With the yoof in mind

WE SAY White House’s online forums for town halls add little.

During the elections last year, the media often used new media technology to connect anybody to the candidates.

Admittedly, at times the new technology was just being used for the purpose of display – interactive touch screen televisions and holographs hardly help create a better discussion – and it made the cable news stations’ coverage seem more like an electronic expo than an “election center.”

But certain new media technologies have a remarkable ability to transform the public’s discourse. For instance, YouTube expands the size of town halls by incorporating viewers from anywhere in the world.

To their credit, President Obama and his presidential campaign staff brilliantly utilized these technologies. From those incessant text messages to Facebook, Obama’s campaign monopolized these technologies, helping them to secure the youth vote. And since taking office, he’s continued to use them.

Last week Obama invited users from Facebook and Twitter to comment and ask questions on official Web pages the White House set up, to be responded to at a town hall meeting about health-care reform. Obviously, the comments and questions were intended to be about health care. But, as Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank noted, they ranged from the bizarre to the irrelevant: from “OBAMA I DONT WANT THE WORLD TO END IN 2012 CAN U STOP IT??????????????” to “WHO LIKES POTATOES!!!!!!!”

What questions and comments that actually did pertain to health care were juvenile at best. No better than the average YouTube comment, the discussion quickly turned into ideological nonsense. By the end, only one online question was taken by Obama.

We’ve come a long way since the days of President George W. Bush and Cindy Sheehan, an Iraq anti-war activist who was hauled off during one of Bush’s State of the Union Addresses. With the utilization of this technology should come better discourse. After all, we’re breaking down barriers, such as location, and allowing anyone a voice. And even if those in charge of picking the comments screen some, they’re still out there for everyone to see.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. The people who use these forums are often the people who have their very narrow and obscure ideological niches carved out – their favorite blogs bookmarked and checked daily. When these people, who have been surrounded by their version of the truth for so long, are all pooled together in these new forums, it becomes more politically divisive than ever.

Last week’s open forum about heath care saw nothing but ideologues shouting (or rather, SHOUTING!!1!1!) their opinions without ever listening to each other, or the president. The new media is a double-edged sword. Connecting potentially anyone has both ups and downs.