Here are all of the posts tagged ‘General Election’.

Will it really be a Mumsnet election?

by Simon Collister in News on 25 February 2010 at 16:52 Google+

I popped along to represent We Are Social at The Albion Society’s latest breakfast debate on Wednesday. Up for discussion was ‘Digital Democracy’ and, boy, what a panel we had: Guardian Editor, Alan Rusbridger, Mumsnet founder, Justine Roberts; Tess Alps of ThinkBox and Dan Thain from Blue State Digital.

Alan was up first and didn’t disappoint. He stated boldly that the media industry was undergoing a massive upheaval that’s splitting the ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ dichotomy of traditional journalism and changing the model of media from one of expected Authority to public Involvement.

Driving this shift is, of course, the Internet – and social web in particular. It’s empowering people to no longer be the passive audience it once was but to want to get involved.

Alan suggested this was a massive, almost inconceivable challenge to journalists but is ultimately leading to better things.

As examples he contrasted the traditional model of foreign affairs reporting: usually written by one ‘expert’ but non-native correspondent. Now we can call up multi-media news content direct from people on the ground with first-hand experience.

Travel news no longer relies on a journalist traveling to a country for three days and writing up their experiences as the average trip. Travel reporting can turn to other traveler’s experiences and those living their lives in the destination.

Complex issues such as tax avoidance which is often too complicated for the average news journalism can be exploded into dramatic news by throwing the investigation and analysis process open to a better informed public.

All of this leads to newspapers becoming focal points for involvement and following Jeff Jarvis’ famous maxim: ‘Do what you do best, link to the rest.’

So how this link to democracy? Well, drawing an analogy with the Authority vs Involvement model, Alan suggested that the attitude some MPs have that they should be trusted because they’re MPs and they deserve our vote is broken.

Smart politicians and parties will understand that political and democratic value in the future will lie in the involvement model. Social media and networks will create a new politics, imbued with greater trust generated through peer-to-peer involvement.

Adapting the concept of online news paywalls, Alan also suggested that while openness was key to fostering involvement, closed (i.e. paywalled) content and networks reinforced perceived authority  and critiqued parliament for still being too closed off from the rest of society. This, he argued, was fueling the crisis of trust being experienced.

Justine Roberts from Mumsnet approached digital democracy from a similar perspective and revealed some fascinating inside facts about politicians courting – and even infiltrating – the leading Mums community.

Justine questioned why so many politicians were keen to get in front of Mumsnet members. She suggested that unlike Twitter which is still largely mysterious to a lot MPs, Mumsnet is an easy concept to grasp: 95% female community; 1m uniques a month; on the media’s radar (since the media claimed the election will be the Mumsnet election) meaning their opinions are more likely to be reported.

Given this high-level of awareness does Mumsnet have any real political power, Justine asked?

Firstly she dispelled he myth of a block vote. Their own internal surveys of members how’s that party support is fairly evenly split across the three main parties. Despite this the BNP was actually caught trying to infiltrate discussions and shape debates towards a fascist/far-right agenda.

Where Mumsnet real political potential lies is through driving single-issue campaigns relevant to members. Justine gave an example where members had vociferously opposed plans by the Government to change the childcare voucher scheme. The campaign eventually caused Gordon Brown to change the unpopular policy.

Given this effect on policy Government was now engaging the community proactively. The wisdom of the community is being exploited by the Department of Health who are involving Mumsnet community members to help develop its policy towards women that have suffered miscarriages.

What this all adds up to, Justine suggested pragmatically, was that while Mumsnet may not have political power in the traditional sense, it certainly has power to mobilize its members in the same way organisations such as 38Degrees can.

“Mumsnet,” she concluded, “is a non-aligned mouthpiece for its community. It’s not a union bloc vote; it’s more like an octopus with pre-menstrual stress.”

Tess Alps from ThinkBox took on the counter-argument by suggesting that without professional media internet conversations would just be “noise”. In terms of democracy she als suggested that while we think that unmediated access to politicians is a good thing when its Obama, what happens when its Nick Griffin. I kind of thought that was undemocratic in itself, but didn’t challenge her.

Tess also suggested that politicians are lazy when they turn to Mumsnet because it’s easier than visiting a working men’s club. Of course, no-one was suggesting politicians shouldn’t visit other communities of voters so this point fell rather flat.

You could equally make the same argument when politicians first clocked that visiting working mens and other social clubs was a good thing to do instead of just talking to the local chamber of commerce when voting rights were extended.

Finally Blue State Digital’s Dan Thain, presented a case study from their anti-BNP Hope Not Hate campaign (it seems the far-right was a recurring theme of the morning).

Dan argued that the campaign, like most political campaigns, was driven by email marketing and reinforced their prowess for all things email – the same strategy that mobilized Obama’s votes in the US election.

Unbelievably the Hope Not Hate campaign has an email database greater than any of the UK’s main political parties – although I wonder how it compares to the BNPs? If you like data driven, transactional email campaigns it’s a great case study.

All in all it was a great breakfast briefing and good coffee too. My beliefs fall firmly on the side of Alan Rusbridger and Justine Roberts.

I was chatting to Justine afterwards and we both agreed that single-issue communities are likely to be powerful tools for political organisation in the future. They are built on social capital and work together to achieve shared goals regardless of traditional party affiliation. While the mainstream media may have coined the term Mumsnet election as a short-hand for the power of that specfic platform, they probably don’t realize how close they are to the truth.

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MyDavidCameron: an analysis

by Simon Collister in News on 18 January 2010 at 15:56 Google+

Cameron Elvis

With the buzz about the remixed Conservative Party election posters and Clifford Singer’s MyDavidCameron website a few days old I thought I’d reflect on the debate and offer up some analysis about what might be going on here and what it means for political parties ahead of the election.

But before I can do that I need to jump back to September last year when I discussed Manuel Castell’s theory of networked power and suggested how it could be applied to the UK’s political blogosphere.

In a nutshell, Castells argues that power in networks is fundamentally about the ability to establish and control particular networks.

This can be achieved by one of two ways:

  1. the ability to constitute network(s), and to program/reprogram the network(s) in terms of goals assigned to the network (largely by setting and controlling the way we perceive issues and information)
  2. the ability to connect and ensure cooperation of different networks by sharing common goals and combining resources (i.e. identifying like-minded networks with which you can work to challenge the dominant program)

Castells calls actors in the first mechanism ‘programmers’ and those in the second mechanism, ‘switchers’.

I argued that Conservative and right-wing blogs were successful because they had programmed the UK’s political network by a) adapting early and b) creating a broad anti-government debate which resonated with the media and wider public.

This meant that left and liberal bloggers had to find common issues and threads with each other and the public with which to try and switch the dominant power in the network away from anti-government/right-wing debate.

So what does this tell us about the MyDavidCameron success? Firstly, I think it supports my original hypothesis. That is, Labour have identified a wider – albeit smaller – network outside of the UK political blogosphere with a shared value (mocking David Cameron/the Conservatives and graphic design).

They are then co-opting this network, forming a strategic partnership but letting the idea and content go where it goes, as opposed to trying to centrally plan and control what happens with the David Cameron imagery.

In my opinion, a political party having the foresight and ability to spot an opportunity like this and use it to help try to ‘switch’ the dominant discourse in the political blogosphere is smart.

Yes, there may be those that say: “well, who wouldn’t jump on an opportunity if it arose?” But I’d argue that the traditional approach to this kind of online meme would be to try and own it: take it in-house.*

I think Labour have deliberately avoided doing this, having learnt the lesson from last summer’s #Welovethenhs grassroot campaign that which Labour co-opted, arguably tried to centralise and quickly destroyed the value in the network. Compare how they’re currently using a Labour Party version of MyDavidCameron (i.e. becoming another node in the network) versus their mini-campaign site for #Welovethenhs which argubly tries to own the decentralised campaign network.

But thinking logically about the MyDavidCameron campaign: would Labour seeking to ‘own’ the network really kill it in the same way that it killed #Welovethenhs?

I’m not so sure for two reasons:

  1. Firstly, the #Welovethenhs campaign was not a pro-government campaign; nor was it an anti-tory campaign. It was a pro-public healthcare system campaign. It’s an issue that traditionally has a shared value for with liberal/left networks but not solely. Labour arguably killed this campaign as it tried to go further than switching and instead reprogram the networks’ values as pro-government/pro-Labour.
  2. Secondly, network alignment based on shared opposition to David Cameron and/or the Conservatives is one thing, but the reality is that only Labour can defeat the Conservatives at an election. Therefore, Labour trying to reprogram the goal of the networks driving the MyDavidCameron campaign to be pro-Labour is actually a smart move.

What this says to me is that now we’re entering the run up to an election, the political discourse is no longer split broadly between anti-government/right-wing ideology and pro-Government goals (that were largely indistinguishable form Labour policy).

Instead, Labour is starting to reprogram the UK’s political networks through creating a discourse of Conservatives vs Labour. It’s early days and the Conservatives still have the upper hand but I’d argue that the MyDavidCameron campaign plus the recent emergence of distinct left and Labour-aligned voices is starting to re-balance the pro-right-wing goals of the UK’s political networks.

Footnote:
* What this reveals is Labour’s ability to switch between a traditional command and control political party and a node in a fluid, participative network. Something Andrew Chadwick has defined as “organisational hybridity” – the internet driven phenomena that enables organisations and institutions to switch between being member-led hierarchical institutions, single-issue campaign groups or temporary, loosely joined networks of like-minded individuals. I believe this is what political parties of the future will look like: political parties in all but name, But that’s something for another post.

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