Ryan MacMillan

It is, according to Wonkette, ‘the most internetty thing ever to happen’ - pro-Hillary bloggers at the Daily Kos are staging a strike, and will:

refrain from posting here as long as the administrators allow the more disruptive members of our community to trash Hillary Clinton and distort her record without any fear of consequence or retribution. I will not be posting at DailyKos effective immediately. I will not help drive up traffic or page-hits as long as my candidate – a good and fine DEMOCRAT - is attacked in such a horrid and sexist manner not only by other diarists, but by several of those posting to the front page.”

All of which rather makes one wonder - in this age of untold numbers of online conversations, where should the innovative political operative go to listen to the people? If things are so virulent and hateful at a liberal blog like Kos (and I’ll own that I’ve taken it off my bookmarks of late for just this reason), which is supposedly a bastion of progressive ideals, is there really anything constructive to be learned by monitoring online political conversations? Aren’t we just going to end up with a bunch of poorly-anonymised political geeks shouting very loudly at one another? Such concerns are why Jeremy and I have begun to flesh out the difference between what we’re calling ‘Political Places’ and ‘Places with Politics’ when it comes to online conversations.

The Daily Kos is a ‘Political Place’ (PP) as are the hundreds of other blogs, forums and message boards out there devoted the political gossip, policy wonkery, and energetic townhall debate - here in the UK we might count websites like Iain Dale’s Diary, Guido Fawke’s blog, or the Guardian’s Comment is Free pages as overtly ‘Political Places’. No-one’s denying that the debates that go on in these places aren’t lively, vital and interesting, but they are also deeply partisan, rife with views that might most charitably be described as ‘entrenched’ and often rather hostile. Rare, I am beginning to think, would be the time when listening to a PP would garner much new information for a politician. PP’s are populated by people who’ve already made up their minds and who, for the most part, won’t be persuaded by whatever comms activity a political party engages in.

Which is where - possibly - Places with Politics (PwP) come in. PwPs are online places that are not explicitly political, but where politically important conversations do sometimes happen. For example, let’s say that the government want to assess the public’s reaction to an increase in the number of speed cameras. Rather than going to a journalist’s blog, or going to the (likely thankless) bother of setting up a youtube video explaining the policy and asking for feedback, might not the government be better off monitoring reactions on motoring blogs/forums such as FinalGear or the RAC’s Motoring Forum? Of course, responses in such places might be fairly predictable, but they could be balanced out (or outweighed entirely) by chat over at ParentsCentre or Mumzone. Speaking of parenting forums, where better for the government to get a sense of public feelings about maternity care, or parental leave than to monitor the forums at Mumsnet or the Parents Lounge? Equally, might not an organic/sustainable food forum be the place for the government to hear how it’s agricultural policies are going down? Governments are used to tailoring their policy messages; maybe it’s time they got used to tailoring the way they listen to feedback.