The divide you allude to is between direct democracy (what we’re seeing with social media) and representative democracy (what we currently have).

Yes, people are organising themselves politically and achieving things they couldn’t before. This is scary for politicians as they’re starting to realise that the role of a political representative – as proxy for direct democracy – is becoming less relevant.

@CarolineW – Habermas’ idea of the public sphere is oft quoted when it comes to the internet. There are some parallels, but in a way social media takes the pblic sphere to the next stage. As well as discussion how they want to be governed people are using social media to govern/organise themselves.

There are parallels; technology is starting to break-down some of the problems that emerged as societies got ‘too big’ for traditional models of participatory democracy. Tech will never be the whole solution, but it is definitely starting to shine a light on participation/dialogue models that could be at the heart of the ever-ellusive solution to democratic deficits in Britain and elsewhere.

These are exciting times!

I don’t think we disagree – there are definitely good pockets of government-related social media usage – as well as (I think) much bigger ones of poor usage… My argument was more-so about shifting the debate away from focussing so much on what politicians and civil servants are doing, towards what people, more broadly are doing and the enabling power of social media to enable people’s views and actions to have fundamental impacts on politics, in a way we have traditionally not seen.

I think it’s really great that some politicians are getting cued-in to the social media shift, I’m just not convinced we need to focus as much on what they are doing, when there is more and more that we’re increasingly able to do on our own…

While I think your overall argument is right I thought I’d add my opinion that your analysis is a bit too black and white. There are some good and bad elements of social media use by both parties….

Yes, Labour’s/No 10′s Gordon Brown video was bad but that was mainly GB. The idea of using YouTube to bypass the news cycle and speak direct to the public was a good idea. Plus No 10 do fantastic work on building dialogue using Twitter. Equally, David Cameron’s first Webcameron with him washing up using Ecover and stopping to chat with his kids was equally cringy but again following the right idea.

The Conservatives are doing lots of interesting ‘wikipolitcs’ stuff at the moment – http://www.makeITbetter.org.uk is a great example and they opened their draft health manifesto to the public online via Google Moderator last week which was also a smart move.

But then don’t forget David Miliband was the first Minister to blog and also tried to co-create environment policy using a wiki.

The bottom line is, I guess, that there’s lots of good stuff happening at a granular level. What we need is for someone to pull it all together – maybe the next election’s the moment in histroy when this will happen