You Had To Be There: National's Rob Muldoon campaigning in the 1970s. Digital political communication will feature hugely in this year's general election. But can the solitary experience of on-line politics ever match the powerful feelings of solidarity generated by the mass events of an active and participatory democracy?
THIS YEAR’S ELECTION will be won and lost in private. People
seated in front of PCs, or, more likely, caressing their smart phones, will be
the ones who decide between National and Labour. On both sides of the great
political divide some very smart people are already working on ways to bring
their followers together – alone.
What a contrast with the campaigning methods of the past.
Right up until that most pivotal of election years, 1984, the opening of an election
campaign was an unequivocally public event. Political parties typically hired
the largest covered venues available – town halls, theatres, opera houses –
from the stages of which their leaders addressed audiences of one-to-two
thousand energised supporters.
And some determined opponents’, too. Because this was the
era in which the noble art of heckling still boasted many proud exponents.
When Rob Muldoon kicked-off National’s official campaign in
Hamilton’s Founders Theatre in 1975, a
clutch of seasoned Labour hecklers were lying in wait. As the pugnacious
Opposition Leader was working his way towards his oratorical climax, one of
those hecklers cried out in a voice that echoed around the auditorium: “Who
stabbed Jack in the back!?” [Jack Marshall had been deposed as National’s
leader by Muldoon barely twelve months earlier.] It took the great
counter-puncher more than a few beats to recover his composure.
All good fun! With the entire spectacle broadcast live on
the state-owned radio and television networks. Political leaders truly earned
the right to rule us in those far-off days before auto-cues, headset
microphones and carefully screened audiences waving pre-printed party placards
in front of the cameras.
None more so that the revered Labour leader, Michael Joseph
Savage, who barnstormed the country in 1938. Diagnosed with colon cancer,
Savage disregarded the advice of his doctors to conserve his strength, and hit
the campaign trail. Faced with near-universal press hostility, he knew he would
have to sell his party’s ground-breaking Social Security legislation
face-to-face. Town halls could not contain the crowds that gathered to hear
him. Labour stalwarts in Dunedin recalled wonderingly the rain-swept afternoon
that Savage spoke to an audience of 20,000 at Carisbrook. It wasn’t even his
largest.
The mandatory broadcasting of campaign openings was a legacy
of Savage’s prime-ministership. Like the social-media of the twenty-first
century, these live broadcasts allowed political leaders to execute an end-run
around the conservative gatekeepers of the privately-owned media.
The live broadcasting of Parliament was instituted for
exactly the same reason. Working-class families gathered around their radio
sets were able to hear Savage describe Labour’s Social Security legislation as
“applied Christianity” – as he said it. They were also able to hear National’s
leader, Adam Hamilton, dismissing it with a sneer as “applied lunacy”.
Paradoxically, the generation raised on Snapchat, Facebook
and Twitter, will find more to respond to in this celebrated Labour legend than
their Baby Boomer parents. Millennials need no instruction in the galvanising
effect of instantaneity: the extraordinary privilege of being able to monitor
events as they happen. A single tweet can reach 20,000 people in a millisecond
– and none of its recipients are required to stand for hours in the freezing
Dunedin rain to receive it.
Hence the sustained effort of all the major parties to craft
their messages to the specifications of our digital age. Tweets, text messages,
Facebook postings, YouTube videos, and personally addressed e-mails will
increasingly complement the old technology of snail-mail-shots, robo-calls,
pamphlets, posters, TV/radio/print ads and, of course, all those bloody
billboards.
Parliament itself has bowed before these new digital
imperatives. The mandatory broadcasting of the political parties’ opening and
closing election statements has been discontinued. State subsidisation of
party-political communications will continue, but now it’s to be applied across
all platforms.
New Zealanders should, therefore, prepare themselves for an
onslaught of algorithmic politics. Messages pitched with unnerving precision at
our entire demographic profile: gender and ethnicity; marital status and family
composition; level of educational attainment; occupation and work history;
income-bracket – all the stuff Facebook and Google know already – will arrive,
unbidden, in vast numbers.
Will they work? You bet your life! You’ll be blown away by
their sky-high production values and will thrill to the uncanny resonance of
their messages. What’s more, you will feel caught-up in something much bigger
than yourself: a movement for change; a people’s crusade! Your determination to
cast your vote on 23 September (or before!) will grow ever stronger.
But will it be the same as standing in a rain-swept stadium
listening to a frail and desperately ill old man asking you to vote for applied
Christianity? Will the sound-track in your ear-pods produce the same reaction
as 2,000 people chanting Mul-doon! Mul-doon! Mul-doon!? Will your computer
screen meet your eye with a flash of solidarity, or join with you in wild
applause?
Can citizens truly be together – alone?
This essay was
originally published in The Press of Tuesday,
16 May 2017.
