After well over a decade of overly-centralised governance David Cameron announced plans to dramatically reduce the public sector and provide the “most dramatic redistribution of power from “elites in Whitehall to the man and woman on the street.” He calls it the ‘Big Society’.
It’s not just the similarity in terminology between this policy and social media that makes the ears of us at RMM prick-up; we believe there are strong conceptual and evidential links between the UK’s newest policy and new media.
The concepts of user-engagement, crowdsourcing and user-generated content – that are so central to social media’s practices – are parallel to the ideology of the Big Society. In Cameron’s ideal Big Society democracy is no longer the right of veto alone; it is the active involvement of citizens in the planning and organisation of local communities, and the environments in which they reside. This is precisely what social network sites require of their users. D J Collins, Google’s Head of Corporate Communications UK, refers to the introduction of social media processes into the political sphere as ‘democratising democracy’ – and he is spot on. It follows that when the PM’s ideas for a radical devolution of power come to fruition we could be entering an age of Britain 2.0.
However, I’m not suggesting that this is a matter of registering every British citizen on a giant social network. This would be just as unpopular as Labour’s hopes for ID cards and as ineffective as Facebook at galvanising social enterprise. But hang on – isn’t the ‘Big Society Network’, launched in July, precisely this: a giant British social network. Well, yes and no. The Tories aim to have 15m members join “the UK’s biggest mutual” in the next ten years, so it’s hardly modest in scope. Yet in the context of Big Society social media has its greatest impact on a local scale – and I think the government understands this.
My fear is that the top-down approach of our democratic system, which the Big Society is working so hard to stymie, could be unknowingly morphed into an online version. The first bad sign is that we will have to pay to join the network. This immediately has the potential to exclude poorer members of society. What is more, the government has little to zero social capital with which to leverage its influence in much of the country. Most of us are cynical at the best of times in regards to Number 10. The best thing to do would be to distance the Big Society Network as far from government as possible, at least until the network’s members are given a healthy chance to improve government reputation. Hopefully, therefore, the ‘Big Society Network’, will work solely as a hub for all the local examples of social media in action. It will be these localised examples of social networks that will form the focus of my study.
Felix Wetzel, Group Marketing Director at Jobsite and polemical blogger, writes with great gusto on the holistic notions of togetherness and group dependability that social media contributes to the Big Society. However, it is the practical aspects of social media, such as incentivising and organising users, that are more important to the ‘man and woman in the street’. In the coming posts I will be giving examples of some of the most effective social media schemes already set-up, and suggesting how they could be further improved.
