What kind of election was it?

The Election 2010 blog is asking ‘what election was that‘?

“The opening book in the ‘Nuffield’ election series – The British General Election of 1945 – lists a series of ‘named’ elections: 1874, when the Liberals went down in a flood of gin and beer; the Midlothian election of 1880; the Khaki election of 1900; the Chinese Slavery election of 1906; the People’s Budget election of 1910; the ‘Hang the Kaiser’ election of 1918; and the 1924 ‘Zinovieff letter’ election.”

The Internet election maybe? Well, no. I was at the Personal Democracy Forum GE 2010 event at the RSA the other night. It was a great panel, but it says a lot about the way that the blogopsphere has amplified so many voices that there wasn’t that much that was said on the stage that those of us who follow these things hadn’t heard before. But Mark Pack – a Lib-Dem blogger – stepped up from the floor and really stole the show. Wisely, Mick has signed him up for a post on Slugger – here:

“…many of those who have been asking “will the next election be the first internet election?” have been asking the wrong question. At the internal, organisational level the internet had already become essential prior to this election. What in effect many of the questioners (especially those in the style of Clay Shirky and Joe Trippi) have been hoping is that the internet will remake politics in a non-hierarchical style.

Whether politics – or other forms of human organisation – can be non-hierarchical is a very different question from what uses YouTube should be put to. It is one I am sceptical about, especially when you see how quickly structures have emerged in the communities growing up on tools such as Twitter which, at a technical level, are very egalitarian and non-hierarchical.

Where does this all leave us? In the end, the election was primarily about what politicians did and how the public voted rather than about technologies and techniques. And you know what? That doesn’t seem so bad at all.”