Communities Dominate Politics

I was asked recently "what comes after Communities Dominate Brands?" and I answered Communities Dominate Politics.

No more is this clearly demonstrated than perhaps in the US, although Gordon Brown seems to understand that giving up control is a way, is in fact a means to re-engage people with their communities and constituencies.

The Observer asked this weekend in From the web to the Whitehouse

Since the 1960 face-offs between Kennedy and Nixon, televsion has been the dominant medium in US presidential election campaigns. But the advent of YouTube has changed all that. Now it's the internet that has become the key political battleground for 2008. But is this the birth of a new democraticatising medium - or just a passing fad?

And we wrote about the phenomonen of Barak Obama in The new web politics back in February this year.

And there is plenty to be concerned about as The young disengage with politics

On 5 March this year, an ad appeared on the spectacularly popular video-sharing website, YouTube. The person who posted it identified him or herself as 'ParkRidge47' - the place where Hillary Clinton grew up and her year of birth - but the video did not appear to have originated anywhere near that presidential candidate's camp. An updated version of Ridley Scott's famous Apple Macintosh ad from 1984, it took the Orwell-inspired original, in which armies of grey-faced workers are lectured to from a vast television screen by a fearsomely Nazi-like dictator, and replaced the face and voice of Big Brother with those of Hillary Clinton

But in Politics - communities and communication technologies we see the beginnings of a shift in the way networks can significantly change the political course of history.

The ad sought to show how little like an actual conversation Hillary's one-way mode of address is, and its brilliance was that the form and the content were beautifully entwined: the anonymous posting was itself the equivalent of the girl with the mallet - a way of smashing the old order of demagoguery and spin by surreptitiously democratic digital means. The ad, entitled 'Vote Different', ended by transforming the Apple logo into an 'O', underneath which was written: barackobama.com.

So what we are wtinesses to is the transformation from Participatory CULTURE to Participatory POLITICS Grassroots media comes of age

Within days, the 'Vote Different' ad had, as the digitally savvy world likes to say, 'gone viral'. It was picked up by progressive blogs, by conservative blogs, by advertising blogs - and then by the mainstream media. The San Francisco Chronicle hailed it as 'a watershed moment in 21st-century media and political advertising', and every time the ad received any kind of coverage from then on, it would send viewers to YouTube to look at it. As of last week, 'Vote Different' had been seen by more than 3 million people and discussed ad infinitum, making an ad that was disseminated for free and apparently independently of a political campaign far more effective than any official ad made by the presidential candidates in the 2008 race so far. 'ParkRidge47', who remained anonymous, became an instant YouTube celebrity, a poster child for the idea that anyone can have a widely heard voice. Interviewed on TechPresident.com, a new website designed to track the 2008 candidates' use of the internet, ParkRidge47 proudly said that 'considering Hillary Clinton's biggest video has only received 12,000 views on YouTube, I'd say the grassroots has won the first round'.

And so we live in a wealth of networks

No campaign has been more aggressive in tapping into social networks and leveraging the financial power of hundreds of thousands of small donors

said Karen Tumulty a writer for Time.

Back to the Observer article

2008 has already been repeatedly referred to as 'the YouTube election', and candidates are all trying to keep up. During the last presidential election, bloggers were the new digital phenomenon to contend with; now YouTube has taken precedence, and it has the potential for much more dramatic effect.

Why do questions have to be filtered through CNN? A question is asked - why indeed.

Jeff Jarvis writing about the Paris riots a few years ago informs us

At the same time, the rioters' political and media bete noire, interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy - who was blamed for worsening the violence when he called the rioters "racille", which was first translated in the Guardian and elsewhere as "scum" and later as "rabble" - took out ads in Google to push his agenda. Business Week magazine reports that French Googlers who searched on such words as "riots," "burned cars", and "violence" saw ads sending them to a petition to support Sarkozy. In the old days, maybe two years ago, the minister would have held press conferences. Now he speaks through a search engine.

The police said that rioters have been using mobile messaging to coordinate their attacks in the Paris suburbs. These are the same techniques used by freedom-loving demonstrators in Ukraine and Lebanon and by political activists in the US. We now call them "smart mobs". But they're still mobs and can do the stupid things mobs do.

So they were all blamed for using this new medium, the internet, to cause violence. But it's not as if they needed the internet to do this. It only made them more efficient.

And

Dassier said that "journalism is not simply a matter of switching on the cameras and letting them roll. You have to think about what you're broadcasting." But now anyone can do precisely that: anyone can switch on a mobile phone and broadcast news from the scene to the world and no one can control it. And isn't that good? Isn't information better than ignorance?

American populist new-media extremist that I am, I believe that the tools that enable free speech are necessarily good

Its not TV its Video on the net says Andrew Rasiej

The candidates still think that every time a video camera is on them, it's television, so they start acting the part. They don't realise that video on the web is an entirely different medium that requires a different set of sensibilities, and it's easily recognisable to the viewer when the candidate is not being authentic. Unfortunately there are still going to be these "gotcha" moments, but my argument is that the way to fight the gotcha moments is not by being defensive but by embracing the technology and producing lots of high-quality authentic content yourself.

Indeed and Professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson says The press is free for anyone who owns one

That's no longer true. You still have to have some income, because you have to have a computer, but the cost of getting access to the public has dropped dramatically - and that goes back to the early days of the republic, when there was more capacity to simply post things. The American revolution was fed by individuals who could easily get things into circulation, in part because the public was so small. When we moved to mass channels of communication, the ability of the individual to affect politics dropped, and to some extent that's been regained now. It changes the rules, and I think it's healthy.

Bill Clinton was the master of "retail politics' whereas Obama is the prince of the YouTube generation, the Community generation. That want to belong and participate and be part of history, to make history and to know their contribution made a difference. Barak knows this and so his campaign is a platform for people to co-create and join in.

I think about, politics, consumerism, consumption, society, education. We need these things BUT - BUT – for whose benefit?

We are responding to this question by revolting – through using digital technologies. Embracing the opportunity to rise against institutions that once had control over us. But it is all in the end about people not about technology

And I do think that is a healthy thing.

But then we have tio ask what is the role of the leader in all of this? Its not absolutist power has G.W. Bush liked to weield or Tony Blair for that matter. It is a different sort of power and a different type of democracy. We live naturally in a network, industrialised politics meant we were in fact exculded from that process.

Back to 1960 and the use of Youtube in the 2008 elections is a watershed moment

it was the moment in which broadcast - that one-to-many model - became the dominant way in which campaigns communicated, and that probably wasn't a healthy thing. Because candidates started to look at the electorate as an audience to talk at, rather than to talk with. Prior to that it was really grassroots effort. That's how campaigns were run for centuries. And now with the rise of the internet there is the ability to have a true dialogue with the voter.

But where does it all end up?

What will happen in the future - either next year or in elections to come - is anyone's guess. Michael Kinsley, who weathered a good deal of scepticism when he founded Slate, thinks that these 'cheap shots, which are delightful', will be less damaging in four years' time, because everyone will be used to them by then. 'There was a time when people were making the same speculations about email,' he says, 'or television. Or arms and legs for that matter. Soon it'll be part of life - it won't be worthy of comment.' Rasiej says he can imagine that eventually, when the generation that's being raised with these tools runs for office, entire campaigns will actually be run inside Facebook. Jamieson, who is in charge of the largest academic survey done on the electorate, says that every academic in her field is asking the question of how this will translate into votes. She expects that 'it will take two more elections before we have a really good answer to the internet question

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