Since I was appointed the Labour Party’s new media campaigns spokesperson – and yes, I am well aware that all my efforts to avoid being forever known as the ‘Twitter tsar’ are entirely futile! – I have frequently had to defend Twitter against the charge that it is frivolous, empty-headed, ‘twaddle’. Not something on which a well-paid Member of Parliament should be spending their time, when they could be working (even if it is eleven o’clock on a Saturday night!)
The recent survey that showed that 40% of tweets were ‘pointless babble’ is often cited. To digress for a moment…. who are they to judge? Don’t we all overhear conversations in the pub or on public transport where the participants are engrossed in what sounds to us like inane chatter? Isn’t all communication important in its own way, even if it’s simply the strenuously-observed social niceties of small talk or the bonding that comes from young people communicating in a language that is incomprehensible to their elders?
But to return to topic… and to put to one side the fact the very name ‘Twitter’ and the language of ‘tweets’, ‘twibes’ and ‘twibbons’ militates against it being taken seriously…
Can Twitter be a useful medium for political discussion, and a tool for political campaigning? Is it a worthwhile use of politicians and campaigners time? I’d say yes, it is, and for a number of reasons.
Many politicians use new media in the same way they used the mainstream media and their campaign leaflets; to transmit information, not to engage. Some politicians admittedly use Twitter in this way too!
But for me, the beauty of Twitter is that it’s interactive, it’s immediate and there are no intermediaries involved. You don’t have to rely on someone to draft a press-release and then send it out through PA and have a journalist pick up on it. You can say what you want to say, when you want to say it.
On Twitter I can tweet something as soon as it pops into my head (which is what David Cameron was scared of!) and get a virtually instant response from someone. And if it’s interesting enough it can turn into a fully-fledged debate, with any number of participants. You simply don’t get that immediacy with blogging, and you don’t get the mass participation. I like the fact that on Twitter no-one ‘owns’ the subject; it can develop a life of its own – and if you get tired of debating/ arguing, there will be someone else to pick up the baton and carry on, bringing new perspectives, new facts, new arguments to the table. There will also be those ready and waiting to challenge you; there’s no getting away with just reciting glib soundbites on Twitter!
Of course being restricted to 140 characters has its limitations, but being under that sort of discipline has its virtues too – and there’s always the option of linking to interesting articles, or your own blog posts if you want to develop an argument in full. In fact these days I find myself reading online newspapers much less, as I know the most interesting stories will be tweeted by someone before too long.
And increasingly Twitter is setting the mainstream news agenda; just look at the way the #welovethenhs debate took off, and made the headlines not just here but in the USA too. In a small way people who previously might have just been ‘armchair politicians’ sitting in front of their televisions putting the world to rights – with no-one except the dog to hear them - were able to influence one of the most important political debates taking place in the USA right now, by tweeting the truth about their own experiences of the NHS. There were attempts by some to hijack this and send out anti-NHS propaganda, but the sheer numbers involved on the #welovethenhs side made it impossible to do so.
Another example of the political power of Twitter was around the Iranian elections, when the truth about what was going on inside Iran could be passed from person to person, bypassing the restrictions that could be imposed on the mainstream media or even blogs. And of course Twibbons had a role to play in bringing people together in support of such shared causes.
So what role will Twitter play in a future General Election? One thing’s for sure, it will make it much harder for parties and the mainstream media to control the agenda. Twitter will allow for instant discussion, rapid rebuttal, sharing of ideas and opinions, rallying of troops, and generally far more engagement from people who may always have been politically interested but never politically involved. Twitter won’t win the election – but it may well make it a lot more interesting!
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