Have you heard Alan Johnson’s twitter? Are you friends with Hilary Benn? Does Hazel Blears ever stop blogging? Competing in elections encourages politicians to connect to voters in imaginative new ways and the Deputy Leadership contest has taken the use of the internet by Labour politicians to new levels. But with Barack Obama rallying 315,000 Facebook supporters and none of the Deputy Leadership candidates mustering over 900, they are still some way short of generating the vast momentum that can be found online.
The Labour Party is using the new medium to carry out old forms of campaigning. Leaflets broadcasting policy achievements have simply been directly uploaded to the website. Tony Blair’s congratulatary message to President Sarkozy, posted on YouTube, contained nothing that Harold Wilson wouldn’t have recognised. Visitors to Labour’s YouTube site witness the awkward spectacle of ‘at ease’ politicians defending their record on podcasts, reminiscent of their colleagues in the 1950s first coming to terms with new-fangled TV party political broadcasts. Labour’s online communication currently only goes one way. It is ‘one to many’, unlike the increasingly ‘many to many’ style of user-generated online content.
So, while our politics hasn’t yet captured the potential of the new thing of the 1990s, the internet is changing again. Few things get web wonks more excited than Web 2.0: the watchword of the next generation net is the shift from ‘us and them’ to ‘us and us’ technology. Moving beyond the old model of consuming what is published online, it’s all about us now – it is the users who publish the photos, the videos, the comments, and waste the working day building their social networks and virtual friendships.
Labour’s current strategy is based on the assumption that the internet is a medium that follows directly from radio and TV before it. The Party uses the web primarily as a tool for top-down communication, rather than the platform for horizontal networking that users increasingly expect. Web 2.0 offers ways to do politics differently, to increase participation, and has major implications for the nature of campaigning. The innovative ways that people can now share information and connect with each other open up new possibilities for political cooperation and action. This has the potential to redefine the process of collectivism for the twenty-first century.
Some are getting this right: the US Democratic Party blog is built on the core concept of Web 2.0 and is a genuine platform for individual action and enterprise. Visitors can type in their postcode to meet members and groups locally, find out about events and are encouraged to act and organise for themselves on behalf of the Party. Supporters can buy democracy bonds, an initiative that links people’s donations beyond institution and directly to the social change they seek, which is characteristic of the empowering nature of online activism.
The ultimate use of the internet for the Labour Party should be to build strategic communities of supporters, strengthening the potential reach and momentum of progressive ideas and campaigns. Encouraging initiative at the periphery will entail relinquishing some control from the centre. Members and supporters should be given the tools to organise and act on their own, dispersing messages amongst their own communities of friends and interest.
The use of third party sites will become increasingly important as new tools are constantly developed and used in creative ways. MySpace plans to offer political campaigns a viral fundraising tool and Google are developing a YouChoose channel for the US 2008 election, while the success of MySociety shows the impetus online organising can have for social action. New forms and forums of grassroots political organisation can create a whole new dynamic, opening up what was once the protected domain of professional organisers and zealous volunteers.
At present the internet remains a niche rather than a mainstream form of communication: its eventual success still depends on whether momentum gathered online can be effectively transferred offline. The Netroots Deaniacs built significant momentum and funds for Howard Dean’s Democratic nomination in 2004, and Segolene Royal was termed the first ‘Wikipedia politician’ after her online strategy for the French Presidential elections saw much of her campaign determined by her supporters through discussions and votes in online forums. But the ultimate failure of both campaigns demonstrates the limits of the web as a technique and an end in itself: the medium must never become the message. So for the Labour Party, a revised approach to the internet must be a central aspect of a wider strategy to reinvigorate a broad progressive movement that reaches out to people in innovative and imaginative ways.