Okanagan Sunday - Sunday, May 31, 2009 - What do U.S. President Barack Obama, the U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, Michael Ignatieff, Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe and NDP Leader Jack Layton all have in common?
Each has a Facebook and Twitter profile.
First it was blogs, then Facebook, and now Twitter has become a politician's new favourite Internet plaything.
These websites have created a new form of political communication.
By writing short messages on their Facebook or Twitter pages about what they are doing, politicians generate permanent dialogue between themselves and their potential voters.
In reading politicians' online profiles, we discover their preferred travel destinations, their opinions, as well as comments and jokes about what is happening in the world.
In short: their daily lives, morning, daytime, evening.
For some, knowing at all times what the politicians are doing is a guarantee of honesty, transparency and a healthy democratic life.
Politicians say they want to talk and listen to their constituents, and these online tools of socialization and networking allow them to stay in touch with citizens.
These websites allow anyone to communicate directly with the politician, without any filters, as if the politician was a friend or a family member.
This new form of communication helps to humanize politicians.
With Twitter, Facebook and other social networking websites, everyone is on an equal footing, and the politician becomes a citizen like any other.
However, there are consequences to the presence of politicians on social networking websites that we seem to be forgetting: the risk of making the political function merely commonplace.
When a politician speaks several times a day on his blog, his Facebook page or Twitter page, we must admit we're a far ways off from the sacred presidential speech of old.
The politician no longer cares to make occasional, even rare interventions, which intensify the weight of their chosen words.
By showcasing themselves on such websites, politicians hope to convince us they are citizens like any other. But that's precisely the problem: if they are not any different, then they are nothing.
What the citizen seeks from a politician is the difference, and a certain sense of superiority, which brings credibility, prestige and authority to the post.
This is not by exposing his private life to show that they are simple and normal, on websites like Twitter and Facebook, that the politician will build the stature of a statesman.
The recent success of the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, which placed the social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter at the heart of its Internet strategy, may seem to be a role model for politicians.
These websites can certainly be useful to good political communication, but only if the politician is not too familiar and he knows to keep the distances required by the stately function.
With voter abstention greater than ever before, the emergence of the "everyday politician" is worrying.
It is certainly by not making the political role a commonplace thing that politicians will convince voters to perform their most basic duty of a citizen: voting.
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Philippe Bernier Arcand is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the Universite du Quebec, Montreal