the opinion of political pundits are more broadly based, and because the opinions of these pundits generate large waves in the general population’s opinion, there will be more truth in political spin than was had in a time when the standard stump speech sound-bytes were repeated by campaign spokespeople, either leading to no new information at all, or, worse for democracy, allowing pundits to use their position to signal their own personal opinions, for lack of a better, more popular source of information. However, those on the other side of debate could argue that online communities like Twitter do not actually represent the population as a whole, but rather represent the opinions of a homogeneous, affluent elite, echoing, amplifying, and self-confirming themselves in the online environment, causing pundits’ opinions to actually end up distorting national discourse by re-projecting Twitter’s consensus.

Either way one leans on the issue, it must be admitted that social networking has changed the game of politics and political movements. This country will need to find more ways to exploit these technologies for even more productive and inclusive discussion, as well as to prevent the meme culture from creating too much unproductive discussion.