A seminal book in I read in grad school many, many years ago, was baumgartner and Jones’ Agendas and Instability in American Politics, Second Edition . They offered what seemed a logical and comforting view of the American political system and how/when policy changed occurred. They argued that the underlying dynamics of the system were quite stable and change happened incrementally, but there were periods where vast social and cultural upheaval produced dramatic and systematic policy change. They called their theory “punctuated equlibrium“… a theory borrowed from evolutionary biology to explain why some species had sudden bursts of genetic adaptations after long periods of stasis.

In politics, social “shocks” to the system force the sytsem to adapt by reorient our expectations about what government can and should be able to do.

Here’s a question I’m wrestling with. What role does social media play in the political “adaptation process”? Does it diffuse the pressure that might otherwise be placed on the system to bring about change? Or does it amplify it in ways that will inevitably lead to a much different system than we have today?

You can reasonably make a case for either. In the first instance, you can say that social media produces political “chatter” that isn’t often funneled through formal advocacy or institutional groups that have the capacity to act on emerging themes. As such the “issue attention cycle” never gets past the “discovery” phase into actual attempts at problem solving and the agenda gets set by those with the strong incentives and financial ability to stay engaged.

The other case, maybe the “pro” social media case, is that for a platform like Twitter that has a high degree of sharing between networks, the medium can serve to reinforce norms. of sincerity, fairness and tolerance. This is particularly evident when corporations or celebrities use Twitter or Instagram to “reach out to fans” and instead get “trolled.” These efforts at a form of cultural rectitude may seem like actions at the margin, but as evolutionary biologists point out, those on the margins of a species’ population are often the impetus for systemic change.