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No inner blogger? Don’t bother!
Unless you have an inner blogger, don’t bother, wrote Emily Bell in the November 27 edition of The Guardian. It’s good advice for the Conservative leader David Cameron but comes a little too late.
The attempts by Cameron and his party to instigate viral cyberspace campaigns (including the now-notorious WebCameron) have been widely mocked by people of all political persuasions. Bell’s basic argument is that nothing rings true of what the Tories are doing online to try to engage the yoof vote, and I for one agree with her. Presumably the Tories’ big idea is that all those just about ready to cast their first-ever votes are sat in front of computers all day, and can’t wait to engage with political material on the Web.
Bell notes the ways in which Cameron’s cybernautical adventures simply don’t ring true:
While the technology and jargon is all there, the true intent to engage isn’t. Hence Cameron’s videos, blog posts, etc, never veer into the realm of the conversational. They never refer to sources outside Cameron or point to material he’s seen or read, or link to people he’s talked to. It is a one-way diatribe of not-quite policies.
The basic dilemma for politicians is that the online environment is toxic to their usual antics on TV and radio. While they can do quite well spinning lies and distortions on BBC 1’s Question Time or during five-minute news magazine programme slots, implanting ‘vote for us’ messages into forums such as YouTube simply does not work. Not many adults, let alone young people, willingly type addresses of political parties’ websites into their browsers. Even fewer will seek out party political broadcasts to download to their video iPods. We know what we’re going to get for exercising our fingers in this way is gloss, spin and very little substance. What’s the point?
None of the main political parties in the UK have enthusiastically embraced interactivity, open commentary and overall engagement with the public via their websites. It’s too risky a strategy. Adopting the standard blogger’s approach would make it easier for the people to make their views known, and that would never do. Many of our views would be unpleasantly truthful, highlighting just why there is such a massive gap between politicians and the people.
Those of us who have ever had cause to write to our MPs know just how convoluted a process it is, even via email, and that often we don’t get replies or the responses we do get do nothing to address the questions we raised with our elected representatives in Parliament. Letters and emails encourage the natural tendency these days on the part of politicians to obfuscate, to rattle off party lines and give nothing of themselves away. Distance is maintained, as it is with the conventional websites our politicians present to us.
We get shop windows when what we want are drop-in centres.
Some brave politicians blog. Some of those blogs are excellent. Some less-than-brave politicians blog but don’t allow comments to be left on their sites or, when they do, moderate them to ensure only visitors who are on message with the party faithful get to see their comments appear. It is a brave politician indeed who, like the majority of bloggers, allows open commentary. Mostly they seek to stage-manage online forums just as they do their annual conferences.
Embracing a medium does not mean just copying a format, it means understanding the rules of engagement.
It’s interesting to note that while you can leave comments unmolested on blogs run by The Guardian, if you leave a comment on blogs run by the Daily Mail, they won’t appear straightaway and sometimes don’t appear at all. One is known to be left-wing, one is decidedly right-wing. Make of that what you will.
Many politicians fear exposing their personalities truthfully online. They might engender positive views of themselves among the public but they also risk the media attacking them for being honest and real. A queue of fellow politicians will be lining up to condemn them in the hope of trashing their political views and credibility among their peers, for whom the desire to be credible only extends to the outer territories of Whitehall or local council offices. And credibility in those circles is a different thing to what the public has long demanded, and needs for confidence to be restored.
Blogging has proved itself but one tool, albeit a vital one, that can be put to effective use in exposing political scandals and hypocrisy. It is no wonder that exceptionally oppressive states, like China, react to the blogosphere by seeking to block most of it being accessed from within their borders. Nothing scares major- or minor-league tyrants or more than honest and unfettered criticism of them being made available for all to read, comment on, and draw conclusions from. Words, ultimately, have the greatest power.
Bell is quite right: if you have no inner blogger, don’t bother. I would extend that by saying, if you have nothing new to offer, don’t bother. If you can’t give us honesty and policies that aim to improve the lives of everyone, don’t reach for that webcam and don’t try to be hip and trendy when we never, ever, see you out of a suit (or when we do, you’re still wearing the kind of attire that goes down well at Oxford and Cambridge).
Honesty and conviction require no technological support whatsoever. You don’t need a plugin, cool logo or streaming videos-on-demand to simply start telling the truth.
You can read the entirety of Emily Bell’s rather astute and thought-provoking article here.
This is a (frankly much improved) reworking of an essay submitted to the Weblog Tools Collection blogging essay competition.
