Today marks the fourth anniversary of the Conservatives taking power in Canada. I am not sure anyone was expecting Harper to continue on this long with a minority. Most people assumed that he would either lose power or have a majority.
Four years in and the Conservatives have been governing as if they are Martin Liberals. They have done nothing radical at all. They have not pushed for any real substantive changes to Canada. I find this a shame as it is time for Canada to be shaken up federally.
Governing the same way for close to two generations is not really in our benefit. What was the right way to do things in 1969 is not the best option in 2010. We need a shake up of the federal government.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Facebook as a Tool for Political Action
As someone that has tried to use Facebook groups for political action, I find they are amazingly ineffective. But even given that they are ineffective, I am shocked to hear from Bill Tieleman that two of his Facebook groups have disappeared. One has to suspect that they were taken down because they were political and had some content that Facebook used as a reason to delete the groups.
He managed to get some decent membership in No BC HST and Axe the BC Gas Tax (I can not link to them as they are not available on Facebook). But how much difference have they made? Have they really pushed the protests further forward?
Clicking join for a Facebook Group is easy to do, easier than signing a petition, but my experience has been that the vast majority of people that join a group are not only not unwilling to take real action, they get annoyed if you send them messages asking them to get involved. As a tool it is by far much weaker than almost any other available.
I used Facebook a lot in the STV campaign in BC and I am not certain it really had much of an impact on the outcome - we were badly defeated, though still the second best results for electoral reform in Canada.
On Facebook a group works reasonably well as a communication tool for the administrators as long as the group stays belong 5000 members. Once you breach that number you are no longer allowed to send messages to the members.
Much has been made of the fact that the Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament Facebook group has a membership of 221,368 people, but this is only 1.75% of the voting age Canadians on Facebook. Given the scale of the protests were no larger than one could expect by basic word of mouth and were hardly larger than the usual suspects at protests, I can see very little evidence that the Facebook group has made any difference on the ground.
Facebook gives us the illusion of connecting with large numbers of people that are supposedly on our side with respect to a political action, but in reality it wastes our energies from building real in person political connections. Knocking on your neighbours door is more effective than Facebook in my opinion.
He managed to get some decent membership in No BC HST and Axe the BC Gas Tax (I can not link to them as they are not available on Facebook). But how much difference have they made? Have they really pushed the protests further forward?
Clicking join for a Facebook Group is easy to do, easier than signing a petition, but my experience has been that the vast majority of people that join a group are not only not unwilling to take real action, they get annoyed if you send them messages asking them to get involved. As a tool it is by far much weaker than almost any other available.
I used Facebook a lot in the STV campaign in BC and I am not certain it really had much of an impact on the outcome - we were badly defeated, though still the second best results for electoral reform in Canada.
On Facebook a group works reasonably well as a communication tool for the administrators as long as the group stays belong 5000 members. Once you breach that number you are no longer allowed to send messages to the members.
Much has been made of the fact that the Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament Facebook group has a membership of 221,368 people, but this is only 1.75% of the voting age Canadians on Facebook. Given the scale of the protests were no larger than one could expect by basic word of mouth and were hardly larger than the usual suspects at protests, I can see very little evidence that the Facebook group has made any difference on the ground.
Facebook gives us the illusion of connecting with large numbers of people that are supposedly on our side with respect to a political action, but in reality it wastes our energies from building real in person political connections. Knocking on your neighbours door is more effective than Facebook in my opinion.
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