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"Later today with my son to a football match: Heerenveen – Excelsior. It has been a long time since I was on a football stand. # Looking forward!" (Rouvoet, 02-04-2011, Twitter) This is a Tweet posted by André Rouvoet at the time that he was a politician. Significantly, he was a political figure who made his private activities transparent through a public medium. In this way, his Tweet denotes an important change in political communication, which has taken place over the past few decades. Ever since the fifties, the old media has been blurring the border between the private and public sphere, and has increased the transparency of politicians. (Pels, 2003, p. 42) Also the new media have the potential to continue this trend, as is demonstrated by Rouvoet's Tweet. The distinction between old and new media will be maintained in the rest of this paper. The old media are defined as non-interactive print- and electronic media, such as newspapers and TV-programs. (Chun & Keenan, 2006, p. 284) To be more precise, this paper especially focuses on the popular and commercial part of the old media. The new media will be defined as online and interactive forms of mass communication, such as weblogs, Twitter and Facebook. (Ibid, p. 3) The fact that Rouvoet's Tweet follows the trend that is visible in various older media, makes it interesting to investigate the extent to which other politicians copy these trends as well. This can reveal how influential this trend actually is, since politics is one of the parts of society in which the distinctions between the public and private sphere is most prominent. Therefore, this paper will be centred on the research question: To what extent does the way in which Dutch politicians use Twitter, reflect the dominant trend in the majority of the old media?

The concept of transparency can be applied to nearly every domain of human activity. In each of these diverse domains transparency is thought to provide the public with information in order to make reasoned judgements: be it information about who to vote for, who to employ, which medications to take, or which Non Governmental Organization to support. If people are sufficiently informed, the argument goes, they are able to hold political officials accountable, find more competent staff, and even punish mismanagement and corruption. As Bessire (2005) puts it, "transparency is strongly related to information – and information is power" (p. 429). This line of reasoning ignores the fact that the availability of information is not the only aspect of accountability. If the public does not know what is happening behind closed doors, it naturally has no incentive – and indeed no chance – to hold somebody accountable necessary. As well as having access to relevant information, people must have measures at their disposal to punish responsible actors.

If you search for ´transparency´ on an internet search engine, it will provide more than 87 million hits to choose from. By clicking through the results, a diverse variety of types of transparency can be found, ranging from governmental or state transparency to transparency in the financial sector to transparency in sports. While some hits provide state or corporate policies on transparency, others refer to organizations that push for increased openness of organizations. Transparency is a concept that can be applied to a broad variety of different situations and domains in our social, political and economic world, often making it difficult to grasp clearly defined conditions. Since transparency seemingly illustrates a concept with unparalleled possibilities of application, it was referred to as a ´buzzword´ throughout this volume. The contributions of this volume sought, however, to give more substance to the 'buzzword'. In which fields of social life do matters of transparency come up? What specific role does it play? Do we understand it in an instrumental or consequential way? Who or what is at the focal point of transparency – individuals, public persons, institutions or professions? The answers to these questions, which seek to define the characteristics and criteria of transparency, and the expectations attached to the concept will differ from case to case. What is needed, therefore, is further refinement of what is actually meant when speaking about transparency. Such refinement is inevitably context-based. This is exactly what this volume aimed to do: it analyzes the concept of transparency within specific cases and attempts to show what implications it can have for individuals, politics, social media, international development aid and the pharmaceutical industry. In this regard, the approaches of our authors followed the rationale that transparency is not to be understood as a value in itself, but as instrumental in achieving specific objectives.