Malaysia in Globalization: Citizen Engagement 101

How effective are politicians in using online social media tools to engage citizens and to promote information openness? They certainly take cues from citizens to transform from bureaucratic figures to sociable figures by taking full advantage of citizen craving for real-time information bits, broadcasting their self-elevated opinions and mobilizing support for their causes. The next thing you know is that they use social media tools to update on parliamentary sessions and sensational political trials, make major announcement before mainstream media. So that is it, being popularly informative.

The real distinction to be made is that using these tools is never any indication of effective citizen engagement. It takes greater effort to be engaging and responsive to citizens than to be informative through promoting selective agenda. Any engagement effort by politicians through social media tools would simply backfire if no consistent and sincere effort is in place. I would say neither such usage is any sign of supporting information openness when contentious policies are still firmly in place to restrict sensitive contents with very little tolerance toward criticism and dissent. It is simply counterproductive to have clogged information in open channel.

The point is that politicians can use myriad social media tools if they want, but they can still fail miserably in engaging citizens, as long as they never learn the fundamental lesson of minimized talking but maximized listening. There is still much to learn about citizen engagement.