It’s something I wrote early in the campaign when it seemed that no reporter or pundit could open their mouth without the words “Facebook” or “Twitter” popping out. There were even some declaring that as ’06 was the “blog election” and ’08 the “Facebook election”, that 2011 would the known as the “Twitter election”.
I disagreed, mostly because I know more about the role of blogs and the nature of online political discussion – then and now – than pretty much anybody else in the room. On April 6, I shared a few thoughts in an email to a friend in old media;
Unlike most in formal media, my real life has a very small overlap with politicians and journalists, and a huge overlap with people of all political stripes who seldom discuss them. My readers are people with a common interest in politics, as opposed to a common connection to it.
They (my blog readers) don’t use Twitter – they’re even a little turned off when I reference it. None of my personal friends use Twitter. Furthermore, none of the hundreds of people I know in dog sport are on Twitter.
The platform has a place as a fast communication vehicle for those inside the machine – but as a means for parties to engage the average voter? I’d say stop wasting your time.
Facebook has a different problem. The people we connect to most are friends and family. In my case, it’s peers and competitors in the dog world. Political discussion is very, very rare because it invariably causes friction – and Facebook hates friction.
For the average user (who are primarily women, by the way) – Facebook is about positive reinforcement. There may be plenty of FB political groups, but I see precious little cross-pollination of election talk into Facebook proper.
Political junkies will always be junkies, but they’re a minority simply moving around from platform to platform.
There’s way too much coverage of social media, way too little reporters shutting their own mouths for a change and listening to people on the street.
I’ll let you in on a little secret – about the time the punditocracy was authoritatively informing Canadians that high turnout at the advance polls was “a bad sign for the incumbent”, I got word that it was the work of the Conservative ground game, and that the party was pretty confident about how things were going.
I had no way of knowing if that was true until Monday, when SDA readers began reporting light to moderate turnout at your respective polling places. Maybe voters weren’t as motivated to “throw the bums out” as the excited few inside the Twitter echo chamber had willed themselves to believe.
There is no “blog election” or “Facebook election” or “Twitter election” for people who don’t eat, sleep and breathe politics. There’s a reason for that – the majority of Canadians don’t live with their faces glued to a screen. They’re out there driving truck, behind welding masks, hauling kids to hockey practice. They have neither the time or opportunity to follow Andrew Coyne’s multi-tweet essays on parliamentary history, Kady O’Malley’s tortured indifference to Jack Layton’s happy ending, or to engage The Phantom in the comments section at SDA.
When it comes to the mechanics of winning elections, it’s the ground game, stupid. And it will always be the ground game.
At any rate, Margaret Wente has written a pretty good column that ties up the loose ends, if you’re interested.
