Today we find that, even as the media’s capacity to countervail or subsume political reality is either decried or extolled, the media’s capacity to deliver this representational envelope is being eroded by the rise to political prominence of the blogosphere, citizen journalism and the burgeoning extent of ‘virtual’ public communication. The now irresistible array of new communicative activity engendered by new digital technologies has reached a stage where mainstream media and political leadership can no longer deny or avoid it, or indeed operate effectively without engaging with it.
The power bases — on both sides of the elite equation — are changing. As Charles Leadbeater (2007) puts it:
… formal party politics is an industry in decline. In the late 19th century, people campaigned in their millions to be allowed into political processes that were dominated by elites. Little more than a century later and the disenchanted great-grandchildren of those campaigners are flooding out of the political realm as fast as they can … people talk of their political representatives as invisible, alien, partisan, arrogant, untrustworthy, irrelevant and disconnected. Industrial-era mass media — newspapers and television — suffer from serious weaknesses as vehicles for democratic life. They have high fixed costs (printing plants and television studios) so they have to reach mass markets to earn their keep. As a consequence they treat people as an audience to be titillated rather than citizens who have a responsibility to engage in debate.
The dilemma is that contemporary political leadership must deal with the broad trends away from political engagement through embracing new means of socially-networked communication which are largely unable to be controlled in the time-honoured way of conventional politics.
The irony is that, as Westminster politics becomes more presidential, with its concentration of power in the executive and election campaigns more and more obsessively focussing on the leaders alone, the more new social media platforms are opening up the hyperlocal and the ‘neo-demos’. And these are driving each other, as the mainstream media power base is being challenged by reader decline, the blogosphere and the blurring of the line between professional and citizen journalism. The inter-elite model, on which both media and communications studies and political science traditions have relied for decades, is coming into question.
The mainstream media (dubbed ‘MSM’ in the blogosphere) seek to speed up the political cycle, and ratchet up the ‘politicotainment’, in good part because of the competition they face from a wellspring of user-generated content and communication that is beginning to shoulder aside the traditional professional sources of public communication together with the commercial business models ‘big’ media are built on. Big media are especially sensitive to this perceived incursion onto its own turf and react, in general, very badly to it. In play and at stake are time-honoured notions of professionalism, the fourth estate function and centralised, one-to-many communication paradigms versus networked, planar, paradigms, to say nothing of their bottom lines. During the long pre-campaign period in 2007, the ‘July 12’ incident (when The Australian blew its stack over the blogosphere’s better analysis of its own Newspoll data) stood out as the low point of a simmering stand-off between MSM and its bothersome ‘other’ (see Flew 2008).
But of course, leaders, governments and bureaucracies also react badly. The litany of missed opportunities, wrongheaded schemes and just plain failures to engage positively with online worlds and the dynamics they unleash speak fulsomely: Howard Dean’s rise and fell on the back of online opinion in the last US Presidential campaign, Mark Latham's failed experiment in localism through e-democracy, and top-down communication strategies by bureaucracies using online simply as another linear ‘consultation’ medium, are a few examples.
Margaret Simons’ The Content Makers (2007), and her regular Crikey and other posts, are an important response to these trends. Her starting point is this erosion of media power (the end of the ‘imperial age’), but what is different is the practicality of her response, which is to lead hyperlocal initiatives such as The Map in Flemington and to warn that good quality journalism never paid its way and that the ‘creative destruction’ of news organisations’ business model may bring about the demise of adequately paid, quality journalism.
Professional journalism and the internet have existed peaceably for more than a decade but now it is very hard to do so. There is an erosion of inter-elite symbiosis and, while these changes are never as abrupt and revolutionary as the utopian or dystopian rhetoric would suggest, and shifts in the balance are more in evidence in US politics than in Australia, there is a more planar sense of the distribution of influence than previously. The blogosphere lays claim that they are the true inheritors of the fourth estate function, as they are increasingly, and competently, critical of the degree to which mainstream media performs this function.
But the fact is that there is a great degree of porosity between citizen journalism and mainstream journalism. It is still the case that to become well known in the blogosphere you must break stories and breaking stories involves strategic and successful interactions with mainstream media. At this stage there has been greater impact registered by the new social media and the blogosphere in mainstream media than in politics. However, this is changing, as the 2007 Federal election campaign began to demonstrate clearly.