While journalists speculated about whether the 2010 UK General Election was the country’s ”first Internet election”, semantic polling (using algorithms to read social media data) was under-examined. Nick Anstead and Ben O’Loughlin explore the role of semantic polling in the 2010 election and argue that it will become even more important in the future.

We have recently studied how the public reacts to offline events (especially mediated events) using social media. Our first work in this area related to the now infamous appearance of BNP leader Nick Griffin BBC Question Time in October 2009. The second piece focused on social media reactions to opinion polls published in the aftermath of the 2010 UK election Leaders’ Debates.

These papers were general in tone, simply trying to document and theorise an emerging phenomeon. However, this got us thinking – would it be possible to extract social media data and make meaningful statements about public opinion from it, in a manner similar to opinion polls or a focus group?

As we soon discovered though, this was not a wholly original idea. Dotted through 2010 election coverage were allusions to the idea that social media did indeed reflect public opinion. Post-debates, Newsnight ran segments on reactions on Twitter, while the BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones wrote a number of blog entries about social media and public opinion. Channel 4 and national newspapers also published this information.

Data from social media in these stories was used in a number of ways. At the simplest level, individual tweets were cited as a sort of e-vox pop. Slightly more systematically, quantative data was used to indicate a high or low level of public engagement with the election, or to show the support for specific politicians through the trending of hashtags such as #IAgreeWithNick or, most famously, #NickCleggsFault.

Most interestingly though, 2010 saw the emergence of a group of firms that engaged in semantic analysis of Twitter. This semantic polling involves using algorithms to “read” tens of thousands of social media items and then coding them according to their content. The data gathered by three firms related to the Leaders’ Debate is included in the figure below.

Figure 1: Traditional pollsters and semantic researchers compared, UK General Election debates, 2010

For sake of comparison, we have also included polling numbers from three traditional pollsters (we should also add the caveat at this point that this is just a selection of the semantic data published during the election). Of course, this data and the method used to gather it is subject to a number of criticisms. As some commentators noticed at the time, Twitter was an irreverant place in comparison with the starchy seriousness of the debates (and their non-laughing audiences). But can natural language algorithms really cope with irony and sarcasm?

However, perhaps the most obvious issue relates to the type of people who use Twitter. After all, we know they are disproportionately middle class, young, educated and technology literate. Ever since Gallup predicted the results of 1936 US Presidential election, the holy grail fo public opinion research has been representativeness. Is Twitter just a Literary Digest for the modern age?

In the future, that will depend on how semantic research techniques develop. There are three possibilities. The first is that social media data breaks the polling paradigm established by Gallup, and becomes a method more akin to the mass observation, most famously used in the 1940s. As such, representativeness might become less prized and insight into the nuances of how people reason and think could become valued. Second, the passage of time (leading to the normalising of social media use and a population shift) makes social media data more representative. This is, of course, a long term process, although there is some evidence that Twitter is already more representative than it was three or four years ago.

Third is the interesting idea of seeking to apply population segmentation techniques to social media data. The key idea here is interlocking multiple pieces of data. This process is already a big part of the political and commercial world, including pollsters scaling their data to make it representative of the populations a whole and political parties paying a fortune for access to databases such as Mosaic to engage in postcode-based targeting. Think for a second about how much information people put onto social networks – who their friends are, where they work, what they read, and what films, television and music they like (as well as, increasingly, geolocational information). In other words, everything you need to build a complete picture of who they are and where they fit into the national population. If this data could be harvested and overlaid with overtly political information, analysed by natural language processing techniques, it might become possible to create far more sophisticated models of public opinion at given moments.

So we might see 2010 as the embryonic election for this kind of analysis. Indeed, retrospectively, it could seem very innocent, like Harold MacMillan struggling with television (note how he clearly forgets which camera he should be looking at about 1.25 in, and then only realizes after a few seconds). Indeed, if things were to develop along the lines of the third scenario, then a whole host of questions are raised. Do the public really understand what might be happening to information they post online, and the type of picture it could be used to create of them personally? Given that Twitter, Facebook and whatever follows them are corporate actors, what obligations do they have? How open to manipulation is the online space, given that in 2010, many political parties saw it as a battleground to be won, rather than as a method for understanding the public? Who should regulate the way the data is gathered and presented? At the moment, pollsters engage in self-regulation through the British Polling Council. No such body exists for social media analysis.

We are now continuing with the second strand of our research, which involves interviewing a number of political actors from the data campaign of 2010 – party campaign managers, journalists, data consultants, traditional pollsters and election regulators. Our preliminary prediction is this: social media data generated through semantic analysis will be big in the 2012 US election, and integrated in to public opinion studies by the (likely) UK election of 2015.

Please read our comments policy before posting

Read the longer paper, 2010: The Semantic Analysis Election?, here.

You may also be interested in the following posts:

1. 2010 may not have marked the first ‘internet election’, but digital platforms are of ever increasing importance in political campaigning
2. Book Review: Political Communication in Britain: The Leader Debates, the Campaign and the Media in the 2010 General Election
3. The Barnsley by-election suggests that the collective health of the Coalition government is now in jeopardy. On current polls the Liberal Democrats will do badly in the May local elections

Asiya Islam reviews Blogistan, a book shedding new light on the special significance of blogging in Iran. A must-read for those interested in the Middle East, media studies or free speech, the book should be seen as the tip of an iceberg. The politics of blogging in Iran is a wide topic that is integral to exploring issues of free speech, democracy and governance in the current scenario. 

Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran. Annabelle Sreberny & Gholam Khiabany. IB Tauris. September 2010.

Find this book:  Google Books Amazon LSE Library

Iran and blogging. Most of us, when encountering the relationship between the two, would probably think about conservatism and the extent of repression in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Arrests of some prominent Iranian bloggers, such as Hussein Derakshan, popularised through the Western media would also spring to mind. But not many of us would know that Persian is one of the most used languages in the blogosphere or that there are almost 700,000 active Iranian bloggers. This is precisely why the book Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran is a must read for those interested in media studies, the Middle East or politics in general.

The book by Anabelle Srebarny (School of Oriental and African Studies) and Gholam Khiabany (London Metropolian University) offers a very interesting insight into the working of the Republic, its contradictions and its modern narrative underwritten by the emergence of the internet and blogging.

An overview of how the possibility and the prevalence of the internet and blogs has changed (or not changed) the socio-political scene in Iran couldn’t be more timely. The year 2009 witnessed what was called the ‘Twitter revolution’ in Iran. The heavy reliance on and use of Twitter for spreading word about the protests following the controversial election results earned it this nickname. Its similarity with the use of Blackberry messaging in the recent UK riots is quite striking.

As Srebarny and Khiabany assert, the socio-political importance of blogging in Iran cannot be understood without referring to the history of revolutions and attempts at democratisation in the country. At the same time, blogging or blogs should not be seen as synonymous to ‘resistance’ for it is a flawed perspective. In Iran, religious clergy and even state officials have taken on blogging as a way of propagating religious and pro-state sentiments. Such a phenomenon is indicative of the contradictory threads of tradition and modernity in Iranian (and for that matter, many other developing countries) society.

What then is the special significance of blogging in Iran, one may ask. As Srebarny and Khiabany put it, “…while a poet might be just a poet in England, a poet in Persian is most probably writing between the lines, evading the censor and pushing the boundaries of publicly acceptable expression”. In Iran, largely governed by religious principles and laws, heavy surveillance prevails because any deviation from the norm is seen as a threat to the regime. Internet, in particular, has been the object of this surveillance because it is open to influences from outside Iran in a way that no other media channel has been before. The danger of ‘Westernisation’ often springs up as a rationalisation of devising strict regulations around the internet by the State (such as censoring key words like ‘women’ and ‘sex’ in search engines).

Blogging in Iran has been, to a certain extent, liberating in that it has developed a new public space for debate which had otherwise been curtailed through the closure of many critical newspapers and journals. Public space for debate has been created by blogs in the UK as well with newspapers like the Guardian using this medium for increasing or supplementing dialogue (see Comment is Free). But in Iran the blogosphere is more important in that it has emerged as a substitute for activities and media clamped down by the government.

For example, Iranian women, who are excluded from almost all public spaces have turned to blogs to express their opinions. It is a surprise (or perhaps not a surprise at all for most revolutions spring from repression) that in a country where there is almost no political representation of women, there is hardly a gender divide in the digital world with women bloggers traversing the boundaries of the public and the private by discussing hejab, familial and sexual relations and many other controversial topics on their blogs.

Though the book provides a massive overview of blogging and related issues in Iran, there are questions that remain unanswered, mostly because of the lack of research in this area. There is, firstly, a lack of clarity as to who ‘Iranian bloggers’ are. Heavy emigration has characterised Iran at various points of times due to various reasons. There is, therefore, a diasporic element to be considered when talking about Iranian blogs and bloggers.

The question of whether blogs have managed to create a vibrant and strong public sphere is also a difficult one. Socio-economic realities still very much shape the Iranian digital world and to assume that to be a blogger is to be free to contest and debate is wrong and simplistic.

The book should really be seen as the tip of an iceberg – the politics of blogging in Iran is a wide topic that is integral to exploring issues of free speech, democracy and governance in the current scenario. Blogistan: The Internet and Politics in Iran is an important read, for it initiates a discussion that could and should lead to further research in this very interesting area.

Find this book:  Google Books Amazon LSE Library

You may also be interested in the following posts:

1. Book Review: The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You
2. Book Review: Making Sense of Media and Politics: Five Principles in Political Communication
3. Book Review: Social Movements, Public Spheres and the European Politics of the Environment

As economic growth remains elusive and fears grow concerning the possibility of a double dip recession, there is cause to believe that the UK could be headed for a decade-long period of stagnation and deprivation. Charles Levy outlines how a new initiative, the Big Innovation Centre, aims to establish areas for policy action to stimulate the creative capacity of the UK’s innovation ecosystem and thus generate growth and jobs.

Without urgent coordinated action across government, business and finance, the UK faces a ‘lost decade’ of stagnation. The government must act now to adopt a strategy of collaborative, entrepreneurial investment in those areas likely to bring the greatest dividends in growth and jobs. This is the simple message that we put to Vince Cable, the Secretary of State for Business Innovation and Skills at the launch of the Big Innovation Centre yesterday.

The Big Innovation Centre is a groundbreaking initiative from The Work Foundation and Lancaster University. Its ambition is to deliver a step change in Britain’s capacity to innovate and generate wealth. The centre is supported by ten companies, two trusts, three public bodies and a consortium of top research universities led by Oxford University. All agree that without major change the country faces stagnating living standards, mounting deprivation and a growing structural trade deficit.

But, at the Big Innovation Centre we also see huge opportunity as the pace of scientific and technological advance accelerates. There are likely to be just as many transformative so-called general purpose technologies (GPTs) in the 21^st centaury as over the past five hundred years. Like electrification, steam power, or the internet, the next wave of broad and multi-purpose technologies will create and destroy industries and business models, remake markets and our lives, and overturn the established corporate order. The UK must develop a fully functioning innovation and investment ecosystem over the next fifteen years to seize the opportunity of exploiting these new waves of useful knowledge.

Our anchor paper Making the UK a Global Innovation Hub: How business, finance and an enterprising state can transform the UK introduces a policy agenda that sets out how government, businesses and public bodies should work together to develop innovation networks and ecosystems, that are founded on open innovation models that can harness the creative capabilities of both public and private sectors. The key recommendations include:

• Building the Technology Strategy Board into the most effective global grant giver for research into GPTs and their application;
• Working to develop the most globally sophisticated national network of Technology and Innovation Centres, organised as far as possible on open innovation principles; and
• Co-developing with financial institutions a structural shift that creates a more effective supply of equity and loan finance to support innovative small and medium enterprises.

Our work has also identified five broad areas for priority action, all of which are critical if we are to build a strong innovation ecosystem:

• Building innovative markets, places and networks – innovation is about much more than single firms working in isolation, it depends on interactions between business, consumers and many other forms of institution. We need to ensure that we support the complex processes that operate within advanced innovation networks;
• Establishing an innovation friendly financial system – we’re concerned that the finance sector appears to be systematically failing the SMEs which could provide the greatest source of innovation;
• Developing universities as interactive partners in systems of innovation – Universities and public research organisations are key nodes in innovation networks. They generate knowledge and act as catalysts of business spin-off institutions, but we need to do more to fully immerse and embed all of our universities as true interactive partners right at the heart of our innovation system;
• Delivering skills for innovation – These are poorly understood. Our focus will be on identifying which higher and technical skills are pivotal for innovation and productivity, and how the university and college system can best deliver them;
• How our state can be more enterprising in how it supports innovation – regulation and public procurement are two key instruments to drive innovation. One of our work programmes will look at how the public sector can design markets which best support innovation and investment.

Uniquely, the Big Innovation Centre will have the resources and capacity to think in a holistic way about the entire innovation ecosystem. In understanding the contribution of individual institutions or policies in each of these areas we will be able to appreciate the context, connections and relationships with other actors.

By working jointly with leading universities, businesses and policy groups we will be in a unique position to find ways to help these organisations better work together to drive the innovation our economy needs. For example this joint working is key to understanding the barriers businesses face when accessing knowledge and building relationships with academic institutions. It is these types of deep external connections that will enable the Big Innovation Centre to have a significant impact on the organisations we work with, as well as the wider economy.

Please read our comments policy before posting

You may also be interested in the following posts:

1. As the coalition government moves to create new public-private partnerships and sell off government assets, the QinetiQ privatization of 2006 is a case study in how not to do things ‘transparently’
2. Making the most of our public services will demand a new way of thinking about support for innovation
3. The current jobs crisis is the result of a lack of business confidence and a shortage of consumers with money to spend. The government needs to create a long-term framework to drive innovation and raise productivity across the economy

The gender balance in UK politics is one of the most unbalanced in Europe, as only 22 per cent of candidates standing for Parliament in the last general election were female. New research by the Hansard Society on gender and digital politics has looked at the gender difference in online political discussion and debates, and here Andy Williamson examines the findings of the research, concluding that a more conversational, collaborative and less combative model of politics is really what is needed.

Politics remains a male bastion. The gender balance amongst MPs and also amongst the candidates who stood for Parliament at the last general election is low, at 22 per cent women in both cases, although unfortunately this will come as no surprise to many.

There are more women than men in the UK, more women vote than men, and, interestingly, women are marginally more likely to blog than men. So can blogging and the internet pave the way for more equal political participation and representation? According to recent research by the Hansard Society on gender and digital politics, the possibility looks slim.

Online political participation

When it comes to active online political participation, such as writing blogs or commenting on them, the research found male authors account for 80 per cent of content on MPs’ blogs, 85 per cent of political media blogs and 93 per cent of local councillor’s blogs. In fact, 85 per cent of all the blogs in last year’s Total Politics Blog Political Awards were written by men. Taking one political blog as an example, 79 per cent of posts on LibDemVoice were written by men, as were 90 per cent of the comments.

Whilst these figures mirror offline activities such as writing to newspapers, access to the internet is more evenly balanced: 84 per cent of men and 79 per cent of women have access, with 81 per cent of men and 76 per cent of women using the internet every day or almost every day. When it comes to blogs and social networks, 44 per cent of men and 42 per cent of women said that they had posted messages on chat sites, social networks or blogs.

New sites for political discussion

But there are other places that some women use to discuss politics online, which aren’t included in surveys of political blogs, for example, as they are places that would not traditionally have been perceived as political. One example of this is Mumsnet, a website for parents, which this month has active discussions around public sector pensions, the NHS, EU and phone hacking, all political issues.

The results of a survey found that more men than women feel that they know about politics; 62 per cent say they are knowledgeable about politics compared with 42 per cent of women. Most likely the variation lies in the respondents’ self-confidence, sugared with a little social desirability bias. Certainly, it is repeated in other surveys about political knowledge. Certainty to vote is more evenly balanced; 59 per cent of women say they are certain to vote at a general election compared with 57 per cent of men. The same is true for signing a petition, which had been done by 40 per cent of men and 42 per cent of women.

Political exclusion, not digital exclusion

It seems that a factor in the differing levels of gendered online political participation is the nature of that political participation itself, reflected in both online and offline activity. Indeed, Electoral Commission research shows that women are as or more likely to participate in cause-oriented activities but men are more active in campaign politics.

The evidence for online politics suggests that the more an activity involves self-promotion, expounding your views to others or the risk of conflict, the more likely there is to be a male dominance. The balance between men and women decreases as the inherent level of contention or potential for conflict rises. Gender imbalance online seems to be the result of wider political exclusion, not digital exclusion. Where women are active in politics, they are just as likely as their male counterparts to be digitally active. The glimmer of light in all of this is that women MPs are as or more likely than their male counterparts to use social networking tools such as Twitter.

Perhaps movement towards a more conversational, collaborative and less combative model of politics is really what is needed.

Please read our comments policy before commenting.

You may also be interested in the following posts:

1. The government’s new Digital Economy Act will do little to prevent file sharing – the music industry must continue to innovate online if it is to survive
2. Britain needs a digital inclusion policy with concrete targets for both availability and take-up to counter the emergence of a digital underclass.
3. Ten years after tax, social security departments in the USA and elsewhere are moving cautiously online. The UK is pioneering ‘digital by default’ services and the advent of a universal credit at DWP could be an opportunity for breakthrough progress

As academics work to illustrate the true value of their work to the public, some might struggle to make a seemingly esoteric project seem relevant, accessible and interesting to the public at large. Alastair Dunning believes that the advancement of online crowdsourcing may hold some answers.

In the push to make clear and unquestionable links between research and its effects on society, academics with seemingly esoteric projects might struggle to make their work accessible and interesting to the public. But projects centring on Scots language dictionaries, tattered Greek papyri and Bentham’s philosophy of utilitarianism have all made the jump through innovative use of crowdsourcing. A growing number of projects, such as Ancient Lives, Transcribe Bentham, Old Weather and Scots Words and Places, are making sophisticated use of the web to actively engage the general public as contributors to their research.

Old Weather, for example, invites the general public to transcribe naval logs, thus providing crucial meteorological data for climate scientists, as well as opening up sources for the history of the British navy. Transcribe Bentham works with a range of groups, in particular schools, to decipher the numerous papers of Jeremy Bentham. For such projects, securing user contributions is about much more than impact. They provide a venue for communities outside academia to play a meaningful role within university research, providing insight and knowledge, saving time, and facilitating the route towards high-quality outputs.

It is worth remembering that crowdsourcing predates the digital era; the Oxford English Dictionary was initially built on contributions from volunteers and there is a long tradition of active contributions from the public within many fields of the social sciences.

But the development of crowdsourcing on the internet has rapidly accelerated the sophistication of its methodologies. Recent projects have been particularly adept at using social media, developing refined mechanisms for ensuring that contributions are quality assured, working with large data sets, and creating interfaces that interact in a way that reduces complexity and confusion.

These developments mean that there are suddenly novel prospects for future projects to interact with much larger audiences than previously, and to do so in a much more effective manner.

Of course, there are plenty of research projects that do not lend themselves to this kind of public engagement whatsoever. That’s fine. But for other projects, even those that could seem recondite in nature, there are opportunities to explore.

So as crowdsourcing advances, a vital factor will be the sensitivity with which the needs and motivations of those taking part are understood. If the research community engages the public in a utilitarian sense, as just cogs in a larger research wheel, then the whole methodology will become imperilled. Understanding what moves an inhabitant of a specific community, a child in the schoolroom, or the ‘silver surfer’ with a new internet connection, and making sure their input is suitably recognised is crucial.

Engagement, as Chris Batt pointed out in his report on the topic, must be a two-way conversation “knowledge co-creation and exchange rather than simply knowledge transfer: a dialogue which enriches knowledge for mutual benefit.”

The task of the University of Oxford’s RunCoCo team was to develop guidelines for projects wishing to develop digitised collections by asking the public to upload their own content or adding information to existing resources, as happened with the highly successful Great War Archive. Equally, the Citizen Science Alliance is working according to firm principles on how to interact with their users, as articulated in Arfon Smith’s podcast on the success of the Galaxy Zoo project. Indeed, the Alliance is now looking for other researchers with whom to work with and is requesting proposals for ideas.

If crowdsourcing is to continue to be embedded in research, then it is the principles and thinking drawn from RunCoCo or the Citizen Science Alliance that need to be adopted, adapted and implemented. There is a wealth of UK research that can be enhanced by the involvement of a engaged, knowledgeable and passionate UK public.

This article first appeared on the LSE’s Impact of Social Sciences blog on 25 August.

You may also be interested in the following posts:

1. The LSE Impact Blog’s new guide to using Twitter in university research, teaching, and impact activities, is now available.
2. There is a pressing need for credible research into the causes and the consequences of the recent riots. A new joint study between the LSE and the Guardian aims to address this.

Internet use and information technology seems ubiquitous throughout our society – for many, life would be unimaginable without it. But, as Ellen Helsper argues, there is a vast ‘digital underclass’ in the UK that has not benefitted from increasing rates of Internet access. New, targeted policies are needed to ensure access to digital technologies and their attendant benefits amongst the most disadvantaged groups.

A digital underclass is emerging in Britain, a group of people who are increasingly more disadvantaged in their ability to use the internet and other Information and Communication Technologies. As the government plans to make public services ‘digital by default’ these individuals will be unable to access them, not because of a lack of infrastructure but because of a lack of (effective) take up of the available connections.

Simpler solutions like improving infrastructure are unlikely to get this entrenched group of disengaged citizens online now or in the future. To avoid further entrenchment, concrete policy targets will have to be developed that focus not only on access but also on digital literacy, motivation and awareness as well as on broad engagement with the variety of opportunities available online.

Those who need access to services most are the least likely to take these up even when access is available. Therefore, a digital strategy that does not link to other social and economic policies is likely to fail. A joint effort between government, industry and the third sector is required to tackle the ever more complex problem of digital exclusion and to guarantee a competitive Digital Britain in the future.

The importance of digital inclusion

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), such as the Internet, provide access to a range of opportunities: information, education, communication, services, savings, jobs to name just a few. Increasingly, governments and commercial organisations are moving their services online. This means that those who do not have access to or are not able to use these technologies effectively are at a disadvantage compared to those who are more digitally included. In so-called information societies, digital literacy is just as important as traditional literacy to establish economic and social well-being.

Grounds for Optimism

Internet use continues to increase steadily in the UK. Recent figures indicate that in 2011 between 74 per cent (Ofcom) and 83 per cent (ONS) of the population has used the Internet. People connect at ever increasing speeds, broadband is the norm and dial-up the almost non-existent exception. This increase in uptake has led to some optimism amongst those who were concerned about digital exclusion.

This optimism may be partly behind the recent shift in UK digital policies – away from active intervention to improve use towards emphasising the rollout of superfast broadband. Underlying this is the assumption that high quality access will be taken up by everyone and that it will be used equally by all. This policy dossier shows that this policy shift in the UK is not mirrored in EU policy which is strengthening its focus on improving opportunities for use as well as access.

The question is if this British optimism is justified. There is statistical evidence that can help answer the two most pressing related queries:

• Will it be as easy to get the last 15 to 25% online as it was to convince the disconnected to connect in previous years?
• Can third sector initiatives, such as the RaceOnline, and the market lead the way to a fully digitally included nation with the government taking a back seat?

Our recent policy brief suggests that the answer to both questions is ‘No’.

Getting the last few online

To answer the question about how easy it will be to get the people who are disengaged online it is important to understand how use of ICTs has developed over time in different groups.

Figure 1 Percentage of different employment and education groups that has Broadband access at home

Source: ONS Omnibus Surveys. Base: Adult Internet Users in the UK (Helsper, 2011)

Figure 1 shows that, relative to other groups, people without employment and education are worse off now in connecting to the Internet than 6 years ago.  While all groups have a strongly increased take-up of broadband, take-up has been much slower in the lower educated unemployed group.

In a best case scenario it would take this group of unemployed lower educated people 20 years to catch up with those who are employed and have higher (university) education. However, this prediction is only sustainable if there is no levelling off of uptake in this group, which is unlikely since this has not been the case for other groups and media. In addition, for this prediction to be valid the technology to access the Internet would have to be the same in 20 years’ time. This even less likely since important elements like download speeds are 78 times faster now than they were 10 years ago.

Helen Milner (UK Online Centres) explains very lucidly in her blog that getting disadvantaged people online is not just an issue of availability of infrastructure, but ensuring take-up as well. Based on this and other data it is clear that rolling out superfast broadband by itself is not going to make the digital underclass disappear.

If the data suggest that infrastructure is not the (only) problem, what else might be limiting uptake of services?  Research shows that two other factors are very important for (effective) use of ICTs, confidence in the skills to use the technology and positive attitudes towards what these can offer.

Figure 2 Estimated Internet use skill level for different employment and education groups

Source: Oxford Internet Survey datasets. Base: Internet Users. (Helsper, 2011)

Figure 2 shows that, as was the case for access, amongst unemployed and lower educated Internet users there is very little improvement in Internet skills while amongst those with higher education confidence has increased exponentially in the last 6 years.

The unavoidable conclusion is that digital exclusion of the most disadvantaged has become entrenched, partly due to a lack of confidence, which continues to hinder them even when they have managed to secure access and go online. That is, the relative differences between those with higher education and employment and those with lower education and no employment have become larger over time.

Implications for Policy

Of course there can be no digital inclusion without access and proper infrastructure. Most people in Britain have access somewhere, but the quality of the connection and, most importantly the quality of engagement are of continuing concern. Therefore a policy that sets concrete targets for the roll out of high quality infrastructure across the country – instead of the rather vague ambition of “the best broadband network in Europe” (according to Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt) – should be priority number one if Britain wants to keep up with other advanced information societies.

However, existing super-fast broadband and eAccessibility initiatives might actually lead to the persistence of a digital underclass in Britain unless they are specifically aimed at narrowing the skills and engagement gap. The well-off have been able to take advantage of the better connections and the digitally excluded have become worse off, relatively speaking. The voluntary and commercial sectors will not be able to narrow this gap on their own without government support because the last 20 per cent of disconnected people are likely to be much harder to get online because they suffer from various types of disadvantage.

To achieve a digitally equal Britain as well as a digital Britain, policies need to set targets for the whole spectrum of digital inclusion: quality of access, skills, motivations and effective, sustainable use. It is irresponsible to think that the latter can be handed over to industry or the third sector completely. Just as standards are set for education standards need to be set for digital inclusion across government departments and policies.

Since digital exclusion is so strongly linked to other types of disadvantage, digital inclusion policy needs to be integrated into broader social and economic policies that aim to improve the quality of life and service provision to the most disadvantaged in society. Without clear and specific targets for different groups and social problems the improvement in uptake of ICTs is likely to be marginal and to take place only amongst those who are already ahead in taking up the opportunities that ICTs offer.

You can read the full brief, The Emergence of a Digital Underclass: Digital Policies in the UK and Evidence for Inclusion on Scribd. More details are also available on the LSE Media Policy Project Blog.

Please read our comments policy before posting.

You may also be interested in the following posts:

1. The gender imbalance online seems to be the result of wider political exclusion, not digital exclusion.
2. Time is ticking on climate change: we urgently need a new, legally binding agreement with concrete measures to reduce greenhouse gases
3. Secret affairs with radical Islam: why Britain’s covert foreign policy needs to change

James Moran reviews an extensively well-researched and thorough book dealing with every level and stage of political campaigning.

Campaign Communication and Political Marketing. Philippe J Maarek. Wiley Blackwell. April 2011.

Find this book at: Google Books Amazon

Philippe J. Maarek’s analysis of the structure and development of political marketing is a thorough, if somewhat overly clinical examination of the strategies used by election campaign teams. Maarek, Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the Paris-East University, has authored various writings on political marketing, though this is perhaps his most comprehensive book on the subject to appear in English.

Maarek analyzes, in four meticulously sub-divided parts, the communication strategies used by political figures in their campaigns for public office and their public relations campaigns whilst in office. He begins by giving an account of the development of modern political marketing, focusing on the post-war US presidential election campaigns (particularly Kennedy and Reagan). He moves on to give an account of the general rules followed by political marketing campaigns (such as the need to be coherent in one’s campaign messages), before giving an analysis of different political marketing tools and the best way of structuring a campaign team.

Maarek is at his best when he describes, with almost scientific precision, a complex system within marketing. During the section on what audience to target during a campaign, Maarek employs a series of clear diagrams to describe the relations between the “transmitter” (a campaign team), the “medium” (TV, radio etc) and “opinions relays” (columnists or television personalities). He moves on to describe how thorough opinion polling must influence said targeting, outlining a detailed summary of socio-cultural categories for different kinds of voters.

Maarek becomes somewhat less precise when he deals with the more cutting-edge aspects of political marketing, particularly the internet. Whilst keen to point out the growing importance of online campaigning – he makes particular mention of Obama’s 2008 campaign – Maarek himself seems to hold the medium at arms length. Younger readers may find references to “iApps” embarrassing perhaps, and Maarek even talks of the internet providing a “quality of communication close to that of the printed version”. One might say this is a somewhat condescending attitude toward the new medium, particularly as online readership rises and the print media enters into crisis.

The book is not the best choice for a reader wishing to read an anecdotal account of the PR men roaming the corridors of power, as Maarek’s writing is academic and serious. This is not to say his extensive and impressive research doesn’t offer many fascinating examples of political marketing strategies. One is the use of subliminal messages by the George Bush campaign team in 2000 – a TV advert showed the word “Democrats” and then the word “Bureaucrats”, in between showing the word “Rats” so quickly as to be nearly invisible to conscious perception. Another is a study by the University of Michigan wherein participants were shown clips of candidates in an election they were unfamiliar with. 58% identified the candidate who later went on to win the election, through first impressions alone.

Though the book is littered with these fascinating examples, Maarek deals very little with the art of political marketing. The author’s approach might be described as scientific, with every stage of a political marketing campaign described with precise subdivisions and diagrams. Maarek rarely gives us an insight into the more creative thinking that goes into political campaigns, and the emotional responses they receive – he cites “Yes We Can” as new high-point in political marketing and explains its coherence within a campaign structure, but he does not go on to describe why the message chimed with so many Americans and motivated young voters so effectively.

This is an extensively well-researched and thorough book dealing with every level and stage of political campaigning. Though full of interesting information about historical political campaign, it lacks a detailed account of the actual creative process of coming up with campaign ideas. However, despite that, Maarek has written an impressive and extensive guide to the structures underlying political marketing.

James Moran works for the political research think tank Gulf Centre for Strategic Studies.

Find this book at:  Google Books Amazon

You may also be interested in the following posts:

1. Book Review: Political Communication in Britain: The Leader Debates, the Campaign and the Media in the 2010 General Election
2. Book Review: The Political Marketing Game
3. Book Review: An Introduction to Political Communication, Fifth Edition by Brian McNair

Barbara Richter reviews an exciting new book on the future of journalism and news media, which will create debate amongst journalists, students and politicians alike.

Networked: A Contemporary History of News in Transition. Adrienne Russell. Polity. June 2011.

Find this book: Google Books Amazon

The focus of Adrienne Russell’s Networked is the changing nature of the news industry: while the industry as we know it is in decline, journalism itself will adapt, and ultimately be fine. Russell, associate professor in the Digital Media Studies program at the University of Denver, argues that journalism is coming to change from something that is merely consumed by audiences, to something that lives and dies by audience participation.

The main reason for these changes is the spread of the internet. The news audience is transforming from passive consumers to active participants and members of news networks. Essentially everybody can now be a journalist, providing facts and images to the public and debating news from various sources, through blogs, Twitter and more interactive news coverage. This requires a broadening of the definition of news, from the mere statement of fact to anything that contributes to the public debate. The Daily Show is given as an example, but we could also reference youtube interviews with David Cameron, in which the Prime Minister answered questions sent in from viewers.

The future of news, says Russell, is rosier than is usually assumed: people want to stay informed, hence there will always be a need for news, but the mode of delivery is changing. Rather than providing the same news to everybody via national newspapers and syndicated television, the internet allows everyone to look for news on their specific subjects of interest. This leads to a decline in widely circulated newspapers, more than any major Murdoch-scandal ever could.

These changes in the mode of delivery and the people delivering them require a shift in the guiding principles of journalism: accountability and transparency need to replace objectivity. An increase in the variety of sources used leads to a better reporting of the “truth” as seen by different groups.

The author’s main policy recommendations are the safeguarding of net neutrality to preserve equality of voices and an expansion of the use of Creative Commons licenses to enable the spreading of news and images. In many ways Russell’s book is very encouraging: news is not dead. She describes the exciting possibilities of the journalism of the future, and this excitement is infectious. Her policy recommendations seem sensible too.

However, I do think the author is a little too optimistic. Russell devotes little attention to possible dangers in the change of how journalism is conducted. The main argument often given against citizen journalism is the lower quality of reporting and the difficulty of deciding in whom to trust. It is possible that these issues will be resolved with time and experience, but it is by no means certain. It might also take so long that standards are forever lowered. A fuller discussion of these issued would have been welcome.

Russell is also very optimistic about the reach of new media. These changes in journalism require all citizens to be connected to the internet and to be internet-literate. Over time, the share of the population fulfilling both requirements will likely increase, but it is not certain that it will ever be large enough to eradicate the need for traditional journalism. Also, most people have lives to lead and might find this new kind of journalism too demanding on their time. I’m also not sure that the reporting of different “truths” is such a phenomenal gain. In my, possibly naive, idea of journalism its goal is to find and report the truth, not what is considered true by different people.

This short book will be an interesting read for journalists and non-journalists alike, though possibly for different reasons. Most journalists will already have an opinion on the matter, so to them the book will be useful to confirm opinion or sharpen arguments. For the rest, it is a good starting point for forming an opinion on the future of journalism and the news.

Find this book:  Google Books Amazon

Barbara Richter is a PhD student in economics at LSE.

You may also be interested in the following posts:

1. Book Review: WikiLeaks: News in the Networked Era by Charlie Beckett with James Ball
2. The News International phone-hacking saga threatens to retoxify the Tory brand. Cameron needs to be ruthless to save his reputation
3. The NoTW closure marks a massive moment in the balance between news media and authority. In a world where power is mediated so intensively, it is vital that the citizen has the right information and proper forums for open and fair debate

Earlier this year, the government unveiled online crime maps, which enabled local residents to track crime right down to their street level. Steve Gibbons is not surprised that this policy may have been a nudge in the wrong direction; a recent survey indicates that residents may actually be not be reporting local crimes for fear of driving down house prices.

The Government is a fan of open data, arguing that transparency keeps the public sector on its toes. Ministers also like ‘nudges’, light-touch interventions that push people towards the ‘right’ decision.

The two came together unexpectedly last week in a survey from insurance firm Direct Line. Earlier this year Oliver Letwin unveiled street-level crime maps, a flagship open data initiative. However, Direct Line found 11 per cent of people had since not reported a crime – because they were worried about the effects of mapping higher crime on local house prices.

It’s always worth checking exactly how survey questions like this are phrased. The question actually asked was:

Have you been affected by a crime that you did not report to the police because you feared it would show up on an online police crime map, making it more difficult to rent/sell your house?

Of 3000-odd people polled, 11 per cent of respondents said yes. Around 75 per cent of these had turned a blind eye to anti-social behaviour, and 45 per cent to vehicle crime. Smaller fractions had either witnessed, or been a victim of assault or street robbery – but had not reported this.

We will have to wait until more recent official data is available on trends in recorded crime – relative to the victimisation survey data from the British Crime Survey – to see whether the Direct Line research really stacks up.

Assuming it does, two points follow.

Credit: police.uk

First, for spatial and real estate economists none of this is very surprising. In 2004 I published this paper in the Economic Journal, based on identical data to that used in the street-level crime maps, showed that incidents of criminal damage (vandalism, graffiti etc.) had big effect on house prices across London. A 10 per cent increase in crime pushed house prices down by 1.5 per cent.

Second, for policymakers this is an unwelcome reminder that it’s easy to ‘nudge’ people in the wrong direction. The Home Office told the FT that providing local information on crime will push crime down, by encouraging people to ‘hold their local police to account … pushing police to tackle crime’. Perhaps. But the Direct Line survey suggests that detailed online crime data could have some serious unintended consequences, given the economic incentives for home-owners to conceal the true level of crime in their neighbourhood. It also follows that policies which attempt to bring crime down by publicly revealing its true extent may not be very successful.

This article was original posted to the SERC blog on 14 July. You can also follow the LSE Spatial Economics Research Centre on Twitter at @LSE_SERC.

Please read our comments policy before posting.

You may also be interested in the following posts:

1. The Home Office’s new online Crime Map is a step forward in providing the public with information, but it ignores the role of the police, oversimplifies vastly different types of offences and belies crime’s downward trend in recent years.
2. The ‘rehabilitation revolution’ in the England and Wales prison system will be slow and uncertain. But small, low-cost measures can lead in the right direction.
3. A vote for AV may lead to fewer safe seats but whether this would make MPs work harder is still up for debate

The recent furore over the unmasking of holders of super-injunctions via Twitter has led some to claim that in the social media age, clamping down on privacy by governments will fail. Dr Paul Reilly looks at two recent cases that seem to show the situation is not quite that clear.

Last month, Eric Schmidt used his keynote speech at the Google Big Tent UK to criticise those governments who pass ‘foolish’ laws designed to protect privacy in online spaces. The former Google CEO did not refer directly to the UK in his speech, but the implicit message to fellow keynote speaker Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Culture, was clear: government measures to protect privacy are unlikely to succeed in the social media age.

So has the internet, and micro-blogging site Twitter in particular, killed privacy? Well, not quite, though it clearly helps if you have lots of money and access to legal expertise. This may seem counter-intuitive given the recent spate of super-injunctions that ultimately failed to prevent revelations about the private lives of footballer Ryan Giggs and former RBS Chief Executive Fred Goodwin entering the public domain courtesy of Twitter and the use of parliamentary privilege by two MPs. However, there were two landmark legal cases in the past month that I think may prove significant as the UK parliament considers the balance between the right to privacy and freedom of expression on sites such as Twitter.

First, South Tyneside council used Californian law to force Twitter to hand over user details relating to a blogger (“Mr Monkey”) who had used the site to post libellous remarks about several of its members. The council lodged a subpoena in San Mateo County that requested access to the name, address and registration information of “Mr Monkey,” who was linked to five Twitter accounts used to defame several councillors. While the council has yet to take further legal action against the user alleged to be “Mr Monkey,” the case suggests that those who use Twitter to break super-injunctions or for the defamation of individuals can no longer assume they are immune from prosecution for such transgressions.

The cost of South Tyneside’s subpoena has not yet been disclosed but is said to be in the region of several hundred thousand pounds. This would appear to suggest that the right to privacy and the ability to respond to defamatory remarks might come at a very high cost on sites such as Twitter compared to traditional media outlets.

However, the second significant legal case involving the use of Twitter in the past month suggests this may not hold true in all cases. Ian Puddick, a plumber from North London, was cleared of using Twitter to harass millionaire city broker Tim Haynes after finding out about his affair with his wife. During the trial Haynes claimed that the publication of sexually explicit emails detailing the affair had caused significant personal distress not only him but also to his family, friends and colleagues. Mr Puddick argued that he had a right to expose Haynes’s behaviour and his misuse of company expenses during the affair. After District Judge Elizabeth Roscoe dismissed the claims of harassment, Mr Puddick claimed: “it is a victory for free speech”. On this occasion the right to freedom of expression was clearly considered inviolable despite claims that it had implications for the privacy of another individual.

What these two cases demonstrate is the extent to which UK privacy law remains in flux. It will be interesting to see what proposals emerge from the privacy committee set up by the UK government in the wake of the super-injunction furore. Clearly, it is too early to make predictions on what this review will mean for privacy in the Information Age. However, I think it would be premature to say that Twitter has killed privacy completely. The perceived anonymity of the micro-blogging site does not necessarily mean that users can act with impunity, as demonstrated by the South Tyneside case. Personally, I would still be wary of what I post on Twitter. As one colleague remarked at a recent conference: ‘The internet never forgets.’

This post was first published in Leicester Exchanges, University of Leicester’s debate blog.

Please read our comments policy before posting

You may also be interested in the following posts:

1. There is a thin line between privacy and secrecy, and increasingly only the famous and wealthy can afford to have their privacy protected when it suits them. The UK needs a proper privacy law.
2. Social media didn’t start the fire: Proposals for the temporary shutdown of social media during riots are unlikely to prevent further unrest
3. Social media is an opportunity for local government communications