Election Day Gives a Glimpse at the Future of News
If you tune into the TV or radio today, you’ll get one of the delightful weirdnesses of election day – the fact that the media aren’t allowed to report on what’s going on. Thanks to impartiality rules governing broadcast media, they can’t tell you who may or may not be winning lest it change your vote and spoil democracy; the Sun is allowed to create epically crass moments of flagwaving, the BBC not so much.
So Radio 4’s Today was full of Frank Bruno being mental and miniature documentaries from Skegness, while Women’s Hour focused on bunions (insert your own Osborne joke here). There’s a wonderfully awkward pretense that hmm, nothing much seems to be happening today, which explodes into deranged swingometer-led musings the minute the polls close.
But this election is different. It was the first where social networking was used in campaigning, and the failures of big hubs like Labourspace (six grassroots campaigns in the whole of 2009!) were somewhat balanced out by candidates getting on Twitter and directly engaging with voters. In terms of election day reporting, social networking has created an even bigger change: where once your election day discussions were only passed around your immediate circle, now they’re on the Internet in a manner that completely rips up all the traditional rules on what’s allowed to be broadcast today. And on a day when vast swathes of the electorate still seem undecided, the cacophony from Twitter and Facebook could potentially change a lot of minds.
With the traditional broadcast media temporarily gagged, we’re also getting a glimpse into the future of news. Since the arrival of the RSS feed and the Twitter list, people can increasingly tailor the news they get to create a hyper-personal stream of information that’s relevant to them. Opinion from friends and trusted sources, augmented by a variety of cameraphone photos, Flip vids, and other democratic reporting techniques, is increasingly the future of news, or at least the news that people are increasingly preferring. We’ve touched on the dangers of this before, the way that people can seal themselves in an echo chamber, and looking at the comments section of any newspaper is testament to the calcified opinions of the internet age. Equally though, one look across the retweeting and 25+ comment Facebook status updates today suggests that there is a genuine discursiveness that top-down old media could never provide.
Today, election news is being made and shared by the people, with the popular stories getting traction because people are engaged with them, rather than a single editorial decision. And perhaps one day all news will be this way. It depends on whether you believe a news organisation can be truly impartial; if you don’t, then there’s little point in bothering with them over your own tailored news feed, but if you do, then it becomes the only place you can trust in a sea of subjectivity. For today, just tune into social networks and see if you’re ready for that version of the future.
Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Creative Economy | May 6, 2010 2:23PM |