Technology is levelling the playing field for protesters

By Tom Hayes / @tomhayes1983

It has become vogue to comment on the parallels between the 1980s and today. The Tories are back, pulling the levers of government, smashing the public services that Labour improved over the last decade. People are once again protesting in force the emasculation of their welfare state.

But, something crucial is different. In the intervening years, the playing field has evened up. If we liken politics to a card game, protesters in previous times took the hand they were dealt and played it as best they could into the game. Now protesters select their own cards, meaning they own their wins and losses to a much greater extent.

Protesters have been able to get their message out and mobilise supporters because they have been technologically empowered. Through Twitter updates and Facebook posts, people connect to YouTube clips of Lib Dem parliamentary candidates promising not to raise tuition fees. A few taps of their touchscreen later, and people are reading the Browne report and the subsequent announcement by the Lib Dem Business Secretary that tuition fees will in fact be raised. More and more people are joining Andrew Rawnsley in his analysis of Lib Dem recommendation of higher tuition fees as ‘a wheel-squealing, tyre-smoking, bone-juddering, eye-popping, bowel-loosening, brain-melting U-turn’. Thanks to technology, more and more people are making their opinion clear: this is a U-turn which must be stopped.

Students are occupying campuses up and down the country. Cities are being marched through by numbers not seen in years. The online platforms that spread news about the Lib Dem U-turn are helping to keep spirits high. Trudging through snow and sleeping on cold floors seems easier to do when you’re being visited by Billy Bragg or Polly Toynbee, receiving shout-outs on Twitter from celebrity sympathisers, or connecting with protesters around the country. Last week Oxford University protesters and UCL protesters Skyped their dance-offs. The resulting ‘Dance for your Freedom’ video was uploaded to YouTube, where it’s been watched nearly 10,000 times, and shared via Facebook and Twitter. To march with students or enter an occupied lecture theatre is to feel a growing sense of a united national student movement.

Technology is helping to foster a strong student movement that is socially, geographically, intellectually and politically disparate. Although the advent of a technologically empowered grassroots movement adds strength to the student body, it has confused the media and complicated their presentation of news about the campaign against tuition fees. The traditional mouthpiece of students, the National Union of Students, has had to scramble to stay in the spotlight. So visible and increasingly popular among students is the grass-roots movement that the NUS President had to perform his own U-turn and embrace the occupations.

The NUS has not suddenly become irrelevant. It just needs to adjust to a rapidly changing reality. If the NUS and the grassroots student movement can work together with all the tools of technology at their disposal, the coalition government could be made to rethink its disastrous higher education policies. Armed with little more than their smartphones, students are catching Lib Dems MPs off-guard. The cabinet minister in charge of tuition fees, Vince Cable, has said that he might abstain in the key vote. A petition signed by 104 former Lib Dem parliamentary candidates has called for their colleagues to honour their pre-election pledges not to raise tuition fees. Even if the vote is passed next week, protesters can have an effect on Lib Dem MPs as they contemplate future higher education policies.

Student protesters have everything to play for. The media are uncertain about how to depict the role of protesters in the campaign against tuition fees. The media are generally uncertain about how to depict the state of the overall student campaign, comprising protesters and the NUS. As the first example of frequent, widespread resistance to the government’s programme of cuts, the media will be especially eager to establish a narrative. Technology could play as important a role in shaping that media narrative over the next week as it has in connecting students to one another in ever-greater numbers.

Technology has to be joined to new tactics, and already that appears to be happening. In addition to trudging through London snow blizzards to take their case to Whitehall and occupying campuses, students are branching out into other activities. They have flash mobbed Topshop’s flagship store at Oxford Circus in London, where they protested tax-dodger Philip Green’s inclusion in a government that is slashing public spending. And they have stood in solidarity with striking London transport workers at their picket lines. There are growing numbers of converts and high levels of energy among them (especially those as young as fourteen). But these advantages can only be pressed home if protesters exploit their opportunities to generate, distribute, and consume their own content. If they do, the future could look very bright indeed.