Matthew Dancona

The mighty should quake before the Wiki man

New technology has the power to transform democracy

As Robert Lindsay demonstrated unforgettably as Wolfie, leader of the Tooting Popular Front in Citizen Smith, anyone who shouts ‘Power to the People!’ can end up looking a prize idiot. So let me throw caution to the wind and say that this is precisely what the web, new media and mobile technology offer us, if we choose to seize the opportunity: democratisation on a new and unprecedented scale.

This, at least, is the conclusion I have drawn making two Radio Four programmes on politics and the internet. First, there is what you might call the direct impact of new media upon political practice: its basic instrumentality.

As D-J Collins, one of the rising stars in the Google firmament, told me: ‘We’re at the cusp of very profound change. The internet is a playground of innovation, and people are playing faster and faster than they’ve ever played before. Facebook wasn’t here three years ago; YouTube wasn’t here two years ago, and it’s amazing to think of a world without YouTube now.

‘And politicians are beginning to embrace it in quite a serious way — whether it’s the US government opening up all its websites to search engines so that people can just search within government websites for information — that’s a profound change — or whether it’s the Lib Dems’ branded channel [on] YouTube, which they use very actively, whether it’s David Cameron answering letters on his Webcameron site or whether it’s the Foreign Secretary speaking to very niche issues because people have raised it on their blog.’

Fine: but what about the ordinary voters operating at the so-called ‘netroots’? In Oxford, the 18-year-old Laurie Pycroft has used blogging to devastating effect in defence of animal testing for scientific research, translating links to other websites into a demonstration of almost a thousand people.

The most exciting example of grassroots web politics I encountered was the campaign led by a young East Londoner, Saif Osmani, who set up a website to save Queen’s Market in Upton Park from redevelopment.

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