New media gives fresh impetus to old ideas

By Douglas Alexander

Until the credit crunch, there was something of a consensus in Britain that it was the politics of identity – not the arithmetic of economics – that would increasingly provide the crucible for public debate.

Global growth this year is forecast to fall to its lowest level since World War Two – just half a per cent. IMF Chief Economist, Olivier Blanchard, has said – and I quote directly, that he now “expect(s) the global economy to come to a virtual halt”. The Euro area has been in recession since last April. The United States economy for a year. In Japan and Germany , output has shrunk by around 1 per cent in the last six months. Last month, Bank of America was rescued, Citigroup – one of the world’s largest banks – has been broken up, Anglo-Irish has been nationalised and Germany has rescued Commerzbank. In the developing world the economic crisis has already pushed an estimated 100 million people back into poverty.

Here in the UK , the Governor of the Bank of England has described this as the greatest financial crisis since the first world war, and the Bank has cut interest rates to their lowest level in history. These are the numbers that are dominating the news, cabinet discussions, conversations in board rooms and around kitchen tables, and rightly so. But behind this economic crisis, and preceding it, there are important changes taking place in our society – and in many others around the world.

The power of the web is changing the face of commerce, social interaction and politics. Klaus Schwab the founder of the World Economic Forum has suggested that if the defining image of the 20th Century was a wall, the defining image of the 21st Century will be the web.

The web gives us the opportunity to reach out to far greater numbers of people, in a far more personalised way. President Obama’s campaign for the Democratic nomination and then the White House is, in many ways, a blueprint for showing us how.

Many people have spoken of the Obama campaign as having rewritten the rules of political engagement, as a 21st Century break with the old-style campaigning that went before it. But I don’t believe that to be the case. The Obama campaign did not reinvent the wheel of political campaigning. Rather, and this is what the Obama team themselves stressed to me when I met with them in Washington last month, they used emails, text messages and social networking as new channels to pursue old political truths.

Instead of replacing traditional campaigning activities, the team used online tools to create a pathway for people to get involved with traditional political activism. Until the advent of the internet – and particularly social networking – national politics has suffered from a problem of scale, which it met with the blunt instrument of the mass media.

But Obama’s social networking site, MyBarackObama.com, provided news of events in members’ local communities. It also provided maps to find local voters and scripts to use in conversation with them. It enabled supporters to organise some 200,000 of their own events – with no central control.

By encouraging citizens with no formal link with the campaign other than their support for it to become advocates, the Obama team lent a power to their message that cannot be matched by TV ads – word of mouth. And it lent a democratic credence to their candidate – as Barack Obama repeatedly said, ‘this is not about me, it’s about you’.

Could the same be replicated in the UK ? I believe it could – not least because of the pace of change in the digital society here in the last decade. Ten years ago just one in ten people in the UK used the internet. Today, 75 per cent of people are online – part of a worldwide community of some 1.4 billion.

As people increasingly use the internet for entertainment, shopping, and news, they are turning away from the traditional mass media. Over the last ten years the ratings for the 6 o’ clock news have fallen by a third. Newspaper circulation over the same period fell by almost a quarter and the projections are that they will fall further.

In contrast, nine out of 10 graduates have broadband according to new research, and three-quarters of people under 30 would rather lose their TV than their internet connection. People aren’t just moving their reading, viewing and listening habits online, they are changing the way they interact with media. Wikipedia would not exist without its 75,000 active contributors, providing articles in more than 260 languages. Social networking sites are all based on active involvement of members. There is a new blog invented every second.

The Obama campaign showed that politicians no longer own politics. I believe that’s a good thing. But it also means that we need to change the way we work – not only on the campaign trail, but also in Government.

There are few who doubt that President Obama faces a greater range of challenges than perhaps any of his predecessors since Roosevelt . If his transition team was careful to study FDR’s first 100 days for historical examples of innovative policy in response to a crisis, then they should also have looked at the way Roosevelt spoke to the nation.

Roosevelt is remembered as one of America ‘s greatest Presidents not only for his mastery of policy, but also for his singular mastery of the new tools of mass communication. In his ‘fireside chats’, President Roosevelt spoke – for the first time – directly to the nation. Even in the ‘golden era’ of US radio, these broadcasts attracted more listeners than even the most popular shows, and cemented public support for his New Deal.

Obama is the first President to put his weekly address on to youtube – echoing FDR’s fireside chats. Thousands of Obama supporters have been holding meetings in their homes to discuss what the President’s Economic Recovery Plan will mean for their community – organised through the social network on myBarackObama.com.

What Obama has recognised both in his campaign and, through early indications in his administration, is that the digital revolution provides Government with both an obligation and an opportunity.

We have an obligation to provide a more responsive state that is tailored to the individual needs of citizens. If we are honest with ourselves in Government, we have too often been outpaced in the past 30-40 years by the ability of the market to provide people with the individualised customised products and services.

Government over the decades has remained too static. Its services are determined too often not by what citizens want and need, and how they live their lives today, but by what suits the silos of Government that deliver those services.

The limitations of the market have become all too apparent in the past 12 months and we have witnesses not just the collapse of bankrupt institutions but also a bankrupt ideology. The ideology of unfettered free markets that suggests the only role for government is to get out of the way and suggest that deregulation and privatisation are the only answers to market failure.

If the collapse in confidence in the market is to be matched by a growth in confidence of the state to deliver not only reliability but also efficiency and effective service delivery, then the state must change itself. If we want an enabling and empowering state, then it must undertake its tasks in new and imaginative ways.

Orange has 17 million customers – government has got four times as many. HSBC works in 83 countries – the Foreign Office in 144. Tesco has 1,200 stores – the Department for Children, Schools and Families oversees 23,000 schools.

Certainly we are making progress. Nine million people now renew their car tax online. Seven million people a month visit Directgov – to find childcare, register their vote, get health advice, and access a whole raft of national and local government services.

We need to go further. To capitalise on this opportunity, we need to drive through a cultural change in the way government and the civil service operates – we need to listen more, become more transparent and be more responsive to feedback.

The internet provides us with the tools to do this – websites like ‘NHS Choices’ are giving people the chance to rate hospitals with Amazon-style ‘marks out five’ for cleanliness, standard of care and attitude of staff.

We also need to reach out to the online community for feedback. There is too much caution about that at the moment – but if 100,000 people are asking each other for advice on the Netmums website each week – equivalent to a full Wembley stadium – I think that our health professionals should be there too talking to people and helping them with their problems.

Aristotle wrote that “one citizen differs from another, but the salvation of the community is the common business of them all”. The new power of the web to transcend distance will give new impetus to some old ideas.