Web-based politics and democracy for the 21st century

Net Results: If you followed any of the news coverage of the recent American elections, you will be well aware that much of the coverage featured the persuasive role that video clips played in the election campaign, writes Karlin Lillington

Initially, many of the clips appearing on sites such as YouTube.com were snippets of interviews on television programmes - sometimes, long ago programmes where a politician could be seen taking a stance opposite to whatever he or she was saying now.

But people also put up clips of campaign advertisements, especially the really nasty, mud-slinging ones. It wasn't always clear if someone posted them because they supported a candidate or were so appalled they wanted others to see the shameful clip. Either way, the ads got a far higher level of circulation than they ever would have previously. Local slagfests became national entertainment for the masses.

An interesting twist on this was that ads which were never - or only briefly - airedwere resurrected and given national visibility. There was much punditry over what this meant and who was posting the ads.

Was the goal to embarrass a candidate with an ad considered distasteful - or to rally votes for the exact same reason? Were the ads posted by studio insiders simply as a bit of fun; by the ad-makers annoyed at having their work pulled, or were they leaked by the pro- or anti- campaigns? Hard to say, but Americans saw a lot of ads they weren't supposed to see.

Other material quickly started to appear - political gaffes from footage made privately being a favoured form of attack on a candidate, or by way of contrast, footage showing a candidate in a favourable light.

While in California just before the election, I watched a programme about a campaign worker for a candidate in another state, whose entire raison d'être had become following the rival candidate around day after day on his election campaign, quietly shooting footage on a handheld video camera.

He filmed a number of embarrassing episodes, off-air comments or asides which he then posted to YouTube.com. The rival campaign people and the rival candidate knew who he was but seemed fairly tolerant - or perhaps a better word would be "resigned". I suppose they could have tried to bar the videomaker from all their events but, in the US, that alone would likely have more negative impact than the undesirable YouTube.com clips.

All this demonstrates how intervention in a campaign by a single individual or group of people, by the people for the people, has become a whole lot easier because of the ubiquity of broadband connections and the widespread ownership of digital video cameras, cameraphones, computers and DVD recorders linked to TVs. It is also helped by the rise of easy-to-use places to put commentary, images and video - social networking sites like weblogs, video sites like YouTube.com, photo storage sites like Photobucket.com and Flickr.com.

This has major implications for elections and participative democracy.

In the past in Ireland, air and print- time for politicians and parties was highly controlled around elections and the domain of the established media. However, that is all going to change. New technologies and services enable all sorts of small guerilla actions by individuals who can, anonymously if they wish, post unflattering or flattering material on a candidate onto a blog, a picture site or a video site. Likewise, expect candidates and parties themselves to use such tactics, probably anonymously of course, but not always.

A small handful of Irish politicians are already using weblogs to promote their ideas and image - always a tricky task. Some American politicians have found how easy it is for web-users to see through insincere content and have been excoriated for their blogging attempts.

In Ireland, there are also a growing number of politically tinged weblogs gearing up for the coming general election. They hope to get Irish people a lot more interested in talking online about politics than has been the case in the past and to make the elections a far less controlled experience, media-wise. Have a look at www.irishelection.com and www.technolotics.com for an idea of what people have been up to.

Video is likely to be one area which could really have an impact on elections, given our carefully doled- out party broadcasts of the past. No one controls the internet when it comes to political broadcast time.

In an attempt to push out the boat on political video, well-known Irish bloggers and activists Simon McGarr and Antoin Ó Lachtnain have just launched a new site focused on video and elections, called VoteTube.com.

The site is the centre for a competition for best political videos on any message created by Irish people as we approach the elections.

"VoteTube is about voting and it is about video," Simon says. "When people say they want to make politics more interesting to people, particularly young people, what they usually mean is that political parties should continue as they are and people should pay them more attention.

"What we're trying to do with the VoteTube is to give people the inspiration to think and talk about what's important to them on camera."

He has suggestions on how to create a video for inclusion on the site and is asking anybody and everybody, including secondary students, to get filming and get creative.

He suggests a target audience of the 18-35s (one point of the site is to get younger floating voters more involved in politics) but I have a feeling people of any age will be attracted to hearing a different message than the official lines spoon-fed to us at election time.

Politicians and political parties, welcome to 21st-century web-based democracy. This is your official wake-up call.