The Targeted Citizen: Civic Life Essay Example

The main ideas presented in the reading are the influence of powerful networks on political issues and trading corporations. The Facebook social network has been used to conduct experiments and gather information on the civic life of individuals, and the participants have happened to be the target population. The discussion gives an example of the experiments conducted on Facebook which was the voter megaphone with the aim of making people carry out their civic duty of voting and having their voices heard. The posts they made about the voting behavior of people was in a bud to stoke peer pressure to vote. Facebook was able to harvest information from many people, and the knowledge was used to influence people's actions which were voting. Other corporations such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon also have their means to steer people in the way they choose. There is also the aspect of government regulation policies on these corporations where it approves their acquisitions and sets the tax policies as well. The central idea of the chapter is to discuss the influence of social network on the extents of politics as it is an excellent platform to share information and gain responses. There are quite a massive number of people that are registered members of Facebook and spend most of their time, and the concept of emotions is also presented where emotional states can be transferred to others such that people experience similar emotions even when they do not know. The modern means of consumer marketing which uses the social networks helps to provide the politicians with new pathways to attract specific voters where the politicians tell them what they want to hear and the voters are likely to accept the information at face value. There is more development in the merging of politics and consumer marketing since the last century, and the politicians engage in powerful campaigns to their supporters. The discussion concludes by stating that the social network is already aware of the voting behavior such that the entire system of politics, the money, the attention and the fawning is directed to the targeted voters, virtually ignoring the rest. In this case, any attempts to change the behaviors are not worth the investment.

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Conclusion

The topic shows what happens in real life situations with not only Facebook but also other social network platforms that people use. It is right to say that the majority of social influencers make use of social network to impact people's behavior determines the way it is and acting accordingly. Facebook is the most used social media platform and contains more users than any other platform. Thus, the politicians use Facebook to state their manifesto and influence their voters to keep having their back on the political campaigns they conduct. Therefore, people get to trust them, and it becomes hard to change their stand. Thus, these platforms become the ideal places to attract large numbers of people because of their availability. These are where the targets citizens are at, and the civic life is influenced by having them practice their civil rights. The article presents the notion of social media in the perspective of everyone and describes how the politicians utilize every single way possible to keep getting far as they identify themselves with the target population in these areas.