Do social media techniques make democracy more centralised?

Citizen Kane: The rise of the mass media led to political centralisation. Will social media change this?

Over on the much-maligned Labour List, former Labour Party Press Officer Adrian McMenamin has an interesting angle on canvassing, and the value of doing it.

“…maybe we should absorb the lesson that the Lib Dems (a party whose membership has declined almost as rapidly as our own) grasped long ago – that in the weeks leading up to polling day canvassing brings a poor return on the limited amount of time and resources available in most campaigns.

Instead we should be devoting the effort to those tasks that do most to persuade people of the need to vote Labour. In many cases that means more “weight of paper” campaigns with better, snappier leaflets (if only Fraser Kemp was available to every Labour councillor). In others it means investing time into electronic communications and designing better permissive (undecided voters come to you) systems. Opinion surveys and canvassing will of course be part of it all, but we shouldn’t turn the act of knocking on a door and asking a voter if they’ve made up their mind about how to vote into a fetish. It’s a tactical tool, no longer a strategy.”

All of the main parties are facing gradual changes. The decline in their own membership numbers is a key one – but there are others. Various de-alignments that have taken place since the mid-1960 (see this PDF for a useful discussion).

At that time, the vast majority of voters picked one of two parties (remember, pre-1970 the old Liberal Party was tiny, the nationalist parties were very much on the fringes and none of the smaller parties – Greens, far-right, UKIP etc – were in existance as electoral forces), and the social class of those voters played a much much more significant role in determining how they would vote. This was an easier electorate to mobilise (without ‘waking up’ the rival’s voters).

It’s now a commonplace observation that the value chain within the media has just disintegrated over the last couple of years, and – until recently – fast-moving-consumer-goods (FMCGs) could expect their sales to go up in some kind of direct correlation with their advertising or brand spend. Now, he said, it’s not unusual for a 100% increase in spend to result in only a 1% increase in sales. Similarly the willingness of the public to be interrupted with intrusive message has declined as the quantity of those messages has increased.

Labour – like the other parties – have a tougher job on their hands than they had at the last election, and all of the parties are quietly digging into the viral techniques that Douglas Rushkoff first really picked up on back in the 1990s.

In writing that post, Adrian McMenemin is saying what the cleverer party officials are probably saying in all of the main parties. Doorstep canvassing may be nice and wholesome, but maybe we need something brighter – and even more centrally directed? More leaflets! And … say it softly – more whizzy viral campaigns.

For me, the most interesting issue (aside from knowing what the result will be – and my bookmaker wants to know that more than I do!) is how far the new ways of reaching the public with the message will result in an increase in the kind of centralisation that we have seen over the past fifty years? I mention this because those of us that work in the digital media sphere have ethical questions to ask ourselves: Do we really want to be the agents of political centralisation in this way?

The job of ethical social media specialists must, surely, be to promote the kind of communications ecology that enables local politicians to reassert themselves at the expense of the centralised party structures? To drag politics towards the concerns of individuals, rather than the aggregated concerns that Ministers feel obliged to address on the relentless national media?

The economist Moshe Alder – writing about the cult of celebrity (in this PDF, but nicely explained here) – talked about the way that talent and stardom are not the same thing. Adler argues that celebrities earn their money by finding the sweet-spot – making themselves the subject that newspapers can please everyone by covering. Chris (again) explains this very well in the context of football: Few genuine go-to-the-match-on-Saturday football fans care that much about supporting the national team. But the newspapers give blanket coverage to the subject at the expense of more interesting articles about the lower reaches of Nottingham Forest’s squad.

Political centralisation works in the same way: It is about addressing the distant concerns that everybody is talking about – rather than the more granular ones that bother us all. Social media – if it is to contribute to the quality of democracy – must find a way of establishing many many more bilateral conversations – rather than the multilateral Big Conversation of modern politics.