This week, President Obama did a new thing with technology, conducting the nation’s first “Twitter Town Hall.” Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, noted in his introduction to the event that “millions of people around the world” use Twitter to “instantly connect to what is meaningful to them.” “Much of this conversation is made up of everyday people engaged in spirited debate about the future of their countries,” he added.
Viewers were given a Web address to submit questions to the president and urged by the baby faced Dorsey to “get the conversation started,” though the questions were ultimately selected by various regional curators. It was, according to Macon Phillips, the White House director of digital strategy, a way to “try to find new opportunities to connect with Americans around the country”.
In May of 1970, Richard Nixon, a less telegenic president, tried to connect with Americans, awaking before dawn to visit, unscheduled, the Lincoln Memorial and a group of war protesters there. According to Time, “his discussion rambled over the sights of the world that he had seen — Mexico City, the Moscow ballet, the cities of India. When the conversation turned to the war, Nixon told the students: “I know you think we are a bunch of so and so's.”
Nixon’s ramble came at a particularly fraught moment in American history: the expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia had reignited the student movement into a nationwide strike, with 441 universities shut down. The Kent State shootings had happened just the week before. The nation seemed fragmented, and Nixon’s promise to “lead the nation ‘forward together” less tenable than ever. With the visit, Nixon, said Time, “was trying his best to reconstruct consensus.”