Johnson et al article investigated online social network sites (SNS), especially YouTube, and civic engagement. The top-down style of political campaigning, which was mass-media oriented, was shifting toward online social networks style campaign where users quickly share information or links, promote political events, and create supplementary contents that would eventually energize public. Social network site not only function as new gathering spaces where users exchange information and disseminate contents, but also serve as a new conduit for energizing political atmosphere (Kaye).

Political conversations likely facilitate an increased desire to participate in political affairs because the interactions with others given political interests help to solidify opinions. Elaborated political conversation contributes to the development of higher-quality opinions due to the refined opinions throughout such conversational processes (Johnson et al). Formerly, such processes occur in interpersonal manners. One shares his or her political opinions with friends, families, and co-workers to refine their political aspects that eventually influence one’s intention to participate civic duty to vote.

However, in the era of social network, such processes can occur in a bigger scale. Political conversations can spread widely, reach more audience, and help to formulate political opinions based on varieties of sources. Besides, social network’s wider ranges of functionalities—email, multimedia sharing, and connectivity management (Kaye)—also play a vital role because SNS can accommodate multifaceted nature of political conversations. It simply facilitates information exchange among users in vastly expanded capacities (Rojas & Puig-i-Abril, 2009).

Surprisingly, Johnson and colleagues’ study showed that reliance on YouTube did not boost intention to vote. Rather, it appears that more use of YouTube negatively influences the intention to vote. The authors speculate that YouTube users’ dynamics are different from other social network sites because content creations are more labor-intensive than other social networks. Nevertheless, social network site reliance appears to be a more powerful predictor of offline political participations, which can strongly influence the intention to vote. Also, some studies found no support for a direct spillover effect between online expressive behavior and offline participatory behavior. However, uses of SNS appear to influence ones’ offline actions (Rojas & Puig-i-Abril, 2009).  Hence, it is premature to generalize social network sites’ weak influence on the intention to vote because SNS likely exerts significant, but indirect influence on the intention to vote.

In addition, mobile phone was mentioned as an emerging medium influencing political participation (Rojas & Puig-i-Abril, 2009). It was not surprising to learn the presence of a positive relationship between mobile phone use for information exchange and political involvement (Campbell & Kwak 2010). Given improving smartphone technologies and its integration with SNS, we will likely witness increasing migration from PC usage to portable mobile devices—smartphones and tablets—because portable devices practically became our third arm!!

Nevertheless, information dissemination by SNS and mobile technologies are not always beneficial because no one can control information flows. Still, in terms of politics, SNS facilitated information flow is  emancipation of the political arena because politics is no longer for movers and shakers. Regular Joes can make a dent now!! Formerly, regular Joes were not allowed to follow up political candidates’ irresponsible promises and actions. Now, they are subject to every action and word, and the advent of SNL may change the job descriptions of politicians.