Bill Thompson
In the four years between the general elections of 2001 and 2005 the UK was transformed by technology. The proportion of homes with Internet access increased from 45% to 57%[1], and over six million households gained easy and always on access to a moderately fast broadband connection; home PC use rose from 45% to 65%[2]; wireless networks were available in over 7,500 cafes, bars and railway lounges[3]; GPRS and 3G phones offered email and web browsing on the move to over fifty million subscribers; and of course the ubiquitous Blackberry meant that anyone who wanted it could have email pushed to them at anytime of day or night.
Yet in the acres of newsprint, days of broadcast coverage and gigabytes of online reporting the Internet hardly featured at all, either as a story in its own right or as an important element in campaign coverage. While weblogs and online newspapers talked self-referentially about the Net and how it was being used, mainstream print and broadcast media sidelined it almost completely.
In part this was because there was no big story, no Dean-like candidate coming from nowhere thanks to the innovative use of online tools, and no Rathergate to focus attention on the blogosphere in its role as the Fifth Estate. The one candidate who was unmasked for digital trickery, Ed Matts[4], did not use the Net for his deceit, and the group that made most effective use of the net to organise its campaign, the pro-hunting lobby, took great pains to keep its activities out of the mainstream media[5].
The reassertion of conventional news priorities and the effective dismissal of the technology angle from coverage was not absolute, and there were certainly occasional articles, features and packages which dealt with the online aspects of the campaign, but they were far from prominent or central to the news agenda. The BBC’s Daily Politics programme featured reports on online campaigning[6] but these did not make it onto Newsnight.
Part of the problem may have been that there was no ‘e-election’ in the sense that online activities could be isolated from the rest of the campaign[7]. While the way that online elements were simply part of the whole story may be seen as a breakthrough when the history of this election is written, it makes for poor copy at the time. So although the affordances of the Net – the things that using online tools make possible – were important in many ways, they did not fundamentally alter the dynamic of the campaigns or merit special attention from journalists. As a result, even though online resources were accessed by many people they were hardly noticed, since perceptions are shaped by the way that message is reported, especially by television.
Email was probably the most widely used tool[8], but by and large it was being used to talk to the already sympathetic, if not the converted and active. Labour, with some well-judged humour from one-time candidate and writer John O’Farrell, even managed some fundraising through email, although the £50,000 that they boast of raising[9] is minuscule compared to US levels. O’Farrell’s emails were among the most risky and innovative uses of technology in the whole campaign, and included a joke at John Prescott’s expense that could easily have backfired[10], but they were mentioned only rarely in the press. There was a diary entry in the Glasgow Herald[11] and an aside in The Times election coverage on April 6[12], but most coverage came from The Guardian, where O’Farrell is of course a columnist.
It was the same with party websites. They were certainly not very exciting or distinctive, but since few people are going to be converted by a web page this may reflect a central view that sites are there to provide policy details, candidate profiles and information to activists. As a result there was little newsworthy or interesting and they garnered little coverage apart from site reviews, including one in the Washington Post[13], and the occasional piece bemoaning the lack of innovation.
We did not see a blog breakthrough, but that does not mean there was not a rich and complex debate taking between those who write, read and link to those blogs that took an interest in the election[14]. It may well be that the quality of debate was significantly improved by the lack of any larger-scale media attention, but an unfortunate consequence of this is that the bloggers continue to talk to themselves and awareness among the wider electorate remains limited. In terms of media coverage, one significant development was that most media outlets had at least one weblog offering news and commentary, and these blogs were themselves linked, through comments and trackback and cross-referencing blogrolls, into the blogosphere on which they were (to a large extent) reporting.
This created something of a positive feedback loop, where the fact that The Guardian had a blog meant that more bloggers wrote about the election on their blogs, giving The Guardian more material to report on and hence a wider readership. However there was little crossover/spillage between the blogosphere coverage and the mainstream media output – the BBC had an election blog but it did not feature in news bulletins, and neither Newsnight nor Today offered their own reporters’ blogs.
Candidate blogs received very little attention, partly because those by the party leaders were immediately dismissed as exercises in e-spin and were clearly carefully vetted, and partly because none of the blogging candidates did the decent thing and embarrassed themselves. The only one that attracted interest was the Prime Minister’s weblog – or rather ‘Campaign Diary’[15], but even here the tone was cynical and mocking.
It is also interesting to note that the things that ‘went viral’ this time around were not games, in contrast to the situation in 2001 when various games featuring John Prescott became very popular[16], but serious election sites with a twist. Sites like notapathetic.com[17], where the disillusioned can say why they are not voting, The Public Whip where details of voting records for former MPs could be searched, and ‘Who Should You Vote For?[18]’ took off, while the Tories’ rather poor ‘Bash Blair’ game made no impact. However while tens of thousands of people visited the various political websites, notapathetic.com only received eight mentions in print media in the run-up to the campaign, The Public Whip got twenty-seven and TheyWorkForYou was mentioned only forty-two times.[19]
Within the discourse of e-democracy the press coverage of particular initiatives and plans matters. Whether positive or negative in tone, the fact of the coverage creates awareness of tools and their uses, and this can shape the understanding of the campaign held both by the electorate and by the parties and campaigns. This in turn feeds into the news cycle and influences the coverage of future activities, but if there is no sustained reporting of what is being done online then awareness remains low and the incentive to report in future is reduced.
The key questions facing those who occupy the ground defined by politics and technology are whether technology makes a difference, and whether that difference is positive or negative. There is no simple metric that can be applied, and each tool must be evaluated in its context. That context is in part created by the way the tool has been reported, so the lack of any real coverage of e-democracy tools and the network-based campaign creates a serious problem both for researchers and the politicians themselves, since it means there is a limited evidence base for evaluation.
By the time of the 2009/10 election technology will have penetrated even more deeply into the fabric of our daily lives and will have become far less visible. The 2005 General Election may therefore prove a missed opportunity for the advocates of e-democracy, the one point at which information and communications technologies were both visible and also in widespread use. Next time around the media will simply not think of commenting on the technology, just as this time around none of the coverage of postal voting fraud bothered to explain what ‘stamps’ are or how the postal system involves placing objects in a ‘post box’ for ‘collection, sorting and delivery’.
It will be up to the historians,
psephologists and political scientists to disentangle the strands of influence
and decide whether poster campaigns, emails or text messages are a more
effective way of reaching the electorate. When the spin doctors, candidates and
party press officers try to decide where and how to use the many channels that
exist for communication between campaign and voter, they will have little
detailed evidence from the coverage of the 2005 election.
[2] http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/cm/jan2005_update/update.pdf - p44 for chart
[3] WIFI coverage – at least 7,800, see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/06/bt_broadreach_wi-fi_deal/
[4] Ed Matts: doctored photo covered in
The Times: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,19809-1566031,00.html
The Guardian: http://politics.guardian.co.uk/election/story/0,15803,1457906,00.html
[5] Vote-Ok, at http://www.vote-ok.co.uk/, and see also Horse and Hound, http://www.horseandhound.co.uk/competitionnews/article.php?aid=62041
[6] Also featured on their website at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/the_daily_politics/
[7] Despite the rather enthusiastic claims of one commentator: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4431893.stm
[8] As noted by Alan Connor on the BBC e-Election roundup at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4532439.stm
[9] See O’Farrell money: £50,000 raised. Letter at
http://reply-new.labour.org.uk/go.asp?/bLAB001/mSTMGG1 and thankyou at
http://reply-new.labour.org.uk/go.asp?/bLAB001/mOZ79H1
[10] http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1477634,00.html
[11] The Glasgow Herald, April 30, Page 7 – Two Minute Briefing
[12] The Times, May 6, Page 5: The internet is a turn-off after the polls close
[13] British Politics Dives Into the Web By Robert MacMillan, May 4
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/04/AR2005050400738.html
[14] eg Alan Connor on the BBC site - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/frontpage/4460633.stm, Mark Lawson in The Guardian on April 23, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardianpolitics/story/0,,1468407,00.html
[15] Still online at the time of writing, http://www.labour.org.uk/tonyblair
[16] See the comment on The Register from 2001, at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/21/bruiser_prescott_v_the_egg/
[19] Based on searches for relevant keywords in the Lexis-Nexis database of UK newspaper stories