Welcome to a two-part series about the real impact social media (or social networking) is having on politics in Britain. In part one I look at the groups which face extinction, whilst in part two I will look at why pundits searching for the impact of social media on politics in 2010 are looking in the wrong place.
What impact has the introduction of cheap colouring printing technology had on British politics? Almost none. Certainly many more leaflets are colour than used to be the case, more target letters contain colour inserts and a generation of amateur designers have had the opportunity to demonstrate just how many ways there are to use colour badly.
But politics has carried on the same.
The widespread use of colour combined with its lack of impact on how the political system operates is a reminder that not all technological development bring forth wider changes. Tempting though it can be to get sucked into the micro-details of the latest internet tools or service and see significance in the details, when looking for big picture change it is necessary to take a step back and consider broader questions.
With social media, it is not the details of the latest Facebook change that matter but rather its role in a broader trend. As Clay Shirky puts it in Here Comes Everybody,
We are living in the middle off a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.
That change is played out across a myriad of different tools and services and is happening regardless of their individual details and which ones are currently on the up or on the wane.
Clay Shirky’s point has been seen at work in a wave of different protests which have sought to influence the political system, or the rules that the political system makes, in recent months.
The Trafigura protest was a protest against not only Trafigura’s actions in seeking a super-injunction but also against the existence of a legal rule which permits such super-injunctions. Tools such as Twitter saw the swift mobilisation of public opinion and hence pressure. Notably absent from the fray were the different traditional pressure groups which campaign for freedom of expression or legal reform.
The protest simply happened too quickly and didn’t need them. Whilst in the past pressure groups were crucial in letting people of like mind find each other and organise activity, with Trafigura and Twitter there was no need for any such role to be played by a pressure group.
Many pressure groups are, despite being armed with a website and some email addresses, still slow moving bodies which look to be the fulcrum around which campaigning will take place on issues that they have selected.
But when people worked up by an issue can swiftly find each other, and the media, through social networks, events move at a pace where traditional pressure groups cannot keep up (several days to agree and write a press release? sorry, the world have moved on) and where they are not needed to be the fulcrum of activity.
That’s why it is they who are under serious threat over the coming years. The good news is that there are three different routes by which they can evolve.
First, there is the Liberty route. It does a fantastic job at getting Shami Chakrabarti regularly in the mainstream, traditional media. Its online campaigning is minimal, but if you view Liberty as primarily a vehicle for repeatedly getting an eloquent supportive voice in the media that does not matter.
Second, there is the think tank route. Campaigns can rise and spread quickly, but they require a body of evidence and detail to call on. The clearer a case is made, the more robust the arguments and the easier to find the evidence, the more likely it is that campaigns will spread. Being the supplier of evidence and arguments to others who then deploy them is similar to the traditional role of think tanks as the supplier of policy and evidence to others who then make policy.
Third, there is the nimble campaigner route. It sounds easy: ah, you just have to get with the internet, speed up your decision making and start making and riding some of these waves. But in reality pressure groups struggle to do this and hence the regular pattern of online campaigns on issues where traditional pressure groups exist, but who do not feature in the action.
But whether they pull off the third option or one of the others, pressure groups have to go for one – or face extinction.
Check back here, same time, same place next week for part two: why pundits searching for the impact of social media on politics in 2010 are looking in the wrong place.
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6 Comments
Yes and no Mark. The attempt by Harriet Harman to exempt MPs from the Freedom of Information Act last year was seen off by Unlock Democracy and (24 hours later) MySociety precisely because we did manage to mobilise people at short notice. Facebook and Twitter were both crucial to that campaign but it took organisations to get the ball rolling.
You’re right that organisations need to be increasingly nimble to keep up in the social media world, but they still have a crucial role to play in playing a constructive role in public policy. Of the three options for survival you propose, the first and third are almost entirely reactive (and at their worst, reactionary) while the second one lacks teeth. Think tanks generally make terrible pressure groups and even “favoured” think tanks (such as IPPR was said to be in 1997) see relatively few of their ideas come to fruition.
I think that for the good of society there needs to still be a place for a fourth model: that is, an organisation that chooses and issue to campaign for, builds support around that issue, wins and moves onto the next target; but it doesn’t lend itself as well for social media as your third model as it is still directed from the centre. Nonetheless, libelreform.org.uk seems to be going quite well and the EDM supporting the Sustainable Communities Act (Amendment) Bill has nearly half of MPs signed up in support following a campaign using precisely that model.
The latter example is an interesting one. In terms of EDM signatures it is the most successful parliamentary campaign going at the moment (despite precious few resources) and has a real chance of changing the law next month. Yet nobody talks about it in the media because it doesn’t have a PR agency behind it and hasn’t used social media. Yet it has involved tens of thousands of people across the country. So I think your analysis is incomplete.
Good points James. I wouldn’t classify MySociety as a traditional pressure group though; their very success I think reinforces the point that traditional bodies risk being left behind. Unlock Democracy is an exception to that at the moment certainly, no doubt in part thanks to yourself!
You are right about MySociety, which doesn’t generally campaign. That meant that when they did put out an email to their TWFY subscribers, they didn’t have to contend with the sort of activist fatigue pressure groups often suffer from.
I’m not overplaying UD’s role in that campaign, just that we managed to mobilise before anyone else. MySociety ultimately played a bigger role. I also don’t think what UD does couldn’t be improved; indeed its my job at the moment to try to make it better. But when I look at the sort of reach we do manage, on often relatively unpopulist issues and with very limited resources, I do think we do okay.
The interesting thing is that cheap black-and-white printing technology revolutionised politics. We should know, we did it.
This was what the Liberal Party was working on when the SDP came along and utterly failed to realise how a new technology was being exploited for political campaigning. They didn’t realise it because it was a new technology that was best used decentralised rather than centralised. We were doing amazing thing with rapid response leaflets through the door on local issues. So much so that the main problem was treating it as a formula rather than looking forward to what else we could do with that technology. But the SDP accused us of being the “sleepy” party, who didn’t know that the way to win elections was to have a glossy national image, and think-tanks in London churning out detailed policy under the control of a national leadership which consisted of superior Westminster types.
On amateur designers, part of the appeal was that an amateurish look to the design actually worked to give the impression “we’re people like you, were not part of that alien bubble of politicians and marketing men that run the world and piss you off because of their ignorance of how your life is”. But there was a survival of the fittest mechanism – people who were crap at it, or a bit loony, didn’t win the local elections and so tended to give up. With the “social media” there does not seem to be the sort of control mechanism which allows the best to rise to the top and the worst to be wiped out. The completely instantaneous nature of it rather seems to encourage the obsessive and emotional at the expense of those with something more thoughtful or deeper to say.
I’m not saying Focus was wonderful, there was much wrong with it. I raise it mainly to point out that it’s so easy to be looking one way that one misses what is happening in another. Particularly when one thing is glamorous and has people who can make big money behind it, and the other is not and does not.
Have a gut feeling . Political party newsletters, leaflets etc for most parties are too interested in all color, flashy style and still have the same old boring substance. and structure
The danger being that of a “digital divide”.
“Three days to write a press release? Sorry, move on…” is not an attitude I recognise in the world away from the Palm Pré and wall-mounted news calenders. For the associations struggling over risographs and working how to make things on Word look pretty – and there are many! – trying to get out Foci with rapid, instant, turnaround is just not possible.
Like many people of a certain young(er) age, I have become very suited to the world of email, chat rooms, instant responses, blogging, and the language of the internet. Social media can bring people together behind a single policy or campaign far faster than knocking on doors…But just as “voodoo polls” are not a true reflection of voting intentions, nor can 2,000 people on Facebook be regarded as 2,000 actual people being actually concerned by the issue at hand. Only by being on the street, knocking on the doors, (“YouTube if you want to” does have a lot of merit in the jest!) can any kind of movement towards democratic change be made.
There is a lot to say about the virtual world and its empowerment on political, and social lives. It will never be a replacement for being out in the real world. It’s a tool. Cheaper colour printing is the 1980s equivilent of Twitter or Facebook today; a new tool to enhance the way a message can be delivered…but no replacement for sending the message out.
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