The Falls

Is it creepy or smart for political candidates to have a Facebook page?

The conventional wisdom these days is that candidates must go online, unfiltered, to the voters. The CW also holds that the Web has made it harder for candidates to slip spin past the citizenry. And, finally, the CW tells us that us old folks can look kind of skeezy hanging around these social networking sites.

All of these things can’t be true at the same time.

Unfiltered and unmediated, candidates don’t revert to solid, straightforward civics. They revert to the standards of advertising.

And while the Web provides a platform for challenging candidates, the press and the status quo, it also can make a casualty of accurate information. Naive cynicism – the direct opposite of believing everything you read – grows like a weed.

The last thing, though – that one’s true. It’s a little skeezy for old folks to hang around on Facebook. Even if all they’re trolling for are votes.