When thinking about this campaign, I really went back and forth on the decision whether to run. There are real challenges to running in a town like West Orange. A candidate is pretty much required to wear out at least one pair of shoes walking through neighborhoods and knocking on doors to reach voters directly, but that can't be the only way that I reach out to let people know about this important campaign. Our town is big enough that I also need tools to communicate ideas and my approach to local government. It is also in a very expensive media market, so ad buying is pretty much impossible for a person who does not have large campaign coffers and simply is running because they think they can make a positive contribution. It is therefore quite difficult to reach voters to communicate ideas and plans, and campaigns here can get quite noisy in the public forum. I think it is important for voters to determine whom to support based on the candidate's presentation, and the challenge is for the candidate to get that presentation to voters so that they can decide which candidate would be most effective for the community.
Yesterday I posted a link to my first blog post in which I announced that I am running for Town Council. I watched as commenters asked good questions that I felt I needed to dig into and understand in order to provide a thoughtful response. And then this morning I saw that commenters began challenging each other, which creates substantial distraction from any clear eyed discussion on the thread. That, I think, is endemic to social media and is one of the main criticisms of these platforms. I find that very difficult to efficiently address with the tools available on social media. To manage social media interaction, the choices seem to me to be (1) allow all comments and risk distracting (at least) or inappropriate commentary - likely to cause more division and pain, (2) monitor comments and censor material that the poster thinks falls outside of some standard - inevitably subjective and inviting criticism, or (3) use social media as a distribution tool to merely notify people about statements, policy positions, etc. that are relevant to the choice that voters will make in November.
I realize that any choice that I make will lead to frustration by at least some people in town. I do not want my campaign to be a platform for division and I believe that it does not have to be that way. I am going to use social media platforms to inform voters about my campaign, including events, policies, my views on issues, and the like. I will not, however allow my campaign to be used by others as a platform for division and therefore I feel the need to have a policy to turn off commenting for my posts on social media. I may decide to revisit this policy as the campaign goes on, but for now, I feel like this is a necessary step in order to try to maintain civility and community that I want to encourage in this campaign.
I welcome questions and comments - my email is redwine4westorange@gmail.com.
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