Transparency has a price
As technology evolves and presents us with more and more ways to connect than ever before, all of us — including politicians and civic leaders — are learning to adjust. With each new innovation, it seems that transparency and openness become even more important and more expected from anyone in the public eye.
That transparency, I think, has a price, and while it’s not cheap, it’s well worth the cost. We as a society are going to have to acknowledge that our leaders aren’t much different from the rest of us. We all make mistakes and say (and write) stupid things, and it isn’t always going to be easy to sweep those blunders under the rug.
Embracing the Web is a way for leaders to communicate directly with constituents and have more control over their public image, but it also makes it easier for their words to be used against them, observers say.
“The potential downside is that once you put something on a blog, it’s out there for anybody, and maybe for all time,” said Mark Byrnes, a political science professor at Middle Tennessee State University. “Unfortunately, we’ve gotten to the place where if you’re a public person, anything you’ve ever said or done can be used against you.”
Is this really a bad thing? Shouldn’t you be accountable for your words and your actions, regardless of how much time has passed? As technology and media advancements lift public figures to a higher standard, the price of that standard may be a dose of reality: We’re all human. We all make mistakes, and we all say things we regret. We all hold ignorant opinions and do dumb things, and hopefully along the way we learn from them.
I hope one casualty of this increasing transparency will be the common refusal by public figures to take responsibility for their mistakes. If we’re poised to witness more blunders and missteps than ever before, I hope those errors are followed with healthy doses of “mea culpa.”
January 7th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
[...] Rob Robinson says this is one of the benefits of growing transparency in government: That transparency, I think, has a price, and while it’s not cheap, it’s well worth the cost. We as a society are going to have to acknowledge that our leaders aren’t much different from the rest of us. We all make mistakes and say (and write) stupid things, and it isn’t always going to be easy to sweep those blunders under the rug. [...]