We have arrived at the end of hierarchical communications and are at a new credibility crunch.

Here follows a note I wrote on Two Way Politics and its role in Ireland on Lisbon and related EU matters – J.Ryan, July 2008.

In the last two to three years, a profound change has occurred on the Internet. There are two aspects to this change. The first might be described as part of the evolution of Web 2.0, and which is in fact a “user driven revolution”. In February 2007, PiperJaffray, a consultancy specialising in communications, issued an important report that noted that a shift had occurred in online communications. Internet users among the general public were no longer behaving as passive consumers of content, but were increasingly contributing to and creating their own. In 2006, the number of internet subscribers in the United States grew by 2 per cent. However, the number of people in the United States using websites dependent on user generated content (such as Bebo, MySpace, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, etc., to which Internet users contribute opinions, news, videos, ratings and comments on other users’ content, images, etc.) grew by 100 per cent. All growth arises from users viewing content generated horizontally (by their peers or creating content themselves), rather than vertically (by specialists in advertising agencies or delivered top-down, from an authority or government).

As Rupert Murdoch told the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference in April 2005:

I’m a digital immigrant. I wasn’t weaned on the web. … Instead, I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know. My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives.

Internet users have become the masters of online content, rather than simply passive receivers of information. A brief survey of the top 50 websites in the globe reveals the dominance of user generated content: Of the top 50 sites, 20 were search engines or portals that were discounted from the sample; of the remaining 30, 23 sites were entirely dependent on user contributed content. On the Internet, the User is King. This is nothing less than a communications revolution, and, as suggested by Audrey Kurth Cronin, might be no less significant for mass political engagement than was the deregulation of the printing presses in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which allowed for the “levée en masse” of the first citizen armies.

The second aspect is what Joe Nye referred to some years ago as the “paradox of plenty”. Internet users, with an unprecedented amount of information available to them, find it increasingly difficult to choose what information to view. As a result, they rely on word of mouth and new technologies such as “social bookmarking” (such as Digg.com) that rate web content according to how many other readers and viewers have found it useful.

These two aspects have turned the norms of communication, marketing, business, and innovation upon their heads. The result is that individual internet users are now the designers, editors, and contributors of content on the internet, and that they trust their peers’ opinions about what content merits attention. For the information provider, this increases the need to compete for credibility. Traditional means of communicating from authority down to the audience are increasingly ineffective, and may become counter productive.

Here follows a bleak note for the pro-Lisbon actors. The boom in focus group politics of the 1990s, and the later development of political engagement at grass roots level over the Internet have both contrived to present the political establishment with a challenge. During the Lisbon Treaty campaign, an important message that resonated among No voters of a younger age bracket is that the European project is at a remove from the European street. Complaints centred about the d’Estaing phenomenon – aged grandees structuring the futures of the European public with no democratic input. The spirit of the times, enabled by technology, is toward open political engagement, and user input. To go against this grain, particularly when trying to convince a sceptical public on a complex international treaty, courts conspiracy theorising. In the emerging environment of heightened competition for credibility, newly empowered voters/users, and deep cynicism of perceived grandees, an orthodox political campaign faces significant challenges.

Before you reflect on this, watch this youtube clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQi7PaYKqTU) in which US Presidential candidate, Congressman Ron Paul, does an interview with a young blogger in his dorm room at college. The point being, this statesman in his 70s believed it was worth his while to visit a young blogger in an informal situation in order to secure his internet audience. On the Internet, the user – not the statesman – is King.

This is the first time in three decades – the surge of popular leftism – that there has been a comparable upwelling in mass political engagement. The implications of this change are potentially enormous. The new trend of user driven communications means that political campaigns now have an infrastructure with which to engage a geographically dispersed grass roots movement. The Dean campaign in the US in 2004, and the present Obama campaign are excellent examples. In 2004, as the Internet was asserting itself as a medium relevant to the political mainstream, Howard Dean’s campaign for nomination took the lead as an early adapter to Two Way Politics. Dean’s campaign manager, Joe Trippi, had spent a short time with a Linux company and had come to understand the principles of ‘open source’. Rather than adopt the rigorously centralised control that campaigns customarily maintain to enforce a consistent political message, Trippi decided to stop policing those writing on Dean’s blogs. Dean’s campaign realised, to his extraordinary benefit, that the trend of the times would favour who ever opted for mass-participation in political dialogue, even going to the lengths of allowing opponents to post critical comments to one’s own website. The resulting dynamo of online political discussion added an entirely unexpected momentum to Dean’s campaign, and threatened to make a previously penniless contender the major spender in the campaign.

In April 2008, it was announced that 40% of the funds donated to the Obama campaign for the Democratic nomination were contributed in sums of $200 or less. Business Week observed that ‘Obama has successfully tapped into a large community that’s prepared to give a little’. This represents the paradigm shift in dollar terms. Electoral power, enabled by the new horizontal communications infrastructure, is shifting, Dollar by Dollar, from large donors such as businesses and transferred to individual voters. To prosper in this context, campaigns must resonate with the national (rather than sectional) grass roots. Obama, using the tools and tone of ‘Web 2.0’, has performed this trick well. His ‘A more perfect union’ speech, responding to the initial controversy aggravated by his pastor, netted over 4 million viewers on YouTube. Most importantly, viewers did not simply watch the candidates speech, but 23,074 people went to the trouble of using YouTube’s rating facility to make a public rating of the speech, and 8391 viewers went the extra step of writing a response to the speech. This is the essence of what might be termed ‘Two Way Politics’ – the user can talk back. Moreover, the user expects to be asked to do so.

The benefits are obvious: rather than the formal structure of focus group studies, two-way politics gives instant feedback. The better that campaigns can tolerate and benefit from criticism, the better the campaign’s message will resonate. This is probably best demonstrated by the concept of ‘wikinomics’: those who ‘crowd source’ opinion and input will prosper when the resulting product hits the market. The same applies to politics.

The objective for any sensible communicator operating in the new information era is to communicate as a peer as horizontal level. This means adopting the same open, consultative approach, and using the informal grammar of web based communications.