This will be a blogging election: bloggers, already a political and media force in the US, will have real visibility in the UK for the first time. Will that be a good thing? Yes - if you think politics should be even more personal than they already are. Blogging is a child of the confessional age: that time which has brought Big Brother, Jerry Springer and I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.
Stephen Coleman, professor of internet studies at the Oxford Internet Institute and the country's expert on blogospheric intercourse, thinks bloggers will flourish and will be of three kinds: one, political wonks whose pitch will be that "you can't trust anybody, except me"; two, candidates and their aides who do blogs to show they are in touch with the emotions of ordinary people and find the fuss and flummery of politics as tedious as the next voter; and three, journalists or would-be journalists who write what they can't in reports or columns, or do not have reports and columns in which to say anything.
"The blogosphere," says Prof Coleman, "allows people to say things like: 'I've never been able to stand Michael Howard's voice!' It is a place for the expression of emotion and the unsubstantiated observation. There are no protocols. There are no limits. It's getting more and more about ME and what I FEEL all the time."
If British blogs follow the example of the Americans, they will have in their sights not just politicians, but what they abbreviate to MSM - the mainstream media: reviled and despised journalists who, say the bloggers, fear to tell the truth, miss the real stories and lag days behind the event. They hate nothing more than a press consensus; bloggers love to show such a thing to be a fraud, and will seek to unpick it.
"Go back to the 1992 election," says Prof Coleman. "Virtually all the press had decided that Kinnock could never become prime minister; should not become prime minister; and were waiting for a moment which would prove they were right. Then came the Sheffield Rally, when he punched the air: and this was interpreted as proving he was unfit for the premiership. If there had been bloggers they might have been kinder to him."
The language of bloggers has moved on from that of press and broadcast journalists. While the journalists have become increasingly aggressive and willing to make a large issue of a politician's character, bloggers want to make an issue of their own character and how it's affected by the politicians and politics. "To blog," writes Prof Coleman in a forthcoming essay in Political Quarterly, "is to ...affirm that your thoughts are at least as worth hearing as anyone else's; to emerge from the spectating audience as a player."
FT.com’s Zero Five blog looks at media coverage of the election
This is a challenge to politicians in two ways. First, because for generations they have been used to a style of politics in which large groups are addressed en masse, with most of the communication coming from the politician. And second, because they are necessarily loyal to parties and programmes which are certain and, at least at election times, set hard. At its best, blogging is open, free-flowing, ready to be corrected and revised.
Politicians who experi-ment with blogs are, so far, few: they include Clive Soley and Austin Mitchell (Labour), Richard Allan (Liberal Democrat) and Boris Johnson (Conservative) the last still a practising journalist. His website is "true blue" but like his journalism, also boyishly amusing. His posting, for Sunday anticipated Tuesday's announcement of the election with a poem. Part of it reads: "It's time to rally round the flag, and this time not the red one, Let's make the Labour party sick, or better still, a dead one."
Austin Mitchell has grasped the idea that a weblog should be personal dissent, not party loyalty. In a recent posting, mourning the death of James Callaghan, the former Labour prime minister, he writes: "he [Callaghan] was a leader, not charting a course and changing it every day like Tony Blair, but leading the party and holding it together by listening to it." He is, however, retiring at this election: it makes bearing personal witness to what he calls the purposelessness of this parliament a less fraught endeavour. john.lloyd@ft.com
