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In it to Win It

As people nationwide visit the polling booths today, Mike Nutley of NMA considers the effect of mass participation with interactive media, and the transformation of politics because of it.

A fly-poster campaign broke recently for a new series on MTV following the fortunes of a number of unsigned bands chasing a record deal. The show is being promoted very much as the anti-Pop Idol; indeed one of the executions uses the line "This isn't pop, and we're not idols". But it was another execution that really started me thinking. This read "The public won't decide who wins". At first I thought that what bothered me about it was that it runs contrary to the spirit of rock, which since the 60s has sought to promote its rebelliousness and its lack of respect for the establishment, even as the business side of the music business has become ever more slick.

But as I thought more about it, I realised that what was actually bothering me was a much more modern concern; that in these days of mass participation and mass interaction, the campaign feels hopelessly dated. People, particularly young people, have adopted interactive media with enthusiasm - 70m iTunes downloads in a year tell us that, as do the surveys into young people's attitudes to SMS marketing campaigns. It's often trotted out that more young people vote in Big Brother than do in elections, and that this is clearly a bad thing. Indeed it is, but what it also tells us is that young people will take part in a process when they feel involved in it and that they can influence the outcome.

This same idea cropped up last week at a meeting of the Comic Relief New Media Advisory Group. A couple of members of the group stressed that all the evidence, anecdotal and from research, indicates that young people are more interested in political issues than they have been for many years. The reasons they tend not to act on that interest are that they don't know if anyone else feels the same way, and they don't know what action to take. And, as became apparent during the subsequent discussion, political systems are not set up to allow them to engage in the way that Pop Idol or Big Brother are.

What's also interesting is that the first two of these problems are ones that interactive media are very good at addressing. Chat rooms and message boards allow you to communicate with other like-minded people, while Web sites and mobile phones can offer and co-ordinate courses of action. Last summer's craze for Flash Mobs (mobile phone-based gatherings of people to perpetrate "art pranks") demonstrated just how effective these tools could be, and Howard Dean's US presidential campaign brought them into the political arena.

So what, in fact, we're seeing is the beginning of the same transformation in politics as is happening in most other areas of human interaction. Businesses and organisations are being forced to rethink and reorganize themselves as control of their communications increasingly passes to their customers, audiences and stakeholders. Politicians are going to have to accept this changing relationship just as marketers, doctors and lawyers are, or their constituency is simply going to leave them behind.

Mike Nutley is the editor of New Media Age.