Politicians cannot afford to be snobbish about use of social media
LOCKDOWN allowed me to watch Gone With the Wind once again. Eighty-two years after it was first released, it is still an astonishing piece of work. As spellbinding as the movie is, the Hollywood legend around how the lead female role was cast is as beguiling. The celebrated producer David O Selznick spent years searching America for Scarlett O’Hara. Fruitlessly. Eventually, production had to get going and Selznick ordered the key scene, the Burning of Atlanta, to be shot. In 1939 they actually burned things, and 40 acres of Selznick International Pictures’ sets were torched. As the inferno raged, a darkhaired, diminutive woman appeared at Selznick’s shoulder. He turned, saw her pale face lit crimson, the flames reflected in her dark eyes and exclaimed: ‘I have found my Scarlett O’Hara!’
It was Vivien Leigh, who was visiting the set by chance with her lover Laurence Olivier. She became Scarlett in the unforgettable US Civil War epic. Why? She had ‘It’. Her face, her personality, her ephemeral star quality fit the new medium of colour film. She intuitively understood it and she worked. Others didn’t.
The relatively new medium of social media has transformed politics like first sound, then colour, transformed film. Some politicians understand social media and know how to work it and some don’t. But spend your working days interacting with politicians, as I do, and you will be certain of one thing – social media is now a vital tool of their profession, even more so during a pandemic that has transsive formed social interaction.
When I entered journalism in the mid-1990s, the typewriter had disappeared – just – but the internet wasn’t available in newsrooms.
Now, the company I work for distributes its content through newspapers, apps, websites, podcasts, radio and so on. Refusal to diversify would have been fatal for a commercial entity.
ANY politician that failed to move into the open range of online communication would have suffered a similarly brutal judgement – a failure at the polls. Many politicians have prospered here. Holly Cairns, a young woman who had not previously figured in national politics, was elected for the Social Democrats, in Cork South West in 2020. Social media played a huge role in her surprise election. Ms Cairns is a photogenic young woman, ideally suited, one would think, to the mediums of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. But social media success is not the preserve of any party, gender, age or background. Sinn Féin’s Eoin Ó Broin and Mary Lou McDonald are adept users of social media. Older politicians like Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams (now retired) and Willie O’Deaare roaring successes. Fianna Fáil TD Jackie Cahill, a dairy farmer, would not be everybody’s idea of a social media influencer. But he is innovative and progreson Instagram and Twitter.
A TD recently sent me links to Limerick independent councillor Frankie Daly’s social media accounts.
I warned him not to distribute too enthusiastically, as I thought Frankie had the potential to become a cult classic. Frankie could be seen shouting loudly about a muchneeded Moyross road. The videos were ad hoc. But his heartfelt, eager pleas for the road were transfixing. He always signs off with ‘Frankie Daly, Working for the People’. He got his road.
Leo Varadkar has a huge following, and his videos are also intimate and unrehearsed. Tens of thousands watch his updates within hours of his posting them.
What works on social media is authenticity. As an example, the true box office gold lies in the feeds of Higher Education Minister Simon Harris. He has 212,800 followers on Twitter and 169,000 on Instagram. He recently started on TikTok, an arena not previously ventured into by Irish politicians.
In an interview with Claire Byrne on RTÉ Radio this week, he was told that historian Diarmaid Ferriter had written in a newspaper that social media participation was often ‘vacuous and indulgent’.
The article also criticised Mr
Harris for ‘wasting time on these inanities’ which Ferriter dubbed ‘a sobering reminder of the dumbing down of his profession’. Harris responded, soberly, by saying that he was not ‘snobbish’ about what mediums he used to communicate with people. He also alerted Ms Byrne to the fact that many people no longer obtain news from RTÉ Radio 1. Like it or loath it, 52% of the Irish population get their news from social media now.
Mr Harris is 34. He has been a TD for a decade, a minister for seven years and a cabinet minister for five. He survived those five years in Health through herculean media management. He should be the leader of Fine Gael one day.
As he progresses, you would do well to watch his social media. Some may see it as vacuous, but what it provides is a window into the mundane, ordinary, authentic life of a person that could be considered a celebrity, a leader.
IN THE United States, politicians as diverse as Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have pioneered social media use to unqualified success. Providing a window – in Trump’s case a deeply unsettling one – into their private thoughts and ventures is the key. Apparent lack of thought and packaging adds, rather than detracts, from their product.
Politicians who do not adapt to social media will die at the polls.
But social media is flawed. As Leo Tolstoy wrote: ‘All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.’
Certainly, large swathes of the social media landscape is a wasteland of putrid personal abuse and threat. Even so, we should not be censorious of politicians’ social media participation. We must be forceful with them to enact powerful laws against social media firms where they still have influence. The Oireachtas – where they can force them to self-regulate or be regulated. Their bravery, rather than vacuousness, will be counted.