Has the Internet Finally Become the Fighting Ground of the Election?
For the first time ever, social media has had a chance to have an effect on how all of us vote here in the UK. In the last election in 2005, we were all still getting over the ‘dot com bubble burst’ which meant many of us were still very skeptical about all this new technology that was going to change our lives.
But in the last five years, things have changed drastically. The media landscape has been irreversibly altered and information can now be transmitted without being filtered by editors with their own political bias and instead appears raw and unedited. For example, if a politician makes a gaff and this is recorded by anyone in the vicinity, it will be transmitted and available for all to hear and see within minutes.
Sites such as Facebook and Twitter have effectively become the new campaigning grounds and if used correctly can work in an MPs favour. But there’s the crunch – do they know how to use them well?
Many politicians have actually been using YouTube, Facebook and Twitter with very mixed results and there’s still the opinion that it doesn’t matter how they’re used, simply because they’re being used by MPs means it’s ‘uncool’ and is open immediately to ridicule. It’s a bit like watching your dad dance at a wedding – regardless of how good he is, he’ll be embarrassing.
So do they in fact risk the danger of alienating their followers and failing to gain new votes? Well you could argue that there’s no such thing as bad publicity and this certainly seems to hold some water when you see the results of surveys in controversial regions. It seems that when a politician does something that irks the media; there are as many people moving in favour of him or her as are moving away. Indeed, too much bad publicity can actually work in their favour and there are many cases where some arms of the media have singled out a particular person for vindictive ridicule only to garner sympathy instead.
But there’s more to this than meets the eye because no longer is the media in control of the news. Yes, they publish it based on their own particular editorial skew, but the masses now have more control of what they read and how they consume it. Not only that, the masses can now control and create the news and foist this upon the world with just as much authority as the traditional press.
Even when it’s published, however, that’s not the end of it because there’s one part of this particular puzzle that many have yet to conquer and that’s the effect of Google on campaigning. It’s OK having your information out there but how are people finding it? Of course, they’re using search engines and if any political parties decide to handle the Internet properly in the future then they should really be looking to tackle the sticky issue of search engine optimisation too.
The Internet will now have more and more effect on how we vote because we’ll have access to more and more information but the subtext to this is that even though we believe we are in control, the fact that search engine results can be manipulated actually means we are not in control at all.
Yet again, we believe that technology will be the great leveller, but I fear that instead we will be putting our trust in a technology that can be used to influence us in ways we would never have dreamed about a decade ago.
Andy Calloway is the online marketing director at Calloway Green Ltd, a website design and optimisation company based in Wolverhampton in the UK. Calloway Green take fantastic website design and turn it into a marketable and usable product that will actually make you money. They specialise in Web Design for West Midlands based organisations that are looking to sell their products to a wide audience.
The company also has a wide range of SEO training courses available and are able to help companies that are looking to train their key staff in order to promote themselves online. We can also help you with your new career.
Author: Andy Calloway
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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