E-campaigning

I attended an event organised by The Hansard Society (www.hansardsociety.org.uk) at the House of Commons on 7 December 2004. The talk was about e-democracy and e-campaigning. It was a very interesting event. Several MPs were there (They were rushing in and out to vote in the middle of the talk). There were people from various organizations as well as many of those who work in the area of promoting democracy. There were three speakers. The first was from the industry and she simply set the context for the two other speakers. She spoke about how blogging played a relatively more important role in politics nowadays. She mentioned a few blogs but I did not catch the details as I was seating somewhere at the back. The second speaker was a Brit. He had conducted an empirical study on the way American electorate voted in the last general election and what influenced their vote. Several findings were particularly interesting. 18-24 year-olds mainly rely on the internet for information. The TV, although it remains the top information source in general, only came second in the 18-24 age group. And he argued that the behaviour exhibited at a younger age usually continues to be practised even as people get older. This means as the current young generation gets older, the role of the internet as a (main?) source of political information will become more significant. More surprisingly, he also found that the age group that most used the internet to spread news about politics was those over 65!!! But this age group mainly use the email rather than websites as the email allow more interpersonal communication. This speaker believed that it is the email, not webpages, that has a bigger potential in e-campaigning. The third speaker was an American. His talk was full with money-fuelled politics. He described how Howard Dean's campaign started off as a nothing but then became a "major thing" as a result of clever use if the internet. Dean was unknwon before his camp decided to use tools like www.meetup.com to garner support. Huge amount of money was raised by all camps. One of the presidential candidates apparently raised USD 1m in just a day from his internet campaign. And the internet also opens up many new ways to convey political messages. Just look at the creativity of those people behind www.jibjab.com. The American speaker believed that it is the webpages that will become a potent tool for e-campaigning. After all, email is a many-to-many method and a huge majority of us would probably delete / ignore many mails we classify as junks. But, the most important lesson is that the internet brings with it a big potential. Parties can raise huge amount of money from almost every connected parts of the world if they know how to exploit the internet. Parties can reach almost every single connected person in the world if they know how to exploit the technology. Parties can raise from obscurity to fame if they know how to project themselves. Parties are no longer confined to printed media as the internet allows all sorts of different methods of communication - texts, short movies, radio broadcasts, animation, photos, etc. But, it should also be remembered that the speakers were speaking from the perspective of the last American election. More than 70% of Americans have regular access to the internet. Malaysia is different. But should that stop us from trying to reach the world audience? There is a lot of potential just waiting to be tapped but Malaysian political parties seem to be stuck in the old days, with the same old ways. When will we change? Having said that, I wonder if there are any rules in Malaysia preventing political parties from accepting online donations from sources outside Malaysia. Will that be classified as foreign donations? In fact, are foreign donations acceptable? And that is just talking about 'compliance'. Discussions about the 'ethicality' of accepting foreign donations may be a different topic altogether. The American speaker finished with one interesting quote: "We must master the tools of communication or we will be mastered by those who do"