MEDIA CAMPAIGN:Memorable moments took place on television and leafleting remained a campaign mainstay, writes MARY FITZGERALD
FOR MONTHS, people had hailed the advent of Britain’s first internet election. One in which online politics would come of age in the British context, and blogs and social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook would drive the campaign. Amid all the hype, Labour created the role of “Twitter tsar” and the BBC appointed a digital election correspondent in the expectation that online tools would prove pivotal. Except that is not quite how it turned out.
“Far from being an important player, the internet has become all but an irrelevance [in the election]. So why has the web been the dog that hasn’t barked?” asked Conservative blogger Iain Dale last week, one of several commentators to declare the notion of an internet election dead.
Unlike the 2008 US presidential election, during which Barack Obama harnessed social networking tools as part of his campaign strategy and websites like the Huffington Post broke stories that set the news agenda, the British general election has been for the most part a pretty old-fashioned affair. Leafleting was a mainstay of every party’s campaign.
All the memorable, and galvanising, moments – from the leaders’ debates that transformed Nick Clegg’s Lib Dems into what appeared to be a major new force in British politics, to Gordon Brown’s “bigoted woman” gaffe – took place on TV.
As Jon Snow of Channel 4 News put it: “Intriguingly, the web has not been the master of this election . . . the campaign has shown that television, whose power I mistakenly expected to have waned, is as great as ever.”
The main parties did experiment with using digital methods to reach voters, but it was nowhere near the scale of the Obama campaign. Nevertheless, it was something new.
Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems created e-mail databases to keep voters informed with personalised messages. On polling day, for example, London’s Tory mayor Boris Johnson sent out an e-mail which asked the recipient: “Who is there left to administer this final judicious kick to the Labour Party’s ample posterior? It could be you.”
While sites such as YouTube and Twitter and a constellation of British blogs added to the national political conversation, the internet provided little original material that succeeded in having an impact on the campaign. There were two minor exceptions: Labour candidate Stuart MacLennan was sacked after he attacked members of his party on Twitter and the party’s “Twitter tsar”, Bristol MP Kerry McCarthy, got into hot water when she revealed postal vote figures on the site.
Amid the cacophony of voices declaring the internet election never happened, there are some who beg to differ. Rory Cellan Jones, the BBC’s digital election correspondent, argued on his blog that the internet played a significant role in the way many experienced the election.
“It wasn’t an election won or lost by the internet, but nor was it untouched by the technology,” he wrote.