Diary – 20 January 2007

If you have started to fear that Tesco, that rampaging retail beast, is running the country, then you may be right. Let me explain. When Time magazine made everyone who uses the internet their ‘Person of the Year’ last month, it got us all thinking about the nature of ‘power’ in the modern technological age. In pre-internet days, power was fairly easily definable. Politicians and newspaper proprietors essentially ran the country, because they decided how we led our lives, how we got our news, and how we thought. But the emergence of the world wide web has changed everything.  I recently interviewed Gordon Brown for a forthcoming GQ ‘power’ issue, and he was fascinatingly honest about the erosion of political influence under this cyperspace onslaught. ‘I think that the level of influence the state has on society now is far less than it used to be,’ he conceded. ‘The internet is so powerful, everyone is blogging, commercial advertising is moving online. So the power is moving to the people. And politicians therefore have less power than they used to have.’ When I asked him to elaborate, he went further: ‘I think that we are now living in the iPod generation, where people want to make decisions about how they lead their lives, and now they have a lot more flexibility to do so. They want to exercise more power over their lives. And politicians have to respond to that new challenge. So in many ways, government in future is going to be more about directing people and enabling them to do what they want to do, than about telling or ordering them what to do, as it perhaps was too much in the past.’

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And as for newspapers, Brown said: ‘I think papers can still set an agenda.