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Saturday 22 November 2008

Politics

The next general election will be won and lost on the internet

If I were the campaign strategist for a major political party, I’d certainly be investing heavily in the internet. People now search as much as they email. I would want my party’s official website to be at the top of every search page. I’d be even more keen for surrogate sites that scrutinise my opponents to be at the top of the Google results screen. I would be sending interns on to the campaign trail with rival candidates. Armed with £150 mini-cameras they would be watching everything — seeking to record the kind of gaffe that cost George Allen his US Senate seat and presidential ambitions after his allegedly racist remark was ‘YouTubed’. I’d also be gathering long lists of email addresses — carefully categorising people according to the issues that motivate them. In the battle of email acquisition the Downing Street petitions have given the government a big advantage.

But in this new world the campaign staff of political parties and traditional media will have a much smaller share of power. The editor of BBC1’s Six O’Clock News will still be a force in the land but ordinary citizens will no longer be passive consumers. When Peter Roberts of Cheshire started a petition on the Downing Street website he lit a fuse that produced one of the year’s biggest political stories. More than 1.8 million people signed Mr Roberts’s petition against road pricing and changed the terms of the national debate on the issue.

Philip de Vellis recently produced what is called a ‘mashup’ of Apple Mac’s Think Different advertising campaign. Using off-the-shelf editing software he took clips from the original advert and merged them with images of Hillary Clinton repeating empty soundbites. The former First Lady and presidential contender was portrayed as a Big Brother character straight out of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. More Americans have watched Mr de Vellis’s advert than have watched any official commercial.

Inspired by de Vellis’s ‘Vote Different’ video, and by the more famous Swift Boat Veterans who derailed John Kerry’s presidential bid, my guess is that some disaffected group of British voters will soon come up with something similar of their own. They’ll direct their fire at Gordon Brown or David Cameron and post their broadcast on a video-sharing site that is beyond the easy reach of UK regulators. It will be harder-hitting than anything that a political party would be happy to be associated with. And like most viral hits, it will probably be a lot funnier, too.

None of this is to say that everything produced by the internet will be better than the efforts of conventional journalists and ad agencies. Ninety per cent of blogs, discussion boards and homemade videos are unreadable or unwatchable. But simply because of the sheer scale of creativity that the internet has unleashed, the best are better — particularly when they are produced by people with real understanding of the subjects in question. Critics of the internet also underestimate its ability to guide people through the junk and towards the jewels.

More articles from: Tim Montgomerie | this section

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