Social media, interactivity and their effect on the power of received opinion (or political Lego for grown-ups)

I feel like this is going to be like one of those "high impact" PowerPoint courses where you're told to tell people what they're going to get, how long it's going to take them to get it and the order which they're going to get it in.  Not my way at all.

But I suppose, for a change, I really know what I'd like to write about this time before I start writing.  The polls are all over the place, that is clear.  The opinions of journalists - evermore left outside their immersively published comfort zones - battle furiously to make themselves heard in their roles as undemocratically elected opinion formers, even as a far more educated populace begins to get used to the idea that we can all form part of the same mix.  And in this sense, the DIY subtext of current Tory Party marketing is perhaps rather more capable of resonating than my partisanship might lead me to hope.  After all, B&Q, Ikea and other grown-up substitutes for Lego are extremely popular these days.

What's very clear is that received opinion is taking a battering - like no other time in our recent political experience.

There is, of course, one more significant trend to add to the mix - social media and its essential interactivity.  If our education system hadn't already taught us to question received opinion and recast it in our own words, then social media is most certainly playing catch-up as it makes absolutely certain that no adult or child will be left behind.  With the added virtue that it's teaching us not only to recast but also broadcast all we say or think.  We are beginning to take a massive ownership of all we ever believe, feel or suppose to be true.  In such a world, where does this leave the secretive, the private, the duplicitous and the underhand?

Where, in fact, does this leave the bread-and-butter of politics?

The biggest change that is taking place is this: through the religious fervour of almost zero-cost communication infrastructures, we are - perhaps irreversibly - becoming as honest, forthright and publicly direct as we have ever been in the entire history of humanity.  Where true religion has failed, so science and technology has succeeded.  This is not going to end up like "1984".  The Big State will not become Big Brother.  Given the choice, millions of people are actively choosing to share their lives with hundreds of others in more or less permanent ways.  Fear of discovery is falling away as being visible suddenly doesn't seem such a bad thing.

The historical discretion of the British is being cast to the electronic winds of email, blogging and now even promiscuous video.

The Big Society concept which Cameron has apparently felicitously and constructively alighted upon in what I actually suspect is a rather superficial, two-faced and soundbitten way could be understood more usefully in other hands to describe a slightly different tendency.  The long-term implications of the sleight-of-hand he is trying to con his electorate with involves piling vast swathes of responsibility on the public for the functioning of services the elected representatives of the people have until now had to burden themselves with.  This is being done with a twofold aim: firstly, in an initial phase to allow service costs to be pared to the bone as ordinary people struggle to take up the slack, often on a voluntary and ad hoc basis - with terrifying implications for the effectiveness of frontline services and their delivery; secondly, to take the focus of attention off our governors to make winning decades of elections much easier.  We only have to see how New Labour managed to avoid all kinds of flack for economic policy as it made the Bank of England more independent in its decision-making processes.  This, I am sure, is a lesson many of the more manipulative types will have learned off by heart - and will be most eager to put into practice.

Thus we have the idea of DIY government and political Lego for grown-ups.

It does of course carry within it the seeds of its own destruction.  Governors with less and less to do will scratch around trying to justify their own existences and will have plenty of time to try and feather their own nests.  But by the time they fall, a generation will have suffered - and both politics in general as well as politicians in particular will lose even more of the former hold they exerted over their voters.

But all is not lost.  This may not be a malignant cancer.  Politics, politicians and - in particular - these reductionist New Tories may end up being a rather ugly but harmless wart on the face of a wider human endeavour - a wart which may drop off by itself or, alternatively, at the very worst, find solution through a little bit of harmless social and cultural cauterisation.  What I'm really saying is that the creeping irrelevance Cameron and his cohort would appear to be wanting to assign to British government may come rather sooner than they expect.  Once the genie is let out of the bottle, they may end doing themselves out of a job.

Of course, they would then soon find golden parachutes in a whole host of PLCs - most eager to finish the job off.

But by then, the whole damn country would be one gigantic PLC.

I am, however, not so very pessimistic about the future as the above train of thought might suggest.  And this is why.  Social media, new forms of communication - with or without Net Neutrality - and a generally increasing ability of all kinds of people to use new technologies as an extension of their own selves will lead to a greater place - a bigger piece of the monthly message cake - for ordinary people's thoughts, both given freely and shared intuitively ... all at the very real expense of what to date we have seen to be the obsessively interested opinions of professional communicators and media types.

Hyper-localism is sprouting from the ground up and there is nothing any politician will be able to do but accept the implications and move on.  Which is not to say that I agree with Cameron's version of the Big Society.  Big Society for him means a cack-handed state with no freedom to compensate the vagaries of the free market.  It doesn't mean an intelligent harnessing of historical movements which will dramatically shift tectonic plates of behaviours.

Oh.  And did I really say "vagaries of the free market"?

What rubbish I peddle.

What I actually meant to say was the "distortions and concentrations of that awful oxymoron we generally call monopolistic competition".  (Bit like that other bastard of recent crises, the "toxic asset".  How it is that clever people just love to play stupid games with words.)