The potential for Twitter integration on all revamped Government of Canada websites made for an intriguing Globe and Mail online headline this week — even if the actual news could be encapsulated in the form of a tweet.

Certainly, the item did its job of riling up the commenters, who are mostly blind to the fact that a social media platform supplies more freedom to rage about Treasury Board of Canada president Tony Clement than a newspaper website does. But who would be paying attention?

Bureaucrats being reliably reached in the future via 140-character rants would be a leap indeed. Customer service departments of service industries have fielded Twitter-based feedback with mixed results. No doubt, any reports of a smooth conflict resolution via social media is seen as good publicity.

Whether civil servants are really prepared to have their interactions aired is one of the challenges of Open Government. Frustration would ensue if much of the bureaucracy used Twitter in the vein of Cap'n Crunch — whose account @RealCapnCrunch depicts a breakfast mascot who is too eager to acknowledge every mention.

The inaugural PS Engage learning and networking event in Ottawa on Monday provided a stage for the Canadian government to announce formal guidelines for playing the social media game.

Yet the lukewarm reception to the idea that layers of bureaucracy must continue to be involved in the most elementary interactions with the public served as a reminder that the future of communications can't be left to career policymakers alone.

Fortuitously, that evening, a second Metaviews salon in the capital city picked up where the October event left off, by asking the question "Will There Ever Be Open Government?"

This question wasn't going to be definitively answered in one night, of course, but a mixture of insiders and outsiders — all of whom have wondered about a more effective evolution of online public service — seized the opportunity to swap thoughts.

Disruption was the central theme of one conversation — as everyone in the room has closely observed the transformation of all media industries over the past decade. Open Government can similarly provide a breakthrough for the younger generation of civil servants. Currently, the way most of them interact on the job compared to in their personal lives remains a century apart.

When it comes to the Canadian economy, Tim Hortons is like the Beatles — to the point of being able to adopt new systems of information delivery in its own sweet time.

Case in point, the chain's Facebook page was up to 1.7 million followers before it committed to Twitter. The easy ride Tim's has received in the national media no doubt contributed to the lack of hurry.

Yet the recent corporate turmoil — which led to the cushioned exit in May of chief executive Don Schroeder — also reflected a lack of success at interacting with customers. After all, they were counting on more Roll Up the Rim to Win prizes to offset any social media backlash. A profit slip was subsequently blamed on the giveaways.

While Tim Hortons could still count on a steady flow of stories for opening in Dubai or introducing lasagna, it faced a potential public relations snag last month when it was learned that a reverend apparently had an overly amorous lesbian couple ejected from a location in Blenheim, Ont. The company seemed to let the outcry run its course — by saying as little about the incident as it could.

Stepping into the public arena of Twitter, though, might also be an invitation to blunder. No doubt, given the effort to plant a Tim's or two in every neighbourhood in Canada, people will eventually expect responses about issues more complicated than a latte.

Does the Canadian music business need a spoonful of Sugar Crisp? Cereal company Post Foods has promised studio time, producer support and $5,000 for the most popular song submission to a contest called "The First15."

The official explanation for the venture, though, is a relatively nonsensical reflection of how cautious many are about stepping into this arena.

Presumably, the company was inspired to link itself to independent home recording artists after being approached by rapper Ish Morris to use the vintage 1960s "Can't get enough of that Sugar Crisp" jingle in a harmless ditty that itself sounds like a commercial that would air between Saturday morning cartoons circa 1989.

No doubt it would've been easier to just exploit the association with a viral video aimed at kids. So, why go through the hassle of trying lure musicians to upload their own tune?

The fact that Post has been forced to stop skewing its sugar cereal to children — while maintaining that 40 per cent of its eatership is over 18 — might have something to do with it.

"The track is allowed to incorporate the Sugar Bear jingle," stipulate the rules, "but this isn't required."

Big box discount stores are generally glum places by nature. The more aesthetically pleasing the environment, after all, the more it feeds the perception that the cost is being handed down.

Walmart just pushed this cheap philosophy so far that it provided room in the U.S. for a fashion-conscious alternative.

The positioning of Target was further validated when it secured its first 105 locations across Canada. No longer would the country be stuck with so many of those bleak Zellers stores that the Hudson's Bay Company never quite knew what to do with.

And, in the run-up to the $1.8 billion handover of about half of its 273 stores from one U.S.-based owner to another — Walmart will get 39 of them, actually — Zellers has seized permission to publicly admit that it became the last place Canadians wanted to shop at.

The lack of need for traditional advertising in the two-year transition period has reportedly helped HBC make more money off the dying stores. Now, the company has accelerated its use of social media to entice customers through irony.

Those looking to catch a break in the self-expression business would have it easier if they were attached to a corporate sponsor ahead of time. Why wait to be discovered as a conduit for advertising if a sell-out is inevitable?

Still, we remain attached to the idea that credibility has to be earned — that an authentic voice requires a trial en route to a payoff, even if no one would voluntarily submit to that hassle.

YouTube has provided a glimpse into universe in which far-out ideas can reap commercial rewards if they get enough clicks: Epic Meal Time might be the most financially successful Canadian television show, ever. So, time will tell if YouTube's strategy for pre-capitalized celebrities will come at the expense of outsiders.

Brand names would obviously rather attach themselves to a proven commodity, after all. Mindshare, the media buying agency for the Ford Motor Company of Canada, didn't need to look any further for a social media-friendly voice than one Amber MacArthur.

Movember has served as a case study of how to ping with the modern monoculture — a fundraiser for prostate cancer awareness flecked with just enough ironic entertainment value. Moustache maintenance might as well replace breakfast auditing as status update fodder for a month.

Plus, it puts a fuzzy face on cause that used to never be spoken of in mixed company.

What happens, though, if the novelty value runs its course? The number of Canadian companies looking to align themselves with the campaign foreshadows an inevitable burnout.

For now, advertisers seem eager to attach themselves to something perceived as authentic. But this isn't as much about furthering the potential for social enterprise as trying to reach a demographic that much mass media has given up on.

This year, Movember Canada branding has been attached to Rickard's beer, Speed Stick deodorant, Schick razors, Bread & Butter skincare and Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Basically, the campaign has swept in to provide a more ethical platform than a wet T-shirt contest would.

The forthcoming MTV reality special about Occupy Wall Street is sure to raise curiosity — if not for the way it presents the movement, then at least for which corporations were willing to advertise on the show.

Twitter apparently has no problem accepting protest-friendly patronage, though. Progressives United, the group founded by Senator Russ Feingold to counter corporate influence in the U.S. political system, has planted its link at the top of searches for #OWS.

Yet for a service still challenged to figure out a sustainable business model, which would require dealing with a system that many protesters are rallying against, this kind of association may just reaffirm the perception that Twitter is too big to succeed.

Being associated with something more psychologically distant, like the Arab Spring, might be a whole lot less complicated as a sideshow to vanity media and sponsor accounts. Occupy, by contrast, risks hitting too close to home.

"In the age of Gov 2.0, the public served by a government program expects to see “alignment” between the policy presented by their elected leaders, the architecture of the program, and, most importantly, the user experience.

The citizens of 2011 Canada who access a government program have the same expectations for quality service as they have come to expect from their favourite shopping outlet, bank, or service provider. Today’s “consumers” don’t think consciously about these expectations — it’s what they have been trained to expect.

It should be obvious to the political and public service leaders that this is the case. But scanning the newspaper, one can quickly identify any number of current events that highlight a “misalignment” within some government service."

-- Alcide DeGagné, in Strategic & Operational Reviews: We Can't Agree to Disagree

When it has come to the adoption of online platforms, and the adjustment to the current information age, there is presumably no worse sin than not "getting it."

Most companies are still presumed by default to be out of touch. And mainstream media outlets continue to be similarly pilloried.

Yet, no one is going to sacrifice profit for the illusion of progress, just because a critic heckled them.

A safer tactic, then, has involved trumpeting a survey that doesn't name any names. SAS Canada, the analytics company seeking new customers for its software and services, has all but perfected this game.

The latest online survey of 1,000 "senior level business decision makers," conducted by Leger Marketing back in January, asserted that less than a fifth of companies are "getting it" when it comes to social media. Statistics showed that some of those executives have sloughed the job off to communications and marketing departments. And some just don't care.

Of course, it didn't take seven months to count up the multiple-choice clicks, given how SAS released numbers from the same survey in mid-May. The press release back then was "Information overload still dragging Canadian execs down."

Without fail, these numbers were promptly spun into a feature report for the Financial Post, then syndicated to local Postmedia Network affiliates across the country.

Last summer, though, the picture was different. SAS boasted that 90 per cent of organizations in the country were using the new tools — just sluggish about applying them.

Still, the statistics actually budged in a positive direction, since 10 per cent of respondents asserted social media was a waste of time in 2010, compared to 5 per cent this year.

I've spent the better part of the last five years working at the confluence of public policy, people, and technology and can say with certainty that the experts in the field agree: the proliferation of digital communication technologies is fundamentally reshaping all sectors of society. While this may be most apparent in the newspaper, music, or television industries, to think that governments are somehow immune to the changing environment is irresponsible. Thus far governments have managed to operate under the radar, espousing collaboration as the new modus operandi of the public service while hiding in the murky rhetoric of ‘doing more with less'; but frankly it’s no longer a viable option for dealing with the coming change.

Digital is different, so let's do things differently

If you don't believe me, look at what is happening across the pond in the United Kingdom where budgets are being slashed on average of 20% but up to 35% in some cases. The harsh reality, as the Brits are learning, is that they can't even afford to do more with less. Being more collaborative isn't the same thing as being innovative. Similarly, all the collaboration in the world doesn't break you out of old mental models or help you re-imagine your role in a rapidly and ever changing society. We need to cut through the noise of ‘greater efficiency through greater collaboration’ and the rhetoric of ‘doing more with less’ and focus instead on doing things fundamentally differently. Given the profound impact of digital communication technologies on our society, I think that doing things differently starts with cultivating a better understanding of how digital is reshaping what citizens expect from their public institutions and how public institutions can best respond to those needs.

The search to make a few bucks in hyperlocal online journalism has turned out fruitless for most would-be contenders.

When it comes to sports coverage, though, seizing control of the message across all possible platforms has been paying huge dividends — one market at a time.

A recent feature from The New York Times highlighted just how much money is being made from media rights, to the point where they are now worth more than the teams.

The squad formerly known as the Expos, in fact, may have never gotten official assent to leave Montreal to become the Washington Nationals if not for the creation of a regional network that allowed the neighbouring Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos to reap the majority of the TV-related rewards.

When it came to the acquisition of the Toronto Blue Jays in 2000, the late Ted Rogers was motivated by the emerging realization that sporting events were predicted to be the last type of long-form programming that was always watched live, rather than on-demand. The regional Rogers Sportsnet channels have prospered ever since.

Going offline is the new going online, and has been for a while, at least since it started to sink in that there were benefits to not feeling burdened by digital distraction.

Plus, the thinking foreshadows a new kind of recovery movement, dedicated to the pursuit of communications where the web is not a factor.

That's increasingly difficult, when conversations are dominated by references to things observed online, and personal input along the way. Most discussions — even (or especially) during time spent away from the internet — don't feel like they've reached fruition without forwarding links after the fact.

Where is the desire to get beyond these trappings going to stem from? A campaign along the lines of the rapidly diminished Earth Hour, or the long-tall principles behind the Sabbath Manifesto, still don't get to the core of what a craving will naturally emerge for.

Nostalgia could become a factor in the great untethering. Memories of how we used to connect with one another, and the culture that surrounded us in the previous century, could start to seem fonder. But baby boomers aren't going to lead the way on this when they're among those most enraptured in the possibilities.

A few notches down the generational ladder, the age group that has the most experience with one foot in the old media and one foot in the new, might be a cohort capable of reinvigorating what was.

Predictably, this back to the land mentality has manifested itself through the internet, because what choice do we really have?

The Daily Dot, a new open-source journalism venture that promises to dig into the real lives behind those who live online, has vowed to "forge links not between pages but people."

Milk, a new idea incubator aimed at the development of mobile apps, headed by Digg founder Kevin Rose, is expected to emphasize a sense of direct collaboration between humans.

On Wednesday, April 27 Dutch media theorist, internet critic and activist Geert Lovink was in Toronto to participate in a panel discussion about the Wikileaks phenomenon. Prior to the event, he stopped by Ryerson University's Infoscape Research Lab to discuss what he's been up to in his role as the director of the Institute of Network Cultures.

Since the advent of the internet, Dr. Lovink has been at the forefront of theorizing both the significance and the potential of networked technologies. He's organized countless conferences, exhibits and symposiums all over the world aimed at generating critical discourse about the internet, and in 1995 he co-founded Nettime, a highly influential mailing list that counts figures such as Bruce Sterling and John Perry Barlow among its subscribers.

Although Lovink's lecture on Wednesday covered a lot of ground, his thesis was fairly simple: our critical perspective on network culture is lagging behind the pace of technological and social change on the internet. There remains an emphasis on discussing emerged -- as opposed to emerging -- phenomena and the pace of academic publishing (a PhD dissertation can take four years to prepare and write) is glacial compared to that of the web. For example, until recently it was still common to see critical scholarly articles centred around Myspace.

According to Lovink, this failure to "play catch up" means that we're not properly analyzing a profound shift towards decentralization in network culture, and the bulk of his presentation consisted of examples of the ways in which this trend is manifesting in social networking, e-commerce and online activism.

During this week's Metaviews teleseminar I was informed about the existence of The National Post's GeoPollster, a foursquare style political Alternate Reality Game whose main goal is to increase voter turnout and interest in Canadian politics. I was immediately interested.

This is because for the most part the political parties, civil society groups and mainstream journalists in Canada seem uninterested, or unable, to use new media effectively. Sure each party uses Twitter and Facebook, but they do so badly. Earlier today Luke described how Micheal Ignatieff's Twitter kept pumping out status updates during this week's debate – effectively undermining the personal nature of social media. Iggy's Twitter was effectively a simulacrum of the real Iggy.

So if the political parties can barely understand how to use Twitter effectively, what hope is there for them to use videogames well? Not much.

This is to their detriment however, because videogames are ideally suited to political tasks. This is because they can engage in procedural rhetoric – something I have discussed at length before. Procedural rhetoric uses what computers do best – run procedures – to engage in arguments about how the world works. It helps that politics is all about ideology, which videogames happen to be excellent at expressing.

Ian Bogost in his book Persuasive Games says that “Political videogames use procedural rhetorics to expose how political structures operate, or how they fail to operate, or how they could or should operate.”