Long ago, I joined this site for business owners, called Merchant Circle. You join local networks of other businesses and honestly, I've never put much time into it. But they send me occasional emails and statistics about how many people have checked my neglected profile and all that.
They sent out a political survey a couple of days ago, I guess to gauge the specific political interests that small business owners have in the coming election, so, since I kind of like doing surveys, I filled it out and hit "submit".
Only I was not allowed to submit my answers. One question listed 4 forms of social media that, I guess, normal people use to follow candidates and political organizations, only they worded it as you see there.
"DO you follow..?" This implies that one can answer "no" as well as "yes" but that screenshot shows you what I got when I left it blank. A red error message. I was given no grief about the other questions, which, as you see by the one above it, offered choices I could relate to.
I am required to listen to politicians' self-promotional jabberings via social media.
Well, of course not, the question really means not that I must, but that I do. Surely I do! Because everybody does, don't they??
Or at least, anybody who would join a networking site must also want to get campaign messages telling her that "I, the Candidate!" or "OUR candidate!" is the one favored by God and the ghost of
[ ]FDR
[ ]Reagan (choose all that apply).
But, no, I do what social media I do to get away from political crap. The truth is that I do follow The Christian Left on Twitter, and nobody can say they aren't political, but they are neither a candidate nor a "related organization." Maybe i'm defining related organizations too narrowly, by including only those tied to and campaigning for a candidate, not for tolerance and help for the poor in general.
Self-promotion by politicians, in any medium, is, OK, not devoid of, but weak on information. Nowhere did it give me the option to say that I prefer news sources, to see what they really think, plan, contradict themselves, and screw up about.
The degree to which the whole thing is driven by social media now slightly horrifies me.
