Don’t mention Saturday
In which the political editor avoids any discussion of politics.
Welcome to the curfew zone – the electoral version of the Fawlty Towers line “Don’t mention the war!” Under our electoral law, there’s a certain event that mustn’t be canvassed with any particularity, in any publication likely to be on a news stand on Saturday, September 23. So that’s us, for the next two weeks.
However, there are some big-picture aspects of our politics that can be tackled during the curfew, and hopefully not just in the anodyne terms of a beauty contestant’s speech, keen though we are at the Listener on world peace and a chance to work with animals.
One is the striking popularity of the leaders’ debates. It turns out people will watch politics on television – in prime time, and without the addition of cookery, real estate, interior decorating, cod-medieval costumes, kittens or a ball of any kind. Ratings of 1.2 million and 1 million respectively for the first two televised debates came as possibly disquieting surprises to the TVNZ and Three programmers, who have steadily marginalised and/or chattified current-affairs content over the years. Politics has for years been regarded as Roundup for ratings.
This debate fever could be a blip, but it’s a potential trend to watch for, especially given the global boom in news consumption wryly dubbed the Trump Bump.
Clearly ours is no media Klondike. Now that free-to-air, pre-programmed television is a dying institution, only a foolish TV producer would mortgage the house to recreate the old prime-time Tonight, Gallery or Dateline Monday. But emerging patterns of social-media consumption suggest it’s no longer smart to write off politics’ audience potential as TV bosses have done. For an increasing proportion of the population, watching an actual television set at the time a show is broadcast, or even at all, is a rarity, which is what makes those leaders’ debate audiences the more remarkable.
Political content has been doing a brisk trade on the internet, too: viewings for some video posts in this campaign have hit six figures. The trouble is that we still don’t know what influence online content has on our thinking about issues. One long-held suspicion is that it’s likely to entrench existing views, because of the “echo-chamber” effect by which people carefully select what they see so as to filter out views and interests that don’t conform to their own.
FEEDING FRENZY
But these aren’t airtight bubbles. Friends and family can be relied on to post all manner of material to our feeds, including on politics and current affairs. As appetites get jaded, people may range more widely for online fodder. Now so many people have at least a once-daily trawl through the mood-salad that is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like, we could be approaching a digital reconstitution of the old daily-newspaper model, with an everbroadening assortment of topics and views passing before our eyes.
There’s already been one false dawn of social media’s political efficacy. Barack Obama used what was then an emerging tool to apparently great effect in his first presidential run in 2008, but later attempts didn’t work nearly as well. Apart from the sheer novelty factor of online politicking, there was a pre-existing bow wave of support for Obama; it is more likely that the sentiment caused the online activity than that the online activity increased the support.
The only reasonable conclusion we can draw so far is that eyeballs, the primary target of web commerce, do not automatically mean
To click is not necessarily to read, and to read is not necessarily to agree.
consumer engagement, which is the holy grail. That goes for politics as well. To click is not necessarily to read, and to read is not necessarily to agree, relate, enjoy or spend money. There’s even a perverse streak in most of us to be agreeably annoyed: to click on things we know we will hate for the frisson of superiority this can give us.
MORE IS NOT MORE
Academic study of last election’s online influence found little to no correlation between the volume of a given party’s activity and its ultimate vote. But we’re at an awkward, gangly stage of communications technology, where a significant, but steadily dwindling proportion of voters are getting most of their political information and impressions from the six o’clock news. The rest are getting it from sources more diverse, and thus harder to measure and quantify.
What is measurable is a new enthusiasm for leaving the screen and going to a political meeting in person. Audiences of several hundred have been common for parties major and minor in this campaign, despite it being held during one of the wettest winters in living memory. Some of this is down to new faces and a gleeful appetite for guaranteed biffo. But it’s all good, healthy civic participation, offsetting the often-aimless mall trawl and walkabout that candidates feel obliged to do.
In contrast, we don’t seem to like being shouted at. Candidates who motor through electorates trumpeting their electability through a loudhailer are about as welcome as those council vehicles that announce “Your water is about to be turned off!” Nor do we seem to warm to impromptu harangues: street-corner meetings are often a sad fizzer, even given a realistic lack of ambition on the candidate’s part. A colleague attended one scheduled by an Auckland MP, who even gallantly provided chairs. This necessarily became a one-on-one interview. And there were still two chairs left empty.
We’ve had the usual visual clutter of billboards, but vandalism has seemed rarer this campaign, and more apt to be witty.
Advance voting has also had the effect of trialling nudge theory with a new ritual: you vote, you wear a badge saying you voted and you post a selfie of you and the badge on social media.
The Electoral Commission piloted a prototype Votes 2 U, installing polling booths in supermarkets and on campuses. The results will be instructive, particularly if they prove to encourage many people to vote who would not otherwise have bothered.
Online voting still looks too risky given the ingenuity of hackers. But could a mobile Txt-A-Booth or Ubervote service be far away?
As for those who adopt the old American injunction to “vote early and vote often”, facial screening technology will soon thwart that.
One old saw that technology can’t fix: whoever you vote for, it’s always a politician that gets elected.
Audiences of several hundred have been common, in one of the wettest winters in living memory.