By way of example, Aiken pointed to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which apparently sent out some 350 tweets during the UK’s annual badger cull, but only issued one press release. That, he said, pointed to the future of government communications. “This is the end of the big budget advertising and marketing campaigns,” Aiken reportedly told the crowd.
Most of us covering politics, either full- or part-time, might rejoice at the prospect of that idea crossing the Atlantic. The party press release as it exists in Canada these days is a tragic document, emailed from partisan headquarters in haste and, more often than not, featuring the basest, most simplistic and diluted talking points. Twitter’s 140-character limit seems almost perfectly suited to one-note ideas like these — not to mention the fact it’s easier to ignore. Here and gone, in a flash.
Maybe we should pause a moment before celebrating. Like countless infomercial products (or the elimination of the long-form census), this looks like a solution to a problem that doesn’t actually exist. Or maybe it’s a solution to a problem that’s self-created.
The thinking that seems to drive a shift to comms-by-social media is that no one has the time or appetite for a message from the government that is longer than a sentence or two. People are barely able to pay attention these days, what with all the information streaming at them all the live-long day via various phone and computer screens — and nobody has time for anything that might force them to pause for more than a moment. Plus, mixed in with all the other tweets and live updates that push into everyone’s pocket, a political message might have the benefit of subversion — another infoblast that’s absorbed along with everything else, consumed automatically and registered on a equal footing with all the others. Even better, you get to circumvent the media. Perfect.
But what’s really being promoted here isn’t time-saving or even effective communications. This is a way for governments and parties to say even less. That prospect might be very appealing to a lot of people — but it should be worrying us.
There is a very simple reason why politicians tend to sound idiotic when given less space and time to speak. There are clear restraints on nuance and considered thought when you speak in sentences that can be clipped by the news networks. At party HQs, where those sentences are dreamed up, they know this very well. And we all know the result. Language and arguments are dumbed-down, simplified and filled with hyperbole and outrage — a mélange of emotion based on limited knowledge.
In other words, it’s the stuff that tends to spark just enough of a reaction to shift the polling data. Do it long enough and, even if you’re not actually changing minds, you can at least make it appear as though you are. And on election day, you can hope this kind of manufactured momentum might win out.
Newt Gingrich, of all people, once said that “if you’re capable of being glib and verbal, the odds are that you have no idea what you’re talking about, but it sounds good, whereas if you know a great deal of what you’re saying the odds are you can’t get on a talk show because nobody can understand you.” If the people writing party talking points don’t have that posted on a wall somewhere, they probably should. Meanwhile, the rest of us ought to take some time to think about it.
While the minimalist-statement, talking-point strategy doesn’t always work (not everyone can win an election, after all), parties have to use it now merely to level the playing field. You have to fight your competition on common ground, and by and large the talking point battlefield is that place. But it relies on people not paying attention. After all, you can only really vote on what you know and, as far as politicians are concerned, the less you know, the better. An uninformed populace is more likely to either believe the last lie they heard or disengage altogether. While parties probably would prefer the first scenario, they know that if a voter doesn’t vote, at least he’s not voting for the other guy.
So now imagine less. Less information, less communication. Fewer words and fewer thoughts. Less nuance and less understanding. We go from the inane and ridiculous to, for all intents and purposes, nothing at all. The current government communications strategy might be far from perfect, but at least it lives somewhere for more than a breath — somewhere, at least, that’s easily accessible — allowing us to point out hypocrisies or simply track the gradual changes in tone or message from the people who govern us.
Don’t be fooled by the buzz, by the social media strategy. It’s really quite simple. When there is less information for the public to use — either because it zips past too quickly or because the argument’s too complex to express in 140 characters — the less useful that information is to the democratic process … such as it is.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Colin Horgan
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