By Matthew Kidd*
There was a time when communication between politicians and their public was simple: almost separate from the business of governing, they made speeches and wrote books or articles, keeping firm control of the agenda, explaining as much or as little as they wanted. Words were the medium, oratory the flavour, longwindedness no drawback. The traffic was in one direction only. Some of the public might get the occasional chance to express a view by heckling or applauding a speech or casting a vote; otherwise, short of the extreme option of rioting, they had little opportunity to tell politicians what they thought. Governments could get on with their business with little public noise to distract them.
Politicians’ work is much harder now. Social media have given citizens a variety of ways of seizing the agenda for themselves. They decide where to get their news from. They can publish their opinions at any time, unfiltered. They can deflate earnest text with photos and cartoons. They can create rapid waves of agreement or hostility. They can believe or be influenced by whomever they choose. It can be hard for politicians to make themselves heard.
All the more so, when the dynamic of social media use creates a competition to be noticed. That can create a temptation to exaggerate, to dramatize and personalise, to play on grievances. It also gives a premium to brevity: extended analysis or argument do not flourish. And the podcast-friendly “All you need to know about… in 30 seconds” style of news reporting can lead to superficiality.
On-line gaming changes attitudes to the process of government too. Such games require quick, intuitive responses to an artificial world. They tend to foster a view of leadership as being about getting and keeping power and doing down rivals, without moral dimensions or consequences. Running a country for its people’s benefit? Too boring.
But if a politician no longer has the same easy dominance of the airwaves, does that matter? Isn’t it even healthy for government’s policies to be more open to challenge? Yes indeed; and similarly it is a good thing if voters feel more engaged in the business of government. The trouble is that, by their nature, social media are not well designed for helping voters to keep tabs on what their governments are doing.
Most of the work of any responsible government is unspectacular and slow-moving. Trends need to be analysed, contingency plans made, risks mitigated. Unpalatable choices have to be made between competing priorities. Differences need to be planed down into compromise. Foundations need to be laid for the long-term future. Budgets need to be balanced. The ship needs to be kept on a steady, coherent course when winds of events try to blow it adrift.
We elect governments to take on that responsibility for us and for our future. We need those tasks done, and we will – rightly – complain if they are not. But we need also to give a bit of space, and a bit of respect, to those grappling with them for us; otherwise we become part of the wind blowing the government off course.
That is where the nature of social media risks becoming part of the problem. The feed focuses on the visible here and now, not the distant contingencies. It has little room for evidential analysis or logical sequence, the careful weighing up of options. Respect for others and breadth of perspective don’t go viral. Instead, the feed oscillates between presenting an unreal perfect world and being aggrieved at how the real world falls short of it. Especially when you can participate anonymously, it is easy to brush off any sense of responsibility. So, politicians and citizens talk across each other, instead of building trust in each other.
How to combine the benefits that social media can bring in terms of fuller, quicker information accessible to all, and new ways for citizens to make their views known, with a greater sense of sharing the responsibility for how government is done?
There is much that the politicians themselves can do. It must be tempting, when one’s conscientious efforts to run a country get dumped on by social media storms, to retreat into one’s shell, sharing as little as possible. But that never builds understanding or support. Nor can they yield to the temptation of concluding that the prime topics of government are what plays on the feed. Instead, they have to keep doing the things that government requires but find ways of presenting them in social-media-speak too, at the same time as promoting other ways of capturing voters’ increased readiness to become engaged: youth parliaments; citizens’ assemblies; voting methods; local democracy.
In the end, though, a sense of responsibility can only come from within oneself. There is plenty of evidence that it can grow even in an age of social media: people deciding to adjust their own lives to help slow global warming, for example, or taking refugees from Ukraine into their homes. Taking responsibility for recognising that our politicians do a difficult job for us, and need our respect as well as our challenge, can help them to do better what we need from them; and can make us feel better about ourselves too.
*Matthew Kidd, former British diplomat