Presidential Debate via Twitter

This week, there was what was described as a Presidential debate via Twitter. Over a two to three day period, surrogates for John McCain and Barack Obama answered moderator questions about technology in 140 characters or fewer.

If you're not familiar with Twitter, it's a site where you can submit posts up to 140 characters in length. Mostly, I have seen people use it to provide friends status on their daily life. I heard someone call it 'life-booking', which i find an apt description. Facebook (and I'm sure other sites) allow you to extend the concept by posting mobile pictures along with status updates. So, for example, if you go to a concert, you can post a message like 'at the u2 concert..we're in the third row!' and then when the show starts, you can take a picture with your camera and post it.

The Presidential Debate via Twitter used the same technology in a different way - surrogates for John McCain and Barack Obama answered moderator questions via Twitter over a few day period.

The tech geek in me finds this very interesting. Obviously elections are constantly evolving - and I think especially so in this contest. But, I was disappointed with this debate for a couple reasons.

• I believe a presidential debate should be between the presidential candidates - not surrogates. The person speaking for McCain wasn't even from his own campaign - it was someone from the RNC. Now I understand that a person working closing with a candidate will be familiar enough with his positions to be able to articulate them and respond to basic questions. But that is not a 'presidential debate'.
• In general, I believe the political discourse needs more detailed discussion, not less. Limiting an answer to 140 characters results in sound-bytes and incomplete and/or imprecise answers on complex issues. However, I recognize that many Americans would benefit from succinct, easy answers, and so the format may be beneficial for the large group of Americans that do not have nor want to have an in-depth knowledge of politics.
  
• To me, the concept of Twitter is that you're limited in length of posts, you can post from anywhere, and therefore posts should be frequent and succinct. This debate lasted about 3 days, but the pace was slow. The first day, one of the surrogates posted three entries.
  
• I frequently have issues with the Twitter site going down. I can only assume that if it goes down on normal days, that the problems will be amplified on days when there is a publicized presidential debate.

Overall, an interesting experiment, but I did not find it very useful in better understanding the positions of the two candidates.

You can find a link to one of the articles about the debate at cnn.com.