Opinion v Knowledge
The spEak You're bRanes blog - an excellent chronicle of UK comments-box idiocy
One of my favourite political bloggers, Shuggy, has a short post up here about opinion and it’s validity (or lack of). My own favourite variation on this is the view that ‘opinions are like a*seholes – everyone has one, but no-one really wants to hear them.’ (an aphorism that I can’t recall the source of now).
Politicians are often a good deal more relaxed about this than Shuggy (he’s a teacher – it’s his job not to be soft on this sort of thing). Opinion draws forth evidence – if I say something that you think is stupid, you may take time to assemble the information needed to prove me wrong.
It also drives conversation, and often contains nuggets of evidence that the keen-eared can pick up on – and this is useful to politicians. The flipside, of course, is that this is the point at which unscrupulous pressure groups have the most traction. Newspapers can weild opinion to devastating effect as we see on a daily basis, but their potency increases exponentially the moment that politicians announce an intention to let opinion shape their policies.
Yet, even without formal petitions, politicians also don’t have the luxury that Shuggy does. In the late 1980s and early 1990s Mrs Thatcher believed that the empirical case for the poll-tax was overwhelming. She ignored the widely held opinion that ultimately damned the policy – namely “I don’t think that I should bloody-well pay it.”
This seems to me to be the fundamental question that we need to form a view upon when thinking about how social media will impact, or can change the way that modern democracies operate. No-one can pretend that opinion will never impact directly upon legislation, or that a judicial process by which pure evidence is the only determinant of what goes onto the statute book and what doesn’t.
But we do have to think about how opinion-based discussions can be increased – both in quality and quantity – and we have to think about how these conversations can be indexed in a way that value can be extracted without any sinister overtones of eavesdropping. And we need to reach an agreement about where a measure of opinion is a legitmate element of the formal decision-making process.
My own view is that having elected assemblies exercise a distributed moral wisdom (there are a few earlier posts on this subject here) allows us to strike the right balance here. It provides something that removes the more unpleasant barbs of opinion while ensuring that we all have a means of participating – after all – we can all find a way of letting MPs know what our opinions are, can’t we? That Parliament and representative government don’t work perfectly is a commonplace.
The question is, can new interactive tools make it work more effectively? In my opinion, it can. But I can’t prove it…