Effectively, communication has flowed in two ways – leader to voter and voter to voter – and both ways have led to informal opinion formula...
Effectively, communication has flowed in two ways – leader to voter and voter to voter – and both ways have led to informal opinion formulation. Social media has blurred the boundaries for leaders. Politicians have always been held accountable for their utterances, scrutinised for their comments that go into an indelible archive.
In the age of social media, perceptions are created against political opponents without so much as a thought given to propriety. Leaders earlier did not have the privilege of this anonymity if they wished to run a full-fledged slander campaign against their political adversaries.
In the pre-social-media era, leaders could not afford to go wrong with their communication strategy. There was no Twitter to turn to the next day, no follow-up comments could be made, no real-time feedback of the previous speech was available for the leader to make corrections soon after.
Today allegations are hurled without any attribution to authentic sources. In many cases, the politician’s public relations machinery does it for him. Surrogate pages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp forwards are all tools that every political party employs ruthlessly to build its own campaign and demolish its opponent’s.
Who exactly came up with “Pappu” for Rahul Gandhi for the...
