The revolution, it seems, will not just be televised but also blogged, twittered and Facebooked. At least that was the message last week from a panel of eminent online campaigner-types who I happened to be chairing in discussion with an audience of largely off-line social activist types at an event run by the voter-registration pressure group Operation Black Vote. The title of exactly what we were discussing kept changing. I was initially tempted in by the promising-sounding ‘Representation 2.0: Engaging the Obama Generation’. The bit after the colon later changed to ‘Using New Technology to Make Waves’ and finally on the night ‘How to Develop Your Social Networks and Mobilise Communities for Action’.
100 days in and the Obama presidency is being hailed as a model to aspire to by all and sundry: from David Cameron, keen to illustrate how he too is a potentially cob-web busting new broom, to the New Labourites who now queue up to heap praise on the man that they scorned and ridiculed when Hilary Clinton was running for the Democratic nomination. Veteran blogger Sunny Hundal of the Pickled Politics site mentioned in his opening remarks that he had worked on the Obama campaign. In the Q and A audience members were keen to find out what exactly he had done – proof (if proof were needed) that everyone is after a bit of ‘yes we (canned)’.
Many are full of wide-eyed wonder about the advent of new technology. Cabinet Office minister and the world’s first blogging MP Tom Watson recently called it the most radical change in the power of communicating written words since Gutenberg. Certainly there is great liberatory potential in the wired world (and its younger wi-fi brother) but those attending the OBV event put forward the other side of the story. One asked for suggestions in getting high faluting meetings of this nature to trickle down to the kids who attended his youth club. Some of the panellists seemed to be answering a different question, applying the logic of citizen journalism to the question. So we got a description of how it was the grassroots who had brought to the attention of the world Ian Tomlinson’s vicious beating and batoning at the hand of the police shortly before dying of what until then we had all thought to be ’natural causes‘. Whilst it’s a powerful point, I think the questioner had more in mind the old question of how to level the playing field between what people used to worry aloud 10 years ago would turn into a stark divide between an ’information rich‘ and ’information poor‘ society. Other people worried about quality control given the deluge of junk out there on the web. The question of responsibility for posting was also raised. The question turned to the Damian McBride affair. I suppose to paraphrase an 80s soft-rock classic, the accusation we could lob at individuals who use the internet for muck-raking gossip is ’you give blog a bad name’.
If we’re talking Obama, I guess the answer to ’how did he do it?’ is a mixture of strategic tactics and politics. In 2008 the potential of new technology was truly harnessed. Many remarked on the spectre of a black man in the white house but he’s not just the first black president, he is the first Blackberry president. A special super-dooper secure-device version was developed for presidential use.
After a tub-thumping speech by OBV’s director Simon Woolley, who remarked how pleasantly surprised he’d been to find the seminar not just one for the ’nerd‘ the evening was rounded off by a comedy turn from John Prescott who it seems in life after government is a convert to all things in a new technology vein. The serious bit came when he reminded us that he had come from a trade union background but believed that now we had to move with the times. Prezza gave us a case study of his involvement in his e-petition to stop bankers getting bonuses. He spelled out the advantages of new technology in being instantaneous in impact, terming his band of 4,000 Facebook friends (‘I‚d be lucky if I had a dozen in the Labour Party‘ he added) ’cyberwarriors‘. He also alluded to his past in a series of jokes. On the egging incident there was justification ’I said to Tony, well you did say I had to connect with the electorate‘. His evangelism for his hand-held portable communications device, proudly waved around for all to see, shone through in further quips.
The moral of the evening seemed to be that the internet is a tool that has great enabling powers to offer voices to those at the margins. There can be suspicion in its take-up however for those for whom it has not yet been ’normalised‘ into everyday life. Its spread has been uneven, a state of affairs that still needs rectifying. Of course the meeting was being twittered to my left and right with instant reaction being spewed out across worldwide channels but the packed-to-the rafters venue and challenging questions raised by an astute audience underlined that there is still a role for good old fashioned public meetings in dusty halls in these technologically advanced times. Phew!