Why #AskTheChancellors left me cold

Channel 4's Ask The Chancellors - or #AskTheChancellors to give it its proper name - last night was a first tilt at bringing a little US-style televised debate to the General Election process.

And the consensus seems to be: it wasn't a half bad attempt; Vince Cable performed best on the night; George Osborne managed not to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and Alistair Darling displayed an air of confidence that suggested the memo about clearing their desks hasn't reached Labour HQ just yet.

For many though the real interest appears to be in the level of social media engagement the event attracted. Charlie Beckett, director of Polis, was on the Today show this morning discussing Twitter's role in the whole three-ring circus. He's also blogged about it: 

"...the real winner was the internet. This was the biggest live political social media event ever seen in the UK. Alongside the TV show was a Facebook page, online voting and comment on the Channel 4 website and the Twitter #askthechancellors debate thread."

And what did all of this online activity and polling tell us? What did we learn from the one-third, one-third, one-third, split across the voting that barely shifted - only marginally in Vince Cable's favour -throughout the evening? We learned that Twitter is largely the preserve of the middle-class, liberal, politically engaged minority spread across a mainstream political right-to-left spectrum of almost unprecedented narrowness.

And we knew that already, right?

This is my problem with declaring the whole thing a success, just because it fitted in with the narrow view of how a minority of us want to see the cogs of democracy turn. It worked well as a multimedia love-in for people already engaged in the political process and locked-in to intransigent opinions. Everybody could show their team colours, boo the bad guys and then at the end of it all proclaim their guy the winner.

But the most insightful comment I saw on Twitter all evening was perhaps this from @DominicFarrell:

Those who will decide the #election were watching Coronation Street

Perhaps the debate should have been held in the Rovers Return after all, or in the Queen Vic with soap stars channelling our questions. It may sound preposterous to anybody reading this, but no more preposterous than how our social media round trip all the way back to square one will have looked to other sections of the electorate who may now feel further disenfranchised the more we revel in social media's role in all of this. 

Of course, adding lots of layers of multimedia interactivity for those of us who get excited about such things doesn't actively detract from the baseline experience of the television broadcast and shouldn't be dismissed. It may even draw in a few stragglers who like the media more than the message and the subsequent coverage may inspire a few analogue politicos to embrace these new channels.

But looking at that broadcast in isolation for those who don't want the Twitter and Facebook bolt-on experience or the live online polling, I saw little in the Question Time-lite format to get pulses racing.

Comments

[charlie beckett]

Hi Will,
I think it is rather patronising to say that those who will decide the election were somehow all watching Coronation Street. (It may well be inaccurate as well - the key swing voters may well be the kind of people who are on FB etc).
The idea that social media is the preserve of a liberal middle class elite club is odd. If that's the case why are the Conservatives so busy online?
I also wonder what kind of event would satisfy your requirements? Perhaps it would have to be something so ridiculously sensational that it would lose much of its political significance (viz Live Aid). Holding it in the Rovers Return is not such a dumb idea but it's only a change of location. You would still have real politicians, not actors.
The fact is that through time immemorial, only a minority of people are consistently interested in 'official' politics. A healthy democratic system at least tries to be more open and engaged, but in the end it's up to us as citizens to chose whether it's worthwhile or satisfying to take part.
Of course, one TV show and a lot of Tweeting doesn't change the course of an election. It would be deeply frightening if it did. Real people make political decisions based on longer-term experience of real life as well as the media (thank God).
In a small way last night's debate with it's slightly more open format and it's connectivity to social media was a step in the right direction. I think it's good to welcome that kind of step before sniping at it as a 'circus' for 'stragglers'.
cheers
Charlie

[Will Sturgeon]

Charlie, Apologies if you or anybody else felt patronised. That certainly wasn't my intention. Likewise, apologies if you thought my cynicism offensive or uncalled for.

Believe me, I'm as guilty as anybody of being a cheerleader for social media but I think if we lose the ability to question the logic of our arguments and actions we're in trouble. Likewise if we assume 'Trending' topics on Twitter are a barometer of anything other than conversations on Twitter.

Regarding the comment that most offended: I do think among the deluge of, as you yourself point out, often asinine comment last night, it was comparatively far less foolish of Dominic Farrell to point out there were potentially six or seven times as many people watching Coronation Street (certainly less foolish than point-scoring on candidates' haircuts and dodgy dye-jobs).

Yes, that comment over-simplifies the issue of voter apathy, though I assumed that was its figurative intent, but I do wonder whether Ask The Chancellors showed so effectively the ability of social media to counter apathy and increase engagement with politics or whether it merely showed that the very people you'd expect to turn up did turn up. On that level its success was perhaps guaranteed but its value less clear - to me anyway.

On the "liberal" point. Apologies (again) for the confusion, that's just my poor writing or political ignorance, or both. I deliberately used a lower case 'L' in the hopes of avoiding that and hoped what I meant would be clear from the rest of the sentence: "...liberal, politically engaged minority spread across a mainstream political right-to-left spectrum of almost unprecedented narrowness".

I probably should have just said "middle ground", because I perhaps wrongly assumed many in both the centre-right and centre-left camps are still in favour of many basic tenets of liberalism. But I'm probably wrong.

Same again with "three-ring-circus" ...I only used that because it was - quite literally - three performers, stood separately in front of one audience but performing simultaneously.

Either way, apologies once more for any offence taken.

I certainly do agree that we shouldn't not 'do' politics just because more people want to watch the other channel. And likewise politics should embrace the communication channels everybody wants to use. I just thought some people may have been getting carried away with social media being the answer to all of this but I clearly lacked the tact and diplomacy to argue that point sensitively.

Thanks for commenting.