The question of whether social media promotes engagement is contested terrain, but there are encouraging signs of the value of social media.  Healthy skepticism is good, but so is re-evaluating what engagement and value can look like.

By Emily Badger, Miller McCune

….Macon Phillips, the White House director of digital strategy, sounds certain the net effect is positive for invigorating civic participation. Speaking Tuesday at the Brookings Institution, he cited a Web debate the White House organized last month after Obama’s major Middle East policy speech. The White House tapped NPR’s Twitter guru Andy Carvin and George Washington University political scientist Marc Lynch to interview national security adviser Ben Rhodes, with the help of the Twitter-sphere.

“They were facilitating a conversation between a large group of people and an American policy official,” Phillips said. “That’s to my mind a new model of engagement.”

… Phillips also brought up another recent event from the White House’s digital engagement strategy. The administration has been releasing regular “white board” videos showing, for example, Austan Goolsbeeexplaining the president’s agenda for patent reform. That particular video has about 8,000 views on YouTube right now….

Research that Pew released last week…: Facebook users are more politically engaged than most people, and they’re more trusting of others and have more and stronger relationships in the real world. The study also showed that MySpace users are more likely to be open to opposing points of view…..

  “Whether it’s consuming something or sharing something or signing a petition or sending an email, there are different values to each of those actions,” said Mindy Finn, who has worked on digital strategy for several Republican campaigns. “The biggest question is what is the value, and are there activities that in the past we may not have considered real civic engagement or having value that do have value?”