Are you afraid of the internet?

On Saturday I helped run a media workshop (the ‘new’ media bit) as part of the training Manchester Labour offers to its councilllors and new candidates. I say ‘offers’ – it’s mandatory. Otherwise I’m not sure who would have turned up for my bit.

My qualifications for being the person who explains new media to our councillors and candidates are: 1. I like the internet and 2. I’m more likely to be free on a Saturday than Kev Peel is. That’s about it. I’m not very good at explaining things. What’s more, I’m so immersed in social networks that watching me try to explain their benefit to people who are not familiar with them is like inflicting Jeremy Clarkson on a tribe of people who have never had cause to develop the wheel. He’d be all “Whur, driving the Mercedes CLK63 AMG Black Series is like shagging Angelina Jolie while being hand-fed a bacon roll by your monkey butler and listening to Ride of the Valkryies”, and they’d look at him like he was being sick on their feet. This is how some of our councillors look at me when I say the word “hashtag”. It saddens me to think that I’m as incomprehensible as Jeremy Clarkson.

I have some successes. Our councillors are very clever people who care about their communities, and when I tell them that there are residents in their wards who use Twitter to tweet at @ManCityCouncil so they can report problems with bins and potholes and problems with bins and streetlights that have gone out and problems with bins and graffiti and problems with bins, and that they can find all these people by searching for the name of their ward, some of them agree that that’s useful. When I tell them that I got a Facebook page to over 12,000 ‘likes’ almost by accident (set up a page before the general election, called it ‘Never Voted Tory, Never Will’, forgot about it), they can see the potential. And when I tell them that a guy in my ward, who I’d spoken to on Twitter but never met, got in touch with me, over Twitter, before the local elections, to ask how he could get involved with ‘fighting for Labour’, and has since come to a branch policy forum and delivered leaflets in his street, and would probably not have done any of these things if I didn’t know him on Twitter, they are a little impressed.

However, there’s still some resistance. I don’t think my reputation helps, if I’m honest. When it comes to social media I’m not an expert or even an early adopter, I’m just notorious for spending too much time in front of a computer screen. And it’s true. I sometimes try to press Alt+E+F on an imaginary keyboard to remember something someone has said, out loud, in real life. If you could actually do that and find instances when the leader of Manchester City Council has said my name, it would almost always be in the same sentence as the words ‘Twitter’ or ‘Put your Blackberry down when I’m talking to you’. And it’s true, of course, that I’m very attached to my gadgets. It’s possible that some people think I actually live in the internet, a bit like Tron.

And that doesn’t help. It gives the impression that you can’t use social networks unless you tweet in a blur of thumbs and say things like ‘totes amaze’. Which, of course, isn’t true. A lot of our older and wiser councillors – not to mention MPs – use social networks sensibly and professionally, and I imagine most sceptics would find them more convincing than they would me.

But sometimes I’m not sure. Some people really seem scared of the internet. I’m starting to think that when the first people to use the wheel tried to explain to everyone else just how useful it was – “you can put a lot of them together and move stuff around! Like, a lot more stuff than if you were just dragging it along the ground! And it’s a lot faster!” – they probably encountered people who thought it was a waste of time. You know, people who said things like “that’s all very well for you, but in my area people prefer to leave stuff where it is”, or “I’ve been dragging stuff along the ground since before you were born, and it works well enough for me”, or “I’ve seen people using wheels, and they only seem to move pointless, trivial stuff around”, or “actually, the Obama campaign only used wheels for fundraising.” (Probably not that last one.)

As you can probably tell, I find it frustrating. I’m frustrated because there are brilliant tools available to us as politicians and campaigners and we’re not making the best of them. You can argue that it’s a generational thing. The councillors who look at me with suspicion when I suggest they allow their constituents to ‘follow’ them – and the few MPs who argued last week that it would be a bad thing if members of the public were able to contact their representatives while they were in the Commons chamber – could just be as out of date as the party representatives who turned down the BBC’s offer of televised PPBs in 1950, apparently assuming that being able to speak to thousands of people at once could only end badly. (Incidentally, I discovered while writing this that the producer responsible for the first televised UK election night – and, essentially, the inception of political TV in this country – was Grace Wyndham Goldie, who just about beats Bald Grace the Irish Pirate to the title of Most Fabulously Named Famous Grace.)

But it’s not just a few councillors missing out on new media and what it can do. As a party we’re not making the best of it either. While 38 Degrees are dominating the online opposition to the government and, more quietly, organisations like Citizens Advice are doing innovative things with Foursquare, Labour’s use of social media is…well, what, exactly? We’ve got Campaign Engine Room and hardly anyone uses it. We’ve got an astonishing resource of activists using social networks to recruit and engage and organise one another and to get Labour’s message out and to listen to people…and the central place the Party gives us to do this is Membersnet. I don’t necessarily agree that the Labour Party website needs shutting down, because, well, then we wouldn’t have a website. But what Membersnet needs is to have its head cut off and to be buried with a garlic-infused silver stake through its heart while someone builds something better.

But more than that, what we need is for the Party to invest much more in training our people to use every tool at our disposal to listen and communicate with our communities. It’s not right that some of our most talented and experienced activists should miss out just because they’re scared, or because the only person who ever tried to explain it to them was a walking hashtag like me. In other words (and forgive me for this): we don’t need to reinvent the wheel. We just need to make sure everyone knows how to drive.