Really?
F
Don’t bother looking; you won’t find me on Facebook.
Wow, I thought only the promise of an end to robocalls would be enough to make anybody vote. Or at least, make you vote early. Yes, we live in one of the bellwether states and the robocalls are killer. My husband voted weeks ago, so some of it has stopped. But me, I like to vote on the actual day. And I like hearing from Mitt, Barack, Ann, and Michelle. It’s almost as if they like me, really really like me! Ok those last two sentences were a big fat lie.
Speaking of fat, we also recently learned that sitting on Facebook (be careful how you write that) can make one fat. The University of Ulster came out with the breathtaking news that sitting on one’s arse for hours in front of a computer or other screen will make you less active. If you are watching your weight and don’t want to read the whole study, here’s the press release with the summary: http://news.ulster.ac.uk/releases/2012/6542.html.
What about voting?
I’ve voted; please stop calling!
Dr James Fowler, from the University of San Diego found that when people received messages from someone they knew imploring them to vote, 80% of the 340,000 people who got such a message voted. No word on whether they would have voted anyway. Synopsis here: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2012/sep/12/facebook-message-boosts-voter-turnout-ucsd-study/.
So you go out and vote tomorrow. Or maybe you’ve already voted. If a friend on Facebook got you to do that, great. What’s more interesting to me is what could be known about how you voted. Secret ballot box? Yes, in the real world. But in the virtual world, people are all too eager to share.
So in the spirit of democracy, all I can say is this:
If we are asked at the end of the day, what we’ve got when we emerge from the online world, we could say, “a community if you can keep it.” In our real world, as we go to vote, I’m reminded of the quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin after the Constitutional convention: “Well Dr. Franklin, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
His answer: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
We the People…
So far, so good.
