In an age where technology dominates our lives, there has until recently been a glaring absence of it in politics. While the politically active understand the uses of social media, very little has been done to insert technology into the act of policy making itself.
Social media provides any number of platforms for people to share information and most people in Europe know that they can access any information that they feel they need. The difficulty in the past has been that responsibility has been placed on the individual to seek out precisely the information they want. Now people can be targeted online by those who want them to receive certain information; technology has made information sharing the norm because conceptually social media is ‘social’.
Up until recently this virtual political world had taken place mostly in terms of opposition, giving voice to whistle blowing, protest movements, iconoclasm and so on. Julian Assange and Wikileaks is an excellent example of this. While politics is no stranger to using technology to sound out the views of its supporters it has, on the whole, held back from communicating with the public directly with a view to allowing the public’s views to actually shape party policy. Instead, politics has relied on internal machinations to edit the final offer that will be presented to the public.
