“Innovators need a heavy dose of faith. They need to trust their intuition that they are working on a big idea. That faith need not be blind.” – Clayton Christensen
Introduction
Considering how Trump was able to hijack media space by tweeting controversial and offending statements on Twitter and how Obama mastered social media in 2008, technology has the capability to empower those who already have power to gather more power. But what about those who are in the underdog position. Despite having no data of their voters and had to start from scratch, the OUT-campaign during Brexit was able to build a software that would take them to victory.
Brexit – How technology was used to communicate with voters
“We were the first campaign in the UK to put almost all our money into digital communication then have it partly controlled by people whose normal work was subjects like quantum information (combined with political input from Paul Stephenson and Henry de Zoete, and digital specialists AIQ). We could only do this properly if we had proper canvassing software. We built it partly in-house and partly using an external engineer who we sat in our office for months.” Dominic Cummings in his blog
It could be said that Brexit was achieved using large data sets and software. Cummings and his team built VICS or Voting Intention Collection System. He explains how his team had to start from scratch, because they didn’t have any data on their voters, whereas IN-campaign had established a firm database and had support from political parties. “If you want to make big improvements in communication, my advice is – hire physicists, not communications people from normal companies and never believe what advertising companies tell you about ‘data’ unless you can independently verify it.” A very stark opinion, but it does point out that traditional communication practises are not going to cut it anymore. OUT-campaign had a powerful software that had the ability to find the eurosceptics in the country and bombard them with messages that we’re designed and delivered with surgical precision.
Discussion:
Many articles have been written about how the information revolution is threatening the political system. This kind of disruptiveness has been depicted from multiple viewpoints: how the Macedonian teenagers were able to make fake news and seemingly authentic looking news websites that would be populated by fake news about presidential candidates, or how the media organizations didn’t take Trump seriously but rather, quite literally. One could say that communication technology such as social media channels is a double-edged sword: It’s capacity to give insight and target an audience with a specific message is incredibly valuable to companies and indviduals in power. But it could also be poisonous to the public discourse as those who are in power can spread a specific agenda as many times as they like and could develop arguments that don’t even have to be rooted in truth. It is not surprising that the former President Barack Obama, urged people to step outside of their online bubbles. He encourged people to seek alternative forms of truth.
“For too many of us, it’s become safer to retreat into our own bubbles, whether in our neighborhoods or college campuses or places of worship or our social media feeds, surrounded by people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions.”, Obama said in his farewell speech
What is fascinating that 22 years ago, Jay Blumler, currently the Emeritus Professor in the University of Leeds, published a book called the Crisis in Public Communication, which set out to describe how the mass communication was in the world of politics very influential and controversial. This couldn’t be more true in today’s world as well. Only, now we have more sophisticated ways to communicate: Our public discourse is based on these platforms where anyone can publish their opinion. However, more evidence is needed to assess, how technology has the power to render politics in the post-truth game but at the moment there seems to be a clear guideline: the one who has the highest volume when talking, wins.
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