Continue
Devesh and Neeraj’s observations about Facebook, I would like to add some
comments about using this widest-spread social media network. It is undeniable
that Facebook is a miracle. It connects millions of millions of people all
around the world. It helps friends and family member who are far way and
haven’t met for years, meet every minutes in one shared destination. It brings
people who haven’t met in their real life closer, making them know every detail
about each other’s life through up-to-minute posts, pictures and video… as long
as the Facebook account owner wants to share with the public.
Not limiting
at people who know or already knew each other, Facebook works under a mechanism
of concentric spectrum, in which people A connect to people B, people B connect
to people C and make people A connect to people C and so on. Day by day, your
Facebook spectrum amplifies, as long as you access to it daily and update it regularly.
One status about your breakfast, your daily activities, or even your inner
feeling, once was posted on your account, will be heard and responded
immediately by persons you’ve never met in your life and are thousand miles
away.
Grasping
those preeminent features of social media in general and Facebook in
particular, more and more public and non-profit organizations are using
Facebook accounts as a tool of communicating with citizens. This trend varies
depending on what level of democracy development the country is. In the US, we
can easily search Facebook account of nearly all the state and local
departments with thousands of people interested in (shown by the number of
“likes”), including more than 3 millions like The White House’s Facebook, more
than 941,000 people like the State Department and nearly 10 million people like
Facebook of NASA. However, in middle-developed country like India, even though
some public organizations manage Facebook accounts, they rarely update it.
Consequently, just a handful of people, both state employees and citizens, know
about the existence of those accounts. And in the less developed and opened
country like Vietnam, while state officials are reluctant to see the citizens
using Facebook, none of public organizations use Facebook as a tool of official
information delivery.
From my
observations, public organizations using Facebook account should be seen a kind
of official information delivery rather than a tool of communication to citizens.
Communication connotes a give-and-get information process, in which two or more
parties exchange information and ideas. Once information was given, the
recipient gets it, gives their ideas back and waits for more explanation or
discussion. However, the next steps are missing in public organizations’
Facebook accounts. All that the public gets from those sites are official
information, delivered under the form of a short press release. Readers, or
public may read, like, comment, but never get any information from the account
managers. For example, more than 5,000 people like the White House’s post 5
hours ago (up to 11:48pm, 2/3/2015) about ObamaCare. More than 1,700 people
shared it. 870 comments were posted, but having a quick look, I realized that
no comment came from the account administration.
Does it
means that Facebook accounts are using as a mere tool of official information
delivery by public organizations, but not a mean of public sector-citizen
communication as I expected?
Trang DANG
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