Could Social Networking Bring the End of Leadership?

Posted on August 2, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Suppose that all the politicians, business czars and celebrities of today had had access to blogs and social networking tools when they were teenagers, and that all the archives of local newspaper articles and crime blotters from that time were electronically available today.

If they were, what would we discover about these people? Would their 1960s and 1970s teenage rants be so outrageous that they would never have achieved elected office because their opponents would have thrown these indiscreet and half-formed thoughts back in their face, and humiliated them in the public eye? Would we know just what Bush said and did during his drunken and drug-addled youthful binges? Would we know for sure how his lies and daddy’s money kept him out of any real military service, and out of jail when he went AWOL from the cozy arrangement daddy made for him in the air force?

Would Canadian prime minister Harper’s youthful dalliances with Western separatist movements and anti-democratic, anti-immigrant extremist groups, and his belligerent and intemperate letters to the editor and editorials have been paraded out early enough to prevent him from ever attaining any major public office?

My guess is that the truth about the past of famous people is out there, despite the lack of electronic records of it, and despite that it is not publicized, deliberately, for two reasons that have nothing to do with research:

The press, for some reason, exercises great discretion when it comes to dealing with events in the personal lives of the famous before they became public figures. They seem to get a free pass. Even the early self-absorbed and angst-ridden letters of (then Young Republican) Hillary Clinton, which got great publicity in the NYT last week, are hardly damning, and unlikely to be the most embarrassing correspondence that the press could find if they were inclined to. My guess as to why this is is that the press might realize that airing all the old laundry of potential leaders might so ruin anyone with any courage, new ideas or individuality that we’d end up with mediocre, fanatically reserved and secretive people running our countries.
Liberal muckrakers are surely aware that the youthful antics of conservatives are probably more restrained and uncontroversial than those of young liberals, so they are probably inclined not to start a war with conservative muckrakers they would be sure to lose. And conservative muckrakers have discovered that most voters don’t care that much about the distant past, that trying to hurt progressives by bringing up their youthful indiscretions can backfire, and that the indiscretions of conservatives, while milder than liberals’, are often more recent and hence less likely to be pardoned by citizens. We saw this with the ‘swift boat’ sleaze campaign against John Kerry on his Vietnam War record, which backfired when it was found to be untrue, and led to much more embarrassing questions about Bush’s military ‘record’.

So the press and the muckrakers keep quiet about ‘the early years’ of public figures. But if it was all there today, a Google click away, it’s doubtful that bloggers and others with fewer qualms about consequences, and less to lose, would show such restraint.

What will happen then, twenty years or so from now, when we all look at the youthful blogs, Facebook entries and chat room rants of the prospective leaders of that time, and when the news reports and the data from every local police blotter are available online, and aggregated and leaked by Homeland Security types? Will we become inured to them, and grant everyone a ‘statute of limitations’ for indiscretions? Or will power become only available to those who have kept their mouths shut and their behaviours innocuous all their lives? And will those quiet people end up being just puppets for the Karl Roves and Dick Cheneys of the world, who will have the real power without having to be elected at all?

I don’t think you can put the genie back in the bottle. There is no way to excise the records of things we said before we knew better (or at least before we became more discreet and tactful in public expressions of what we know). Google caches and the Wayback logs will keep it on the record forever.

So at some point we will have to decide whether to ignore what people said and did when they were young, or to accept only lifelong wimps and nondescripts as leaders. Given today’s (lack of) sensibilities, I would suspect the latter — there seems to be no end to the public’s appetite for scandal and sleaze, and no limit to the public’s willingness to punish any indiscretion once they know of it. Whether that will change as the firehose of information gets ever-wider remains to be seen. With the cult of leadership so well entrenched, especially in the US, it will require a huge change in attitudes before we learn and accept that both our expectations and our adulation of leaders are wildly misplaced. We will learn that no one is worth more than anyone else, and that everyone makes lots of mistakes.

Perhaps that will bring about the end of learned helplessness, the end of billion dollar lawsuits for honest mistakes, the end of autocracy and cults, the end of abdication of personal responsibility, and the end of executive salaries a thousand times the poverty level. Perhaps we will finally realize the wisdom of crowds, that decisions made by consensus are invariably better than decision made by swollen-headed experts, czars, gurus, tyrants and executives.

That would be a truly democratic political, social and economic revolution, powered, ironically, by information we don’t really need and probably shouldn’t care about. Then we could roll up are sleeves and start figuring out what to do to make the world a better place, peer-to-peer, with no one pretending tobe in charge.

Photo: Hillary Rodham at 19, uncited source

Category: Technology & Society

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7 Responses to Could Social Networking Bring the End of Leadership?

Malva says:

August 3, 2007 at 06:43

Canadians in general aren’t as crazy about celebrities as our southern neighbours and we leave them mostly alone when we see them on the street. Why can’t we do that our politicians past? I personally don’t really care what Harper did in his youth, nothing could convince me to vote for him anyway. ;) However, I was pretty appaled at the treatment Andre Boisclair got over some past cocaine consumption.
Vish Goda says:

August 3, 2007 at 08:50

Dave,Here is my vision on the roadmap for the next generation of elected officials.The teens and young adults that are networking socially online and sharing their opinions and solutions for societal problems – are actually aware of the public forum that they operate in – and therefore, they are going to be much more careful in what they say or how they say it.I attribute the “hippy” lifestyle of the baby bloomers to the simple fact that there was no such effective forum like the internet, where they could productively share and exchange political views and differences. The only way they could voice their opinions and vent their frustrations was by being irresponsible and outrageous.I am positive that the next generation of political leaders are going to first get together as online buddies much before even entering the political format. Even the reporters that will be promoting them will be their buddies sharing their vision. In other words, they may never find themselves in a situation that they did not want to be in…
Jon Husband says:

August 3, 2007 at 09:01

Theoretrically possible .. and it would be a welcome development, but lots of resistance and disbelief (and thus practice and learning required) along the way.
Pearl says:

August 3, 2007 at 22:40

Would that presume people would all stabilize in a comfort zone of being equal with leading or following with no natural dominance or submissiveness?Found a blog that may have some aspects up your line…http://lisapeake.org/
Vish Goda says:

August 4, 2007 at 08:58

Why does online social networking be any different than the networking we do by meeting people at work, at parties, at sporting events or just while traveling? The one huge difference is that there is a log of every word or sentence that has passed between every participant.As long as the contents and agenda behind each interaction is open and acceptable to both parties, the same logs can be used as a source of reference to put it in context and clear the intent behind seemingly inappropriate statements or words. In fact, even if someone was engaged in a damaging conversations, in a moment of carelessness or abandon – if there is a good track history otherwise, then those can always be brought out to clear one from an isolated incident.Of course, in the end, we reap what we sow. If nothing, social networking brings home that point very early in people’s social interaction. We are only going to end up with better prepared and responsible leaders than we have now, who have got away with many moments of indiscretions without being held accountable.
Barbara W. Klaser says:

August 4, 2007 at 18:42

I’ve often wished that I knew more about candidates before voting for or against them. I’m not convinced that most people change that much, though I believe they can. I also think that many of the qualities that get people into prominent positions, in our world as it is today, are the very qualities that make them awful leaders and role models.In the workplace I found that the reluctant leader was often the best leader, someone whose ego wasn’t as involved, who wasn’t a power broker or control freak, who didn’t tend to get full of him- or herself, but simply wanted to facilitate getting the best job done, as a leader but still part of the team.
Doug Alder says:

August 4, 2007 at 23:12

Dave it is possible to clean up a lot of your youthful online indiscretions – see Shelley’s excellent post from yesterday http://burningbird.net/technology/controlling-your-data/