Conference Stephen Coleman
“Democracy, if it is to amount to more than a hollow abstraction, should be vivacious, noisy and consequential…”
Professor Stephen Coleman, from the University of Leeds, gave a talk entitled “Searching for Digital Citizenship“, on Thursday 21 October 2010, at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle University in Paris (Maison de la Recherche, 4 rue des Irlandais. Here is a video of the conference if you missed it. The conference was organised by the Center for Reseach on the English-Speaking World (CREW - EA 4399).
Using social media in campaigning
Labour launched a Virtual Phone Bank and mobilises activists via Twitter and Facebook. The party launched #mobmonday (see video below) in the middle of January: activists can log on every Monday evening between 6 and 8pm and make contacts for a key marginal.
Twitter etc and the election: Is it worth the risk?
By Brian Wheeler, Political reporter, BBC News, 10 February 2010
Somebody will put their foot in it.
Opinion may be divided about how much influence YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the rest of the social media phenomenon will have on this year’s general election.
But there is one thing all the experts can agree on.
Some hapless candidate will say or do something which will make them an instant, if unwitting, internet star - bringing instant shame and embarrassment to their party.
“Candidates are going to have to be on their guard all the time,” says Tim Montgomerie of Tory-supporting blog ConservativeHome.
Social media was in its infancy at the 2005 general election - now it is everywhere and the consequences for politicians are only just beginning to sink in.
‘Too many tweets’
With so many camera and Twitter-enabled phones in circulation no political meeting can ever be considered private again, argues Mr Montgomerie.
“Everything you say could potentially be recorded. You are being watched all the time and you have to be careful what you say,” says Tim Montgomerie.
Even when they are relaxing after a hard day’s campaigning, election candidates can not be sure that the person fiddling with their phone at the next pub table is not Tweeting their every word.
But the benefits of social media for politicians on the campaign trail far outweigh the risk of making a gaffe, argues Tim Montgomerie.
Twitter, in particular, offers them a chance to get their message across to voters in a more relaxed, intimate way than was previously possible.
Tim Montgomerie has been urging Conservative leader David Cameron to overcome his wariness about the micro-blogging site, which allows users to post updates on their day in 140 characters or less.
“I think Cameron would be good at it. It’ll be a great medium for communicating in a warm, direct way,” he wrote in a recent blog.
‘Great medium’
But his pleas seem destined to fall on deaf ears. Mr Cameron made his views on Twitter plain last year, when he told a startled radio presenter he believed “too many tweets make a twat”.
If nothing else, the incident proved that you don’t need to be on Twitter to put your foot in it.
But with the opinion polls narrowing the Conservatives cannot afford any slip-ups.
The party is encouraging candidates to use Twitter and other social media websites - but party managers have also been accused of attempting to vet their online utterances, after an e-mail to candidates was leaked to the press which said “electronic publications such as websites, blogs and Twitter have to be approved before they are posted”.
The Conservatives say it would not be practical to vet everything that their 650 general election candidates say online and they were merely seeking to remind them to stick to party policy.
What worries Tim Montgomerie and other Tory supporters is that many more Labour MPs than Conservatives are active on Twitter.
Recent research by Tweetminster found that of 111 MPs tweeting, 65 were Labour, 23 were Liberal Democrats and 16 were Conservatives.
Gordon Brown does not have a Twitter account but his wife Sarah is a something of a Twitter phenomenon, with more than a million followers.
‘Chaos’
Of the big three party leaders, only the Lib Dem’s Nick Clegg has used Twitter to hold debates with voters and announce policies. Mr Clegg also boasts of having the maximum number of friends on Facebook.
But does any of this matter to voters?
Labour MP Tom Harris, one of the most prolific and widely-read political bloggers and Tweeters, believes most of the electorate will not even notice social media and it will have little, if any, impact on voting intention.
He believes the main impact of Twitter will be as a source of stories for the mainstream media - something he has bitter experience of, when comments he made about an “‘army of teenage mothers living off the state” were picked up by the newspapers.
“Whatever I write on Twitter now I have to just assume the Daily Mail will read it,” he says.
The other effect of social media on the general election campaign - and this is something most of the pundits seem to agree on - is that it will speed everything up.
“It will add to the general sense of chaos,” says Tom Harris.
Instead of worrying about the main TV news bulletins, party managers will now have to keep across literally thousands of media sources.
But far from loosening their grip on the political agenda, Mr Harris believes the internet has given the parties more control.
“If the parties want to respond or attack, they can now do it instantly. A lot more of the power to move the agenda is back with the parties,” says the Glasgow South MP.
Cameron spoof
And he is scathing about the ability of the big political blogs, a handful of which probably wield as much influence as newspapers in shaping the political agenda, to keep the spin doctors in check.
“There will be a huge push by all the like-minded bloggers, both left and right, to promote their own party’s agenda. I think you are going to get quite a lot of discipline,” he says.
Perhaps. But Mr Harris may be underestimating the ability of the internet to subvert party messages and take them off in unexpected directions.
One of the biggest hits on Twitter in recent weeks has been the myDavidCameron site, which allows people to come up with their own, spoof versions of the Tory leader’s recent “airbrushed” election poster.
More than 70,000 have had a go. With money tight for Labour at this general election, this kind of “viral” effort could prove crucial to the party.
But the biggest impact of social media may be at a local level - and this is where much of the parties’ efforts are being concentrated.
‘Creativity’
It is thought Conservative candidates are being encouraged to record their own YouTube videos saying what is important to them - ready for when voters type their constituency name into Google.
Former Liberal Democrat web chief Mark Pack believes the internet will spell the end of indentikit candidates, all repeating the same election message crafted for them by party HQ.
“It will encourage individuality and creativity,” he says.
He even argues that round-the-clock scrutiny by camera-phone wielding voters is a good thing for aspiring politicians: “In a less politically divided age, the personal attributes of a candidate are increasingly important.”
But Mr Pack, who co-edits the Liberal Democrat Voice blog and is an associate director of PR firm Mandate, says social media may not truly come into its own until after the final vote has been cast.
With a possible hung Parliament and one or more of the parties potentially facing leadership contest, politicians are going to need a fast, cheap and convenient way to rally support and raise money.
As Barack Obama found during his US presidential campaign, when it comes to generating a “bandwagon effect”, the internet is hard to beat.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8459624.stm
New media gives fresh impetus to old ideas
Speech by Labour Party’s Douglas Alexander
Until the credit crunch, there was something of a consensus in
Global growth this year is forecast to fall to its lowest level since World War Two – just half a per cent. IMF Chief Economist, Olivier Blanchard, has said – and I quote directly, that he now “expect(s) the global economy to come to a virtual halt”. The Euro area has been in recession since last April. The
Here in the
The power of the web is changing the face of commerce, social interaction and politics. Klaus Schwab the founder of the World Economic Forum has suggested that if the defining image of the 20th Century was a wall, the defining image of the 21st Century will be the web.
The web gives us the opportunity to reach out to far greater numbers of people, in a far more personalised way. President Obama’s campaign for the Democratic nomination and then the White House is, in many ways, a blueprint for showing us how.
Many people have spoken of the Obama campaign as having rewritten the rules of political engagement, as a 21st Century break with the old-style campaigning that went before it. But I don’t believe that to be the case. The Obama campaign did not reinvent the wheel of political campaigning. Rather, and this is what the Obama team themselves stressed to me when I met with them in Washington last month, they used emails, text messages and social networking as new channels to pursue old political truths.
Instead of replacing traditional campaigning activities, the team used online tools to create a pathway for people to get involved with traditional political activism. Until the advent of the internet - and particularly social networking - national politics has suffered from a problem of scale, which it met with the blunt instrument of the mass media.
But Obama’s social networking site, MyBarackObama.com, provided news of events in members’ local communities. It also provided maps to find local voters and scripts to use in conversation with them. It enabled supporters to organise some 200,000 of their own events – with no central control.
By encouraging citizens with no formal link with the campaign other than their support for it to become advocates, the Obama team lent a power to their message that cannot be matched by TV ads – word of mouth. And it lent a democratic credence to their candidate - as Barack Obama repeatedly said, ‘this is not about me, it’s about you’.
Could the same be replicated in the
As people increasingly use the internet for entertainment, shopping, and news, they are turning away from the traditional mass media. Over the last ten years the ratings for the 6 o’ clock news have fallen by a third. Newspaper circulation over the same period fell by almost a quarter and the projections are that they will fall further.
In contrast, nine out of 10 graduates have broadband according to new research, and three-quarters of people under 30 would rather lose their TV than their internet connection. People aren’t just moving their reading, viewing and listening habits online, they are changing the way they interact with media. Wikipedia would not exist without its 75,000 active contributors, providing articles in more than 260 languages. Social networking sites are all based on active involvement of members. There is a new blog invented every second.
The Obama campaign showed that politicians no longer own politics. I believe that’s a good thing. But it also means that we need to change the way we work – not only on the campaign trail, but also in Government.
There are few who doubt that President Obama faces a greater range of challenges than perhaps any of his predecessors since
Roosevelt is remembered as one of
Obama is the first President to put his weekly address on to youtube – echoing FDR’s fireside chats. Thousands of Obama supporters have been holding meetings in their homes to discuss what the President’s Economic Recovery Plan will mean for their community – organised through the social network on myBarackObama.com.
What Obama has recognised both in his campaign and, through early indications in his administration, is that the digital revolution provides Government with both an obligation and an opportunity.
We have an obligation to provide a more responsive state that is tailored to the individual needs of citizens. If we are honest with ourselves in Government, we have too often been outpaced in the past 30-40 years by the ability of the market to provide people with the individualised customised products and services.
Government over the decades has remained too static. Its services are determined too often not by what citizens want and need, and how they live their lives today, but by what suits the silos of Government that deliver those services.
The limitations of the market have become all too apparent in the past 12 months and we have witnesses not just the collapse of bankrupt institutions but also a bankrupt ideology. The ideology of unfettered free markets that suggests the only role for government is to get out of the way and suggest that deregulation and privatisation are the only answers to market failure.
If the collapse in confidence in the market is to be matched by a growth in confidence of the state to deliver not only reliability but also efficiency and effective service delivery, then the state must change itself. If we want an enabling and empowering state, then it must undertake its tasks in new and imaginative ways.
Certainly we are making progress. Nine million people now renew their car tax online. Seven million people a month visit Directgov - to find childcare, register their vote, get health advice, and access a whole raft of national and local government services.
We need to go further. To capitalise on this opportunity, we need to drive through a cultural change in the way government and the civil service operates – we need to listen more, become more transparent and be more responsive to feedback.
The internet provides us with the tools to do this - websites like ‘NHS Choices’ are giving people the chance to rate hospitals with Amazon-style ‘marks out five’ for cleanliness, standard of care and attitude of staff.
We also need to reach out to the online community for feedback. There is too much caution about that at the moment – but if 100,000 people are asking each other for advice on the Netmums website each week – equivalent to a full Wembley stadium – I think that our health professionals should be there too talking to people and helping them with their problems.
Aristotle wrote that “one citizen differs from another, but the salvation of the community is the common business of them all”. The new power of the web to transcend distance will give new impetus to some old ideas.
Labour launches unique campaigning site: Labourspace.com
Labour today officially launched Labourspace.com - a unique site giving organisations and individuals the opportunity to set up campaigns they want to bring to the attention of Labour politicians.
Ed Miliband, who is compiling the next Labour election manifesto, will launch the site today at 4pm with a speech to guests from a host of charities and NGOs.
He will be speaking about the importance of working with campaigning organisations and individuals to build our manifesto - and how the website can help achieve that.
Ed Miliband MP, Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, explained:
“LabourSpace is the Labour Party’s campaign social networking site. I hope it will provide a unique home for organisations and people to host and promote their campaigns - and to bring their ideas to the attention of Labour ministers and the wider party.
“The idea behind Labourspace.com is really simple. You get your own webpage within the Labourspace network where you can tell us why you think Labour should be implementing your campaign ideas.
“I will be regularly checking out the site which I expect will become a lively forum for discussion and debate. I hope people will use it to let us know what their priorities are for a better, fairer
Source: The Labour Party website
Digital Democray: The Labour Party embraces Second Life
The Labour Party Conference organisers in Manchester set up a virtual meeting between politicians and internet users via the virtual reality universe Second Life. At a fringe meeting co-hosted by policy think-tank The Social Market Foundation and Microsoft, blogger MP Tom Watson invited internet users to participate in a meeting between himself, members of the business community and party delegates in the first virtual reality experiment of this kind. It was the first time in the UK an event at a political conference was run simultaneously in Second Life. The idea behind the experiment was to make conference a more inclusive event, involving people who either could not travel to Manchester or were not able to enter the secure area.
British politics is missing out on the potential of new media
From The Economist print edition, April 17th 2008
EVEN the least fogeyish of politicians have been flummoxed by the internet. Tony Blair, champion of all things modern, paid no end of lip service to the potential of new media as prime minister but was comically technophobic himself. Still, the internet plays a role in huge areas of British public life: party politics, punditry and government itself. But web aficionados lament a yawning gap with
The official websites of the main political parties—Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats—get less web traffic than the most popular political blogs, and much less than even the far-right British National Party. No surprise, say cyber enthusiasts; they do a passable job as repositories of information but offer little scope for users to get involved beyond signing up for e-mail distribution lists.
The Tories want to transform their online presence, and Gordon Brown, the prime minister, has recruited new staff to overhaul Labour’s. Both parties have wised up, it seems, to foreign examples of what new media can do for fund-raising and campaigning. Ron Paul, a former candidate for this year’s Republican presidential nomination in
More vitality can be found in the British blogosphere, which has changed how many people tap in to punditry. But shortcomings remain. Whereas there is broad parity between right and left in the American blogosphere, in
And true “civilian journalism” has been slower to emerge in
One area where
Mr Brown is not much more web-savvy than his predecessor but some of
George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, is another who is thought to “get it”. He wants much more information put online, including American-style crime maps and every item of government spending over £25,000 ($49,000). More radically, he is flirting with “open-sourcing” policy: some companies now go online to solicit solutions to stubborn problems, so why not the public sector?
Of course, there are caveats to all this fervour. One reason why American political parties have snazzy websites is that they can afford to; there is far less money sloshing around in British politics, and few regret that.
Yet web gurus insist that British politics could be doing much more with the internet, and the idea of open-sourcing policy particularly intrigues them. Government efforts to solicit the public’s ideas are often clunkingly non-specific: asking people what they think should be done about, say, crime is unlikely to result in much new thinking. Narrowing the question to particular problems, often in particular locations, is cannier. “You may only get one truly workable idea out of a thousand,” says Tom Steinberg, a former government-policy adviser who set up the e-petitions website and now runs mySociety, a charity operating websites designed to foster civic engagement. “But that one idea makes it worthwhile.”
New Labour on the Web
The Internet is expected to play a growing role as New Labour’s communication channel. The Labour leadership has been trying to exploit the potential of «web 2.0.», the second generation web-based communities, where websites turn from information silos to platforms where users can generate and distribute the content, the most popular social-networking sites being Facebook and Myspace, as well as YouTube, the video-sharing website created in February
The whole range of initiatives mentioned above can be seen as attempts by New Labour to face up to its two main challenges: to open up to involve new people, and to improve the experience for those who do commit. The essentially one-dimensional configuration of the Party’s website where exchanges, when they do exist (as in the discussion forums which allow members to post comments), remain very limited and centrally controlled (themes for chats among members include “stories from the doorstep” or “beating the Lib Dems”; the discussion forum devoted to “Britain in the world” is organised around questions such as “How do we tackle the challenges of global poverty?” or “How do we secure peace, freedom and democracy?”). Alternatively, members may print off or send the latest campaigning poster, or download campaigning user guides and toolkits. The website is as yet essentially a cheaper extension of advertising campaigns as well as a fundraising tool.
Poor use of the new technologies available, which tend to be seen more as campaign tools rather than offering an opportunity for real debate, like the Party’s Facebook application, can have highly detrimental effects. They have the potential to turn the Party into an object of ridicule: when Webcameron was launched in September 2006 with a video of the Conservative leader at home with his family doing the washing up, there was doubt initially as to whether it was a spoof – but at least it got people talking. Overall, however, very few people watch political parties’ videos. In spring 2007, the videos featuring Tony Blair were watched by only 2% of British users of YouTube (The Guardian). The YouTube channel also failed to cause much excitement. It has to be said that the interactivity of the channel leaves a lot to be desired when by “taking part in Q&As” what is meant is that you will be able to view videos of ministers supposedly responding to questions sent via the website (“Ed Balls answers your questions”).
On the other hand, the rise of social networking, where supporters talk to supporters, as opposed to the one-way announcement format between campaign and supporter, could have a far-reaching impact, as seen in the current American campaign. Labour’s website has taken a few cautious steps in that direction: in the members’ section, Party members can now set up their own blogs and have their own email address. They also have access to their constituency’s chat room which can only be viewed by other members of the local party. There are also facilities for members to communicate outside the party to local groups. This kind of social media strategy, if it genuinely allows member to member contact, can far more useful in keeping people interested than trying to attract thousands of people to be “friends” of the Prime Minister on a Facebook page. But it also means losing control of the content generated on these new channels.
(This is an extract from a talk I gave at a one-day conference on the New Media and New Communication at the
Virtual Hustings for the Labour Party Deputy Leadership
On June 20, 2007, The Guardian political editor, Michael White, played the impartial outside chair of virtual hustings for the deputy leadership election, laid on ‘for the benefit of You Tube’s ever-expanding interactive audience’. The questions had been collected by the Labour Party from party members and the wider You Tube community. The six candidates were asked to answer one question each in four categories (home, foreign, party organisation and miscellaneous), 30 seconds anwers as well as yes/no questions. The idea behind this experiment was to reach a wider audience and ‘draw in voters who might disaffected from the political process’. This is an example of a more innovative use of the internet.
Labour advertises on the web
In the section entitled ‘Tools for your website’ the Labour Party online page invites members and supporters to act as a conduit for the Party’s message on the net. Technology is thus used strictly for campaigning purposes.