Change we believe in? By Ibrahim Ghubbar

Since Obama’s campaign for the presidential elections 2008 the political sphere got to know the new way of political communication. The retail politics has moved from the streets to the worldwide web. With all the web 2.0 application it is possible to reach a huge public and to react immediately to the rival’s campaigns. Especially blogs are an easy way to connect with the electorate why many parties decide to use the new way of communication.

There are several elections going on right now in Europe. An important one will take place in the United Kingdom where the House of Commons and so a total new government will be elected. As all elections it shows the new age of political communication, e.g. the main parties have websites, online-communities and the use of the social networks as Facebook or MySpace. For the direct communication their candidates use Twitter to connect with their supporters. Nevertheless the numbers of followers on Twitter or Facebook create a bigger attention in the media. Another very important way are weblogs in which the parties and their candidates are not bonded to a fixed number of character (e.g. Twitter allows only 140 characters per message) and can write longer statements to certain issues and combine them with video clips, links to their online-channels (YouTube, MyVideo, etc.).

On May 6th the British people will vote a new parliament. The three main parties are the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party that is the current leading party in the House of Commons. It is the first election for the current Prime Minister Gordon Brown who became leader after Tony Blair’s resignation in 2007. Next to several TV debates of the three parties, there is a lot of online campaigning going on between the two main parties, Conservatives and Labour, which I would like to present.

“Labour-Central”- that is what the blogs (yes, plural!) by the Labour party are called. Surprisingly, there are no blogs. The site provides information about the on-going campaign and opportunities to support the party by giving donations or organising local events. Beside that the site forwards to other websites by the Labour party or its supporters. One of them is “Bloggers4Labour” that summarizes all labour-related blogs on one page, the other one is “Labourhome” within the “Labourspace” a reference to the social community MySpace. The first thing that one notice on Labourhome is the candidate pictures that is similar to the ones during the Obama/Biden-Campaign 08. The colour-scheme, the shadowed faces and the writings are almost the same. Same as Labourcentral the Labourhome offers its users to support the party on the networks of Twitter and Facebook or to join the online-community. In comparison Labourhome supports the user with more knowledge and articles about the campaign than the main page.

The “blue blog” is the Web2.0 home of the Conservative party. In a traditional blogspot-layout it greets its visitors with several topics, blog-entries and YouTube-Clips supporting to convince the electorate. Interestingly, every user is able to post a comment or blog-entry, not only the party itself (same thing is on Labour party).
A typical example for the copying-trend in political communication is the video clip on the website. What everyone notices immediately is the significant word “change” which was one of the leading points of the Obama/Biden campaign. It is a kind of irony due to the fact that the British Conservatives are more similar to the American Republicans than to the Democrats to whom Obama belongs.
Another very interesting thing is the time-clock in the movie. Two years ago a Dutch nationalists Geerd Wilders tried to offend the muslim community by creating a video-clip called “Fitna” that shows a cartoon with a bomb fuse on Mohamed’s head. The sound of a clock keeps on going in the background until in the end a black screen and the shatter of glass shall symbolize the detonation. Very similar to the end of the “Change”-clip. This is meant to be a comparison of the settings – not of the contents.

Terry Few said: “Through interaction with new media, knowledge easily passes between sources resulting in a form of collective intelligence”. So what is the political blogosphere? Obviously the political parties support by using Web 2.0 tools and writing Blogs the online-world with a pool of general knowledge and political education. On the other hand the user is able to join this by contributing its own statements. The sharing component of the blogosphere is the most important point of the political online-communication and the main reason why parties decide to use that way. So, the political blogosphere is a collecitve intelligence.
On the other hand it is a great example for the preconditions of produsage due to the fact that is has no hierachy or others strings attached. The fact is that through the online trend in political campaigns more people an especially the younger population deals more with political issues and the parties fulfill there job of contributing to the political education of the people. Thus, the political web 2.0 is defenitely a change that we can or should believe in.