Furthermore

Access and Representation - NotCon Thoughts

Before the whole event fades completely from my mind, I thought I'd write about an aspect of NotCon that I've not seen much other comment on, which is the theme of access and representation. I followed most of the political panels during the day, and different aspects of this theme emerged in several talks. In particular:

• Will Davies (of MySociety I think) -- spoke (in the Politics of the Net session) from a sociological perspective about the way that power and access are structured on the internet. The point that came across to me was that we tend to accept as inevitable facts that e.g. blog readership follows a power-law distribution or the geek-celebrity status of people like Linus Torvalds rather than face up to the enormous complexity of the forces that make things the way they are. Will thought that these structures would, in some cases, act to exclude newcomers or the uninitiated from some of the inner circles of access or power. My immediate defeatist thought is that maybe the structures are inevitable facts, but it was a valuable perspective that we shouldn't just always say, "that's just the way it is" when we look at the sociology of internet users.
• Richard Sargeant from the No.10 Policy Unit (I think) -- spoke (in the Politics on the Net session) interestingly about the fact that as voting is declining, other forms of political activism - single issue politics for instance - are increasing. He pointed out though that the newer forms of engagement tend to favour the people who are already more politically active, so that the voice of the people in society already least engaged with mainstream politics - the poor, ethnic minorities etc - is weakened further by the more strident voice of educated geeks. For that reason, he also thought that services such as faxyourmp etc tended to be viewed by MPs as in effect the voice of a special interest group, rather than as broadening access to democracy.

This also connected in my mind with Tim Ireland's talk on blogging your MP as a form of political activism. I can see that idea has somewhat wider uses too - you could blog the doings of pretty much any public figure as a way of increasing the public scrutiny they are under - although you are dependent on there being publicly accessible sources of information on what they do and say. I think that's largely a good thing - I would quite like to be able to type in my MPs name to Google and see (ideally) her own blog and also two or three blogs that follow her activities. Blogging seems a good way to pursue this kind of micro-journalism.

However, coming back to Richard Sargeant, I can also see that the kinds of people who are able to do this sort of thing (essentially as a hobby I guess) need a certain amount of technical knowledge, or access to people who have it. They need leisure time. They need a bit of social confidence dealing with authority - Tim said you should get information on your MPs diary from their office. Basically, this is largely a middle class hobby. That's not to denigrate it as dilettantism, but I think as this kind of "private" political activism grows, we need to be aware of the biases that it brings with it.

Posted by MFreestone at June 22, 2004 09:11 AM