Tweeting my way back to Labour

One non-politician’s take on the promise and the peril of social networking and politics.

By Stephen Smith

I’ve read a great deal recently about the way in which new technologies can be harnessed to provide new ways of communicating between the electorate and the political parties. As a Labour supporter most of this has been via Labour supporting websites, and I’ve been struck by the importance which seems to be attached to blogs, Twitter, Facebook and so on – and the feeling that if Labour can get a strong foothold in these media it will give the party a strong leg-up come the next general election – and hopefully all the other elections.

Is it true? Will it work? And if it does what implications does that have for the future?

I’ll start with the positives.

I’ve posted on email lists, and discussion groups for many years – rarely anything political – I’m a computer geek, football supporter, and a special school headteacher – most of my ‘on-line community’ engagrment has been around those interests.

Several months back I opened a Twitter account. I’d heard about it & thought I’d give it a try. The only person in my email contact list that I found on Twitter, though, was a colleague who works in politics – a previous contributor to this blog. She didn’t have anyone following her either – it all seemed a bit pointless telling each other what we were doing – (especially as we already knew from Facebook anyway!).

Then suddenly I was followed by a total stranger. Scary in real life – but also felt odd on Twitter. I checked his profile – he also followed my colleague, so I followed him as well. He was clearly interested in politics, and after a week or two I clicked on a few interesting people on his list. The rest as they say, is history – things sort of snowballed.

Within weeks I was hooked, commenting on MP’s blogs, getting into mini-debates with politicians in the middle of the night, and being surprised to find that many MPs actually followed me, and replied to my Tweets, and were actually interested in what I was saying. I was even motivated to blog a couple of things myself when I had the time.

A couple of months on, I would now say that from being passively interested in politics, and passively supporting the Labour party, I am now relatively in tune with what’s happening in politics, and an active contributor to the Labour debate – albeit on a small scale. I can’t ever see myself knocking on doors or stuffing leaflets through letterboxes, but if I can contribute my thoughts, then maybe it will help. Who knows, one day I might even join the party!

One thing is certain, I’m no floating voter – and my ‘X’ is in the bag come the next election. So if this can be replicated among the millions of others like me, then Twitter, and similar new technologies will prove powerful indeed.

But I can’t help wonder if many of the things that make this phenomenon so attractive are transitory in nature. It’s really great being followed by an under-secretary of state, but I wonder whether it would be so great, or possible, if that person had 20,000 followers rather than the 200 or so that she has now, or if her staff team helped her to respond to 13,000 people that she follows instead of the 100 or so, which I’m fairly sure she responds to personally, at the moment. The number of people could presumably grow very large indeed.

Many Tweets also link to political blogs, which in turn have comments. Again, there is a point at which the number of comments made starts to detract from the quality of the debate and discussion taking place. I wonder how many people reading this have been fairly recently converted to being Facebook users, but are now using it less often – not because they don’t have many “friends” – but because virtually everybody they know is on there, and it’s not so much fun anymore.

In the same way – even in the space of a few weeks – I’ve realised that some websites where I used to be able to spar amiably about obscure philosophical points, are fast becoming soap boxes for people who seem to have little else to do with their lives but drown any sensible discussions. They’ve always been there, and they are entitled to be there – but now there are so many more – and their presence stymies debate, and discourages contributions from those less confident and with less definite political stances. Dealing with this without censoring free speech is a tough challenge indeed.

So I can envisage that Labour’s apparent embracing of new technologies – Labour 2.0 anyone? – could ironically be a victim of its own success, if it isn’t able to deal with the vast amounts of user generated information that will transpire if current trends continue.

In the past, publishing anything on the web has, for me personally, raised questions similarly to those of trees falling in distant forests – if no one reads my blog, does it still make a noise?

My feeling is that we should be starting to think of that now – and looking not so much to Labour 2.0 – but to Labour 2.1 Service Pack 2.