ABSTRACT
Crawford notes that the increased use of the social media tools as discourse spaces puts added pressure on politicians to perform in these spaces. As such, politicians must carefully manage their identities in social networking spaces. But a site like Facebook that is entirely based around disclosure and connection demands a much more intimate and informal style of communication than does mass media. Facebook provides an unprecedented opportunity to get people personally interested and excited about public life. But ultimately the same politics of the personal that excited users lets them down when the realization that public governance cannot be personal. The problem is that the nation state is not personal. The problem with conflating the public with the personal is that the process of disclosure and connection is asymmetrical. Perhaps the most pernicious effect of the divide between public and private evidenced by an architecture of disclosure is the removal of cognitive barriers between the public and hidden transcript.
