Gaining access to political figures

Speaking to my colleague involved in our internal Twittergate incident; he made a fairly astute observation that I would like to share. He believed that through social media, never before has the general public had such access to political figures - this is very much true. The senior management of public service organisations are now under more scrutiny than they have ever been before and rank and file members of the organisation have the ability to influence thinking like never before.

Possibly, no longer can bureaucrats filter information to heads of departments or political figures, now any government employee can post a comment on the page of a politician or public figure. This could possibly be a seismic shift in workplace dynamics; sure social media pages of politicians are usually monitored and run by staffers, but the staffers can and do bring issues to the attention of political figures. Also laughable, the director of human resources informed my colleague that our workplace, a state government department monitors the pages and profiles of key figures on a regular basis - now there is a great use of government resources.