B1BLOG

Read any qual­ity news­pa­per (and quite a few blogs) and you’ll see lamen­ta­tions about the cur­rent state of pol­i­tics. So the com­men­tary goes: we are becom­ing nations of apa­thetic sub­jects who are largely dis­con­nected from the polit­i­cal process. The activism of ear­lier times has gone, they say, no one is putting flow­ers in the bar­rels of rifles any more. The influ­ence of spe­cial inter­est groups (and their per­sua­sive bucket-loads of cash) is added in as a fur­ther exam­ple of a sys­tem skewed against the aver­age citizen.

There are signs, how­ever, that this is chang­ing with the Inter­net being the medium of choice. Of course, this isn’t exactly new. The 2004 US cam­paign for Howard Dean set the stage with its grass roots fund-raising (over $25m) and use of blog­ging among other things.

Now, it’s all moved on again. We have the growth of social net­work­ing and all the other web 2.0 tools. Where as Dean had local level Mee­tups, now can­di­dates can cre­ate wider net­works, inter­con­nect those net­works and amplify their mes­sage even further.

The poster child this time round in the US is Barack Obama. Through his my.barackobama.com site, sup­port­ers can link to his social net­work, cre­ate sub groups of their own and blog their own mes­sages. The over­all first impres­sion is of an inclu­sive cam­paign rather than a me, me, me one.

Hillary Clinton’s site by con­trast feels very much an ‘all about Hillary’ affair. It doesn’t have the dig­i­tal out­reach of Obama’s. And nei­ther have quite the pull of some­thing like Rock the Vote which in the last US elec­tion claims to have reg­is­tered 1.4 mil­lion peo­ple to vote.

But what about the UK?

It’s inter­est­ing to con­trast David Cameron’s web­cameron site with Gor­don Brown’s blog. Cameron goes for acces­si­bil­ity. Brown goes for states­man­like. Cameron is all video. Brown is text and images. While much of what the par­ties say is pretty sim­i­lar, it’s in the tone and char­ac­ter that the dif­fer­ences are most appar­ent. And as they’re on the web it is all that more imme­di­ate and accessible.

Of course it remains to be seen if whether these efforts will rad­i­cally affect the out­come of either the US or UK elec­tions. Can the tech­nol­ogy really help re-engage peo­ple into the process? Or will it cre­ate alter­na­tive grass roots net­works that place pres­sure on the main polit­i­cal institutions?

Per­son­ally, I’m opti­mistic. The acces­si­bil­ity of the web, its ease of inter­ac­tion and cul­ture of speak­ing your mind (for good and bad) can only help cre­ate and sus­tain debate.

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