By Dan Jellinek
“The British public is increasingly disenchanted with mainstream politics,” Tom Savigar, Director of the Future Laboratory, told the October meeting of PITCOM, the Parliamentary IT Committee.
“The voters of today and tomorrow are not interested in being passive consumers; they want to be active participants in civic life,” Savigar said. “The internet has given younger generations the opportunity to be creators, designers and publishers. People want more than a vote; they want a closer relationship with the state, and a chance to get involved in decision making.”
Communication technologies provide the tools to help rekindle the public’s engagement with politics, as shown by the way the Obama campaign led millions to view YouTube policy videos and organise themselves using social networking sites, he said. “But this is just the beginning. We have barely scratched the surface in terms of the internet’s impact on British politics.”
Research carried out by his organisation for mobile operator Orange, and published last December in a ‘Future of politics’ report, had revealed three key themes relating to how technology could help the politicians of the future relate to constituents, he said.
The first is the need for politicians and public service managers to display “online resonance” – an affinity with the more interactive, two-way nature of modern digital communication channels.
“Politicians in the UK are still in the broadcast mode that was cultivated during the age of television. They use tools such as the internet for one-way communication, and this is a shame because the internet has so much more to offer. Over the coming decade, the internet must promote interactivity and two-way communication.”
One way to re-energise political discourse will be to create networking sites aimed specifically at particular political issues, Savigar suggested. “If a site is built around issues that people care about, such as education, or child poverty, and if the site guarantees wide and engaging discussion, you will bring in swathes of people from different backgrounds and generations who share the interest.”
Some envisage the development of a ‘mega democracy portal’ that could draw together many such issue portals as well as information and consultation on a wide range of public services, he said. “This will provide information on officials at all levels of government, from the town parish to the PM. Citizens will be able to write to them and they will have the ability to write back. It will also give personalised notification about things that matter to citizens based on where they live.”
The second key factor for politicians of the future will be the need to adapt at least partly to channels that are ‘always on’, Savigar said.
Despite the potential benefits that communications technology will bring, many MPs still feel overwhelmed by the added ‘noise’, he said. “They feel emails add to the workload rather than help make their lives easier.”
In this, they will need to learn from today’s “digital natives”, a younger, networked generation that does not see technology as a substitute to traditional forms of contact, but one that enhances their hectic lifestyles.
“Technology will not replace face-to-face contact in constituencies, and in the halls, bars and tearooms of Westminster. Rather than being ‘off’ or ‘on’-line, politicians will be ‘in-line’, switching between the two,” Savigar said.
Communication tools will also help politicians interact in more sophisticated ways with lobby groups, activists and constituents. “With intelligent use, technology will help politicians better target communication at voters according to their interests”. Contextual services, for example ones that use GPS-based satellite location finder technology, will enable a politician or party to focus in on particular issues of strong importance to people and communities, ‘live’.
“Citizen relationship management will be a case of collecting information about each voter – political bias, family situation, interests and so on – and then targeting communication that will interest them, rather than sending out blanket emails or letters to everyone.” However, privacy issues would also come to the fore and such procedures must not fall foul of data protection rules, he said.
The third major theme to emerge from the December report was the related one of ‘live’ campaigning’ in the realm of social networks, Savigar said.
“In an always-on society, campaigns are monitored by millions. Armed with handheld devices, citizens can already engage wherever and whenever they wish. We live in a world that increasingly demands immediate, passionate and live responses.
“This new paradigm requires politicians to be ‘live’ – always available, always on, always there, and always listening – and to be accessible in a way that most would have considered inconceivable less than a year ago.”
Dr Ian Kearns, former Head of the e-Government Programme at the Institute for Public Policy Research, said he concurred with much of the report’s vision of a deepening relationship between Parliament and the people enabled by technology, including greater involvement of people in the policy-making process.
“But the vision is too technology-led. It seems to imply that, simply because technology can do something, it should. For example with electronic referenda, direct democracy, it implies the technology can do it so we should be thinking about it. I’m not so sure – I am a democrat but I also believe in deliberation. Voting patterns always change after deliberation.”
Likewise, single issue campaigns online do engage people, but they also “give people a free ride, and don’t confront them with decisions and trade-offs: that takes civil education, to teach people how democracy works and how beneficial it is to live in a democracy.”
Kearns also questioned the concept that technology can make Parliamentary committees stronger and better able to challenge government. “Maybe technology could help, but could have even more challenging and robust committees even without technology, if MPs themselves wanted them to be.”
He said he agreed with the report’s finding that political parties “need to change or wither”. “I think that’s right, they are losing their social moorings and could be swept away by different types of grouping such as social networking.”
There was a danger that online networking will make it easier for people to express their discontent by supporting fringe parties such as UKIP and the BNP, he said. “Other new parties might emerge and become serious contenders for some part of the public vote.
“The internet can give people with a particular view a sense of how many they are, giving them confidence, and this could be a good thing or it could be a bad thing, depending on what kind of views and issues they are.”
To ward off such dangers political parties must open up, but “they need to first make the decision to open up, then use the technology for that purpose: not just use technology,” Kearns said.
The internet could help parties in other ways, such as in raising money as it had so successfully in the US Presidential race, but again, other non-technical issues needed to support such moves, he said. “It will not work if people are just asked to donate online – people want a say in what is done, some influence, and then they might engage and donate.”
Some of the historical trappings of the UK party political system would eventually have to be stripped away if we are genuinely to enter a new age of greater openness and engagement, Kearns suggested. “Following the party whip is not going to play in the internet era. I think the whip system will wither, because people do not like it. Parties will see that if people see politicians acting like automatons, they will lose votes.”
In the same way, the format of party conferences of the future might be characterised by a dynamism and influence currently absent, and which today “might seem like a disaster” to party officials, he said. “They could become places where people come to take decisions, not stage-managed where people can see politicians don’t mean what they say.”
Overall, we should be asking first what sort of politics we want, and only second, how we should use new technologies to facilitate that, Kearns said. “Technology will not produce a political system for you. But if a new kind of politics is available, people might use it to engage.”
