Consulting Citizens away from the Media Glare

(Crossposted from Gatewatching.org.)

There's been a bit of discussion amongst political bloggers about a post by PollieGraph's Rachel Hills which pointed out that Liberal leadership contender Malcolm Turnbull had her - and other journalists - on 'limited profile' on Facebook, because of her status as a writer for New Matilda (also noted over at Larvatus Prodeo). Some of the discussion about this has been fairly predictable - with the Libs plumbing untold lows in their approval ratings, it's easy to engage in some gratuitous pollie-bashing - but for once, I have to say that Turnbull's decision to keep the media at arms' length from any online discussion with voters seems like a pretty smart move to me.

Rachel cites a Liberal Party source as saying this about Turnbull's approach:

I don't think there are many journos on his list at all because he wants people to be able to ask whatever they want, and for it to be natural. Well, as natural as Facebook ever can be.

If politicians are serious about consulting with citizens about their concerns, then at present this is for the most part best conducted directly between them, as an open conversation outside of the glare of the mainstream media. Importantly, real discussion and debate is not just about stating one's own point of view, but also about changing one's mind and accepting a superior argument when it is made. Media coverage, though, has an unhealthy tendency to report any such opinion changes - which should be part of politicians' everyday activity as they are confronted with new information - as 'embarrassing backflips', 'wavering', and 'caving in to pressure' from political opponents; unfortunately, that instils a deep-set stubbornness in our pollies which is very difficult to overcome. (Even now, after a crushing defeat, many Liberals still can't bring themselves to admit that Howard's WorkChoices was a deeply unpopular, deeply flawed piece of legislation, for example.)

So, rather than facilitating open and frank political debate as they often claim to do, from this perspective the media actually tend to play quite a destructive role which effectively prevents constructive public deliberation. In doing so, they also undermine the potential of using collaborative online tools for community engagement and debate as a means of developing new policy ideas. The fear of being seen to be open to new ideas which didn't emerge fully formed from political think-tanks and party-affiliated institutes is what deters all but a handful of minor parties and politicians and exploring the use of produsage tools such as blogs and wikis to harness the ideas and knowledge of their constituencies in developing new policy: outgoing Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett does it with his blog (and as a result perhaps outlasted his troubled party); the Canadian Greens did it by experimenting with wiki-based policy development; and before them, Howard Dean used social networking to galvanise his diverse supporters into a strong base that sustained his campaign for longer that he could have hoped (notably, he failed only after cable television seized on some particularly unflattering footage).

In a paper for the Media in Transition conference at MIT last April, I noted that unfortunately, such problems face any leader

experimenting with the open consultation of informed citizens as produsers of policy. Where (online or offline) consultative fora are made available to citizens, there tend to be two main reactions: political opponents will accuse the leader of having run out of ideas and playing the populist game of latching on to whatever seems to exercise the minds of voters at present, especially if the mode of citizen consultation is open and does actually lead to the adoption of policy ideas which emerge from it; on the other hand, participating citizens themselves will accuse their leaders of populism for the diametrically opposed reason of not opening up the policy process enough and conducting mere feel-good exercises which appear to consult citizens but ultimately do little to implement their ideas. It seems as difficult to overcome this problem as it is for traditional, industrial journalism to both embrace the produsage efforts of citizen journalists and maintain the editorial processes of the journalistic industry, or as it is for software producers to harness open source software while retaining a business model built around the sale of copyrighted products.

It's interesting in that light to compare the approach of the two main contenders for the Liberal leadership - Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull. With his widely ridiculed 'listening tour', Nelson is trying hard to be seen to be doing something - at every petrol station, in every classroom, and on every playground he visits, there's just as much posing for the cameras as there is actual conversation with citizens, it seems (and judging by Nelson's own words, what conversation there has been has remained fairly banal). If Turnbull is in fact shunning journos in order to be able to speak directly, frankly, and undistractedly with citizens - even if only through the deeply flawed mechanisms of Facebook - then more power to him. That said, there's a big if in all of this, of course - Turnbull might just be avoiding direct contact with journalists at this point because Nelson's doing such a sterling job undermining his own position already...

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