After the Election, What to Do with Political Social Networks?
Eagle-eared listeners of 2SER FM may have noticed me popping up on the radio the other day - Leeanne Torpey interviewed me for a segment on The Fourth Estate about the use of social networking in politics (following on from the successful use of social networking in galvanising support for Barack Obama and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Kevin Rudd). It’s come out quite well, and you can now access a podcast of the whole 30-minute show at the 2SER Website.
The key point I ended up on, and one very much worth exploring further, is what to do with a network like Obama’s now that the election is over. (Labor’s campaign managers have just answered [?] this by rebranding Kevin07 as KevinPM - we’ll see how that works out.) For the Obama machine, this will be interesting to follow - after all, what exactly is his my.barackobama.com network? Is it part of the Democrat campaigning system, part of Democrat party structures, or even an element of the incoming administration? Is it a quasi-party in its own right, a political movement, a non-profit lobby group, or even a commercial enterprise (it is a dot.com, after all)?
I think I agree with Noam Scheiber at The New Republic (and the authors he cites in this piece) that it would be a mistake to let the Democratic Party get its hands on the network itself, thus inevitably watering down its impact and alienating at least those of Obama’s supporters who are not automatically also staunch Democrat voters. At the same time, keeping the network as Obama’s personal support base would also further cement a style of politics that is almost entirely focussed on the candidate/office-holder and his politics, rather than on the political movement he belongs to - in essence eventually turning the Obama brand into a party in its own right, virtually independent of the Democrat machine. To do so may be beneficial in the short term (assuming Obama is all he’s cracked up to be, he may be able to accomplish more without needing to rely on Democrat party machinations), but also dangerous in the longer term (a future candidate following the Obama playbook may build a strong, personalised support network using fear and demagoguery rather than hope and the promise of change).
Obama’s personalised support network represents a great deal of power, unchecked by party organisation or oversight. Perhaps he’ll need this extra power to undo eight years of Bush/Cheney-style fundamentalism; perhaps he deserves this grassroots backup to deliver the change he’s promised. But what if the next leader to galvanise such fanatical levels of grassroots support doesn’t?
Barack Obama, Kevin Rudd, USA, activism, elections, social networking
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