Not a compulsive blogger

Anyone who attended the social media dinner last week can vouch for at least one admission I made – that I’m far from being a compulsive blogger. While Tom Harris spoke of finding it almost impossible to go through a day with a bloppost or three, my own updates are few and far between.

In fact I’m so unreliable that despite having been determined to write something about the dinner straight away, I now find myself getting round to it a week later.

Which is not to imply that it wasn’t a highly enjoyable evening. As well as the slightly odd experience of being on the same side of a winning argument as Tom (in this case on the casting options for Doctor Who) we had an excellent curry and some good chat from right around the table about the interaction of politics and social media.

Aside from my general gadget-friendliness and my enthusiasm for open debate, I think I have two concerns.

Firstly that politicians, political parties and institutions think they need to “use” social media. I think it would be a shame if these exciting forms of communication were co-opted simply to serve the old familiar objectives of narrow self-interest. Rather I want to see a rich environment in which MPs, MSPs and others involved in politics can engage in the discussion without thinking we have to try and dominate it.

Secondly, that the speed of electronic media could further coarsen and cheapen public debate. The 24-hour rolling news media has been with us for a while now, but its development has been accompanied by a steady loss of the sort of deliberative analysis and thoughtful or investigative journalism which are so valuable in a democracy. Plenty of the people I know who work in the media, especially in print media, desperately want to be involved in high quality “capital-J” journalism, but don’t feel able to. If the rise of the new social media were to continue that trend, there might come a day when we forget what we were missing in the first place.

In theory the fact-checking power of the net should give rise to a greater degree of scrutiny and deliberation. Feedback too can be an important democratic control, as we’ve seen with the responses to issues like #janmoir and #trafigura on Twitter. But when online debate becomes news in its own right it’s all too often about a hastily written insult or ill-considered and inflammatory comments.

It’s still early days in the development of the technology, but a rapidly growing proportion of the public already have access to instant social media almost wherever they go, and it’s possible to see news stories evolve over the course of hours and even minutes based on widespread public participation. This is in many way a Good Thing. Yet we still don’t know what the consequences will be. I’ll hazard one guess though – if we all end up behaving in the mode of our worst perception of politicians, we’ll live to regret it. This revolution in communication can enrich our society, but only if we’re willing to a bit more grown up than we think our opponents are.

One more point on the dinner – it made me aware again that I need to get round to having a proper comments policy on this site. I want to welcome debate here, and of course that means comments from people I don’t agree with. But I’ve no intention of letting it become just another place to post vacuous non-argument, meaningless conspiracy drivel or personal insults against people not here to defend themselves. So I’ll try to turn that into something clear, and add it to the site as soon as I can.

Thanks again go to Craig at Contently Managed, and everyone else who made the dinner fun. And no Jacq, you still can’t have Helen Mirren playing the Doctor, though I’d love to see her as the successor to Chancellor Flavia.

2 Comments

I agree – what I enjoy about political blogging, particularly the blogs of MPs/MSPs from whom we’re used to more constrained and formal communication, is the openness and, dare I say it, humanity. But I think this takes courage, since every blog/Tweet/facebook update can potentially be seized on if the media is in need of some scandal. I hope more politicians do find the courage to blog honestly though – it might cause some short-term media stooshies, but I suspect it might also gain them some votes to show that they’re only human.

Patrick Harvie

Patrick Harvie MSP

Not a compulsive blogger

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