Grant Shapps MP
Last night I was the only politician on a panel at a Henry Jackson Society debate The Internet: Saviour or Corruptor of Democracy?
Battle lines were drawn early on when the new media blogger Guido Fawkes (aka Paul Staines) savaged old school journalists – Nick Robinson (BBC) and Michael White (Guardian) accusing them of being part of a cosy Westminster consensus which he said was ill-prepared to shine light on the inner workings of MPs and their expenses.
Needless to say both Nick Robinson and Michael White struck back and the debate was perilously close to being hijacked by an interesting, though off-topic, debate about old media versus new – rather than whether the Internet is good or bad for democracy.
For what it’s worth, my contention is that the Internet is not just good for democracy, but could well be its saviour. New technology has the potential to open up the system in a way that has never been seen before. After all, at no other time in history has it been possible to gauge the reaction of constituents so swiftly, to be more transparent about what you’re doing or to quickly build a grass-root campaign about any subject under the sun.
And yet the Internet has appeared troubling to many politicians.
It’s blamed for a massive increase in correspondence from constituents who no longer experience the barrier of having to place a stamp on an envelope before walking the letter to a post box, in order to share their strongly held beliefs with their MP.
Surprisingly Peter Kellner (YouGov), himself an Internet pollster, wasn’t convinced either. Despite his firm being behind some of the fastest and most accurate public opinion research carried out in Britain today, Kellner positioned himself as the only member of the panel who shared the view of a decreasing number of politicians who would have apparently preferred that this InterWeb thingy had never been invented.
I tried to flesh out how I use Twitter.com/GrantShapps to let my constituents and others know what I’m up to and the way in which our Welwyn Hatfield Forum receives up to a quarter-of-a-million page impressions a month; as my constituents discuss local issues without having to wait for the letters page of the local newspaper to catch up.
But perhaps the most optimistic note about the Internet and politics was struck by Nick Robinson who believes that with the Internet in existence another Berlin Wall could never stay in place for quite so long. I’m not sure that the ability for every global citizen to be able to access and publish information in real-time will be enough to end all tyranny – but at a more mundane level I do know that it will always help me to stay better connected with my constituents and, as such, I reckon that overall it’s becoming pretty good for democracy.
Internet debate round-up
01-07-2009 – Ben | Debate, Delib news and events, Democracy and government, Participation, Social media, web 2.0 and other buzzwords
So you may have noticed that we were running this debate last night, ‘the internet: the saviour or corruptor of democracy?’, (with the help of the Henry Jackson Society, sponsored by MessageSpace and very graciously hosted in Parliament by Danny Alexander MP).
Our pretty prestigious panel comprised Paul Staines (Guido Fawkes blog), Peter Kellner (YouGov), Michael White (Associate Editor, the Guardian), Grant Shapps MP (Shadow Minister for Housing) and Nick Robinson (BBC Political Editor). There were something like 120 people attending in person and we also opened up the debate via Twitter (you can read through the interactions and my frantic attempts to keep up coverage via #idebate).
My quick reflections on the debate are below; before that, though, you might want to check out our freshly uploaded photos of the event, a clip of the Michael White ‘tw@tter’ incident or Guido vs Nick Robinson…
The good
- That was a great line-up of panelists and guests for the first of what we hope will be at least several such debates. Kudos to those involved in organising it and let’s hope it sets a precedent for highly engaging, high profile discussions on interesting topics.
- It was fun (and hopefully beneficial) to try out the Twitter follow-along. Personally, I enjoyed seeing people play with the fact that they could get a message broadcast live on the big screen and it was great to have participation from both within the room and across the world.
- There were some big characters up on the stage and the coming-together of personalities and agendas was certainly entertaining (if not necessarily conducive to the most objective debate).
- There were some great questions from the floor (on- and off-line) that hinted at a real interest at a sophisticated level in some big ideas about the relationship of the internet, ‘the people’, politics and democracy.
- Loads of people went away with one of our ‘good online policy-making guides’; I genuinely think that the matching of internet tools and approaches to essential governance processes means the booklet will be of benefit to anyone involved in policy-making (and not just a handy bit of marketing for us).
The not-so-good
- Only one slight gripe from me really: the vociferous interaction of our media panelists meant that the debate focused a bit too much on publishing, press and ‘push’ models for my liking – more a discussion of the impact of the democratisation of the media than necessarily democracy itself at times. On a couple of occasions, the contributions felt like ‘my dad’s bigger than your dad’ rather than an attempt to identify and address problems or opportunities. I guess that’s to be expected but, as a handful of Twitterers noted, it would’ve been nice to push harder at some of the more radical or fundamental issues around things like public participation in formal decision-making, privacy, open data, ongoing citizen engagement, leadership etc.
- Actually, one other thing: we didn’t really get time to dig into the questions received via Twitter, which was a shame.
The miscellaneous
- Couple of nagging curiosities from the event: 1) if we assume the internet challenges both, where in the balance of the system (referenda or representation? ‘Clubs’ of media, politicians, campaigners etc or absolute open access? Stuff like that…) and the medium (internet is the new telephone, a channel to do much the same job as before, only better) do we want to see change happen? 2) Moderation and making use of things like Twitter for feedback – is trust or zero-tolerance best? Is it freedom of expression, futile or just fun to call Michael White a ‘twat’ because one can? Do mass participation tools hit a human limit of saturation or information overload?
- Our audience looked, on paper and in the flesh, like a bunch of interesting people – sad not to get more of a chance to talk to them afterwards
- Parliament looks good in the sunshine!
That’s all for me for now – I’m sure other people can chip in (other write-ups are on the way already, including one on Guido’s own blog).
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