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Election in GB: An exciting time for eParticipation?8. April 2010 – 10:52 by John Heaven (TuTech Innovation GmbH) |
Photo by Melvinheng on Flickr
You’d think that a general election would be quite an exciting time in eParticipation. Indeed, that was one of my first ideas for a PEP-NET blog post. I’d make use of PEP-NET’s UK contacts to find some meaty examples of how people are participating in new and exciting ways and then blog about it.
Well that’s not quite how it worked out. I spoke to Peter Cruickshank, from the International Teledemocracy Centre at Edinburgh Napier University, who burst my bubble straight away:
“Many people think an election isn’t the best time to work on eParticipation, which often focuses on lobbying representatives between elections. In fact, the election can be something of a distraction.”
Okay. Well what about Andy Williamson from the Hansard Society?
“We won’t see anything like the Obama campaign in the UK because our system isn’t personality-centred like a presidential campaign. You need big personalities to build campaigns around, and our electoral system doesn’t work like that.”
The same applied to the German election: a blog post by Rolf Lührs (in German) argued that last year’s German election wouldn’t be won online (despite the hype around the Pirate Party), which was no surprise to Andy Williamson. Even the Obama Campaign isn’t such a clear-cut case: Rishi Saha (Head of New Media at the Conservative Party) pointed out at a discussion organised by Delib, a PEP-NET member, that the $100m Barack Obama’s social media campaign raised were spent on TV adverts. At the same event, Bruce Anderson (journalist and political commentator) claimed that election campaigns – new media or old – rarely influence election results anyway.
Of course there are examples of citizens participating online: MyDavidCameron.com, where people can submit their satirical takes on the Conservatives’ poster campaign; or the Conservatives’ own crowd-sourced budget. All of the parties’ websites have some degree of built-in social media functionality – including a facility to initiate campaigns on the Labour site.
As much as the possibilities for participation in politics have been vastly expanded by the internet, the main media outlets (BBC News website, Guardian, Times etc.) still have a huge impact. To use Charles Leadbeater’s analogy, they are still large boulders compared to the rest of the pebbles on the beach. One need only look at the hundreds of comments that their articles receive every day. In the light of the Times’ announcement that it will be charging for content (or at least the announcement of the details, as Paul Bradshaw points out) we may yet see a de-democratisation of the internet if other media outlets follow suit.
The internet never fails to surprise: it’s often more about local than global; more about what happens offline than online; more about people than technology; more about small than big. Sometimes it’s even more about slow than fast — eBay auctions last much longer than conventional ones.
So to come back to Peter Cruickshank’s point, maybe the election isn’t the best place to look for insights into eParticipation. Maybe the really exciting thing about the internet is its ability to deliver “always on” scrutiny, where citizens can constantly keep an eye on what their representatives are doing and influence them over a longer period of time instead of just once every four or five years.
