Twitter takes Britain into interactive democracy
I tuned in, along with 9.4 million other people last week, to watch the first ever live televised debate between the country’s three main political party leaders. Armed with my Blackberry I half watched the debate and half communed with my fellow tweeters as the debate was broadcast. Twitter as a social networking tool came into its own, the ordinary person – not just pundits - could express their opinions on the leaders in real time, giving instant reactions to what they had heard moments before. It’s not surprising that #leadersdebate became a trending topic . So now having witnessed the second debate last night, how has the world of Twitter responded to the live debates?
In the first debate not only were many ordinary people voicing their reactions and ideas as the leaders gave it their all, but also many of the political big hitters were on Twitter to add their thoughts on how the debate was going. Ed Balls, Alistair Campbell, John Prescott, Conservative home, William Hague and many others used Twitter to poke fun and tear down the oppositions’ comments and to bolster their own champion’s performance. Tweeters were treated to spin that showed more about the parties furiously at work behind the scenes trying to convince us of their party than anything else.
Once the debate was over what was really interesting was the ‘debate about the debate’ which has raged since. The Liberal Democrats have been riding the wave of the ‘Clegg’ effect for a week now and expectations on each of the leaders to supersede their first performance has mounted.
I proceeded to engage with the second debate much like the first with Blackberry in hand to tweet reactions to the points raised. Feisty was probably the best word to use to describe the more polished style of the big three. Armed with a weeks’ worth of media analysis, the world was a-twitter dissecting the new techniques adopted by David and Gordon to address the camera more and challenge Nick Clegg more for detail. But how did the use of Twitter for the second debate compare to last week?
On statistics the first debate stirred up the most discussion with 180,000 tweets covering the hour and half debate on ITV compared to 140,000 for last night’s Sky debate. This could, of course, simply be attributed to the debate not being on a mainstream channel. That aside the decline in tweets and the nature of the tweets is interesting. The decline is probably most indicative of the novelty factor having gone - people are less hyped to see what the live debate would look like. The nature of the tweets is the most valuable to Twitter and social media analysts. This week Twitter was more awash with party candidates and spokespeople repeating key messages, putting down the opposition and boosting their own leader’s impact. They have seen the twittersphere as a new place to try to influence opinion and use it as a platform for key messages and electioneering.
What conclusions, if any, can we draw from the creation of a twitterstorm in this context? To me, it has enabled thousands of people to engage with politics in an intensely interactive and immediate way that it has to be a good thing for British democracy and it also underlines the value of social media as a tool for modern living.
