Town Governed Through Twitter

Many people spend long hours of their life using social media for different tasks. In the past, before internet was discovered, people had limited ways to communicate, find information or socialize. Nowadays, however, thanks to social media it is increasingly easy to achieve those objectives. While there are some undoubted benefits of this trend, such as the speed and improved social equality, there is also a significant disadvantage, namely the loss of anonymity.

A recently article I read it was striking at least for me – … a mayor of a small town created a twitter account for his newborn daughter…- what for? It was to announce her birth. I suppose that this proud father did it with his best intention, but taking into account that he is the authority of the town, I think that he should separate his public and private life.

More than ten years have passed since this mayor has encouraged his citizens to use twitter to contact the available services of the town in addition to the traditional ways such as going face-to-face or fill any kind of form required. He also said that using this social media, not only people save time, effort and resource, but also the hall town has saved an important amount of money due to the different roles that people take part.

That relationship seems positive, but on the other hand, it can be an inconvenient to some people. In fact, the article mentions that the city council brigade is controlled when it is doing its work and this can provoke confusion when it comes to being judged by ordinary people when they tweet to the mayor. How can a mayor take into consideration all those short messages? In my opinion, it can be quite risky to invade a worker’s privacy because they can be felt constantly observed and that can cause stress on them which it is not a good factor to work properly.
In conclusion, social media in general and Twitter in particular are positive resources as long as people give a good use of them.