Can Labour cope with the changing nature of the internet?

The internet is changing the way we view the world in astonishing ways – both obvious and insidious. The recent debate over Google’s privacy policies has largely avoided discussion of one very important way Google and other Internet companies put the data they have about you to use. It is a trend that is a growing influence on our lives and that could have profound consequences for public debate and Labour’s involvement in it.

Internet companies face a fierce battle for your attention. We are an easily distracted bunch. However, the larger internet companies and sites, such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo and CNN, are becoming exceedlingly good at giving us what we want. They collect a staggering amount of information about what websites we have looked at and the links we have clicked. They use this information to present you with stories that will interest you and keep you clicking. If you did a Google search for Egypt during the Arab Spring you would have received very different results depending on what you usually looked at on the internet. News junkies received links to stories about the uprising. The newsphobic were presented with links for holidays in Egypt. The ability of these companies to monitor what you like and present you with similar options creates, what Eli Pariser of MoveOn.org calls, a filter bubble. A feedback loop based on your past preferences.

This creates unusal distortions in how people interact on the internet. If you click only on the links of your left-wing friends on your Facebook feed you will gradually only see links that they post. Facebook will make sure that other viewpoints will disappear. It also means thoughtless clicking can influence what you are exposed to. People are more likely to click on a story about a celebrity, sports event or something quite random (does anyone remember the woman who put the cat into a bin?) than want to read about massacres in Homs or policy debates about combating homelessness. People did, and still do, read a national newspaper with the political leaning of their choice for their daily fix of news. But there is a difference. All newspapers, broadsheets and tabloids alike, are curated. A decision is made at some level about what stories are important even if they are not what people want to read. The filter bubble doesn’t make these decisions – it’s blind and a moral vacuum.

If this trend continues it poses obvious problems for Labour’s engagement with the general public. There is the potential that it will lead to political activists having an increasingly narrow worldview. It is a tendency that may have always existed but now the tools are in place to amplify it. Social media such as Twitter exascerbate this by recommending people similar to you to follow. At the same time the trend indicates that the general public will become increasing disengaged from the broad sweep of public debate and may become increasingly issues based in their outlook.

While many voters are not yet using the internet as their primary means of getting news but it is a growing trend. Despite the strong presence of newspapers and the BBC in our news culture the internet is continuing to grow strongly as our primary place to go for news. As a party we need to avoid allowing invisible walls to surround us. These developments will mean, over the long term the party will need to, as ever, redefine how it packages its messages so that people will listen to them. This may mean more targeted messaging such as the systems that are being developed by the Democrats in the United States for the 2012 Presendential election.

Nevertheless, the simplest way for cutting through will be to speak to voters directly. While the filter bubble grows old fashioned door step canvassing may be a trump card for Labour. While it will no doubt remain very difficult to changes someone’s opinion on the doorstep it is at least a form of direct communication the electronic media is unable to match.