Interactivity + Transparency = Lost Elections

Jonathan Edwards is the Plaid Cymru’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, hoping to take over the mantle (but let's hope not the ethno-nationalism) of Adam Price at the next election.

He certainly seems to be the one for the grandiose sound-byte and is also apparently not at all nervous about hiding his light under a bushel:

THE "most modern election campaign in the UK" will be run in Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, claims Plaid Cymru’s prospective parliamentary candidate for the constituency, Jonathan Edwards.

That's some claim:

Launching his campaign website, he added: "The website will front a whole range of new media technology that we will be embracing.

"People can follow the campaign via Twitter, Facebook and Flickr."

The churlish would point out all the other parties have been using that new media technology for some time now...but, as it happens, his site is not too shabby at all.

The problem, however, he and other prospective candidates, dabbling their big toes in the new media, will surely face is contained within this sentence:

"In Plaid we have always endeavoured to run open, transparent and interactive political campaigns."

I've pointed out previously that I believe blogs and the wider internet will impact on the next General Election overall in a negative way. If he decides to truly embrace the concepts of "openness" and "interactivity" through the tools offered by the new media, how many new voters will he attract? People who have been impressed by his online presence may tell one or two friends or relatives- that potential small scale feel-good factor isn't going to go viral. Balance that by how many voters he risks losing by something said or written (and publicised to a much wider public audience by his opponents) on his blog, Twitter, Facebook.

If I were a party manager, I'd certainly go through the motions of setting up the various new media technology tools to publicise candidates to a wider (or at least younger) audience. At the same time I'd be quietly ensuring that the kind of "open" and "interactive" (ie offensive, reckless, petty etc etc etc) debate that occurs on a daily basis in the UK political blogosphere is conspicuous by its absence.

As is probably obvious by now I am an extreme cynic and sceptic about what positive effects blogging can achieve in a relatively small and intense political market. Fair play to Edwards if he does live up to his promise but by doing so he will undoubtedly be playing with unpredictable and uncontrollable fire.