The prime minister has had some bad experiences of using the internet recently. But websites such as Twitter and YouTube could be essential for governments in communicating with the public.
For the second time in as many weeks, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been criticised for his performance in a video posted on the YouTube website. Hardly a day goes by without reading in our newspapers about YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the like. Websites like these have rapidly changed the ways that large segments of society communicate and share information, but are there implications for government and public services?
Web 2.0 is the term generally used for these types of tools for communicating, collaborating and social networking. This includes the use of ‘blogging’ (online personal commentaries); collaboration and sharing sites (Wikipedia and YouTube); and social networking and community building sites (Facebook and MySpace). There are estimated to be more than 100 million bloggers, 200 million MySpace accounts, 40 million Facebook accounts and more than 100 million views per day on YouTube.
At the political level, Barack Obama used these new media tools extensively in his US presidential campaign. He made sure that his speeches were on YouTube, he had over 1.5 million friends on MySpace and Facebook and more than 45,000 followers on Twitter.
He also used his own blog to fight a smear campaign and his supporters used social networking sites to share information at speed, set up rallies and raise money. Much of this was done using mobile devices that they carried in their pockets — campaigning has become much simpler and faster using these tools.
In the UK, the government commissioned the independent Power of information report into the use of web 2.0 by government. This was published in 2007 and led to the establishment of the Power of Information Taskforce, whose priorities and progress you can view — you guessed it — on YouTube.
The report strongly encouraged government to communicate more with these new media and to better understand the information markets that are developing as a result. Partly as a result of this report and the success of the Obama campaign, the Number 10 website now makes extensive use of Web 2.0 tools, with videos, web chats and the PM’s recent ill-fated YouTube video on the reform of MPs’ expenses.
At the local level, about 50 councils are experimenting with Twitter — a type of blogging that allows you to publish short messages of fewer than 140 characters. Personally, I don’t see the interest in receiving text messages from people telling you that they are watching television.
However, the opportunity to use this as a means of quickly sharing information locally to provide updates on things like roadworks, accidents, flooding, swine flu and new initiatives does sound attractive. A joint website set up by four Dorset councils is tracking the growing number of local authorities using Twitter and their numbers of followers.
Professor William Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute recently put forward the idea of the Internet as the ‘fifth estate’. The rise of the press, television and other mass media had previously created an independent institution in many countries that has become known as the fourth estate and has been central to pluralist democratic processes.
Dutton believes that while the internet is being used by existing institutions to try to enhance what they do, it is also a means of mobilising individuals and groups to create local and global networks that can hold institutions accountable. It can, for example, be used to increase the accountability of politicians, the press, academics and doctors by offering internet users alternative sources of information and opinion.
MapTube is an example of this type of approach. This is a free resource for viewing, sharing, mixing and mashing (combining different sources of data) online that has been created by University College London.
Using simple techniques, data can be brought together to map the impact of the credit crunch and crime statistics. For example, ‘MapTube crime map’ links newspaper articles to the locations and details of recent murders. This provides powerful information for community groups concerned about safety and crime prevention. Similarly ‘patient opinion’ is a privately run web service that sends subscribing organisations feedback from patients about their NHS treatment using data derived from NHS sources.
It would be easy to dismiss these Web 2.0 tools as passing fads that are unlikely to affect the serious business of government. It is also very possible that they are the early stages of fundamental changes in the ways that society will communicate and share ideas and information. What is clear is that the scale of interest cannot be ignored by organisations that want to communicate with people and communities.
John Thornton is the executive director of e-ssential Resources and the author of CIPFA’s Top Ten Tips for Delivering Efficiency through Technology
