Brave New World

When MEP for South East England Daniel Hannan delivered his attack on Gordon Brown on Wednesday in the European Parliament, the press didn’t pay much attention. But the public did. So it came that the video he posted on Youtube got the most hits in less time – 1,270,568 views until now and 8,752 comments so far, not just from English people.

The video spread like a virus through the Internet, with support of first Twitter, followed by links to several blogs.

The media didn’t feel that this speech was newsworthy obviously, but the public did.
That’s an obvious example of how the media turns into pull media. The whole communication process becomes people powered by people actively searching for the information they want to.

But that means for Public Relations as well as for the politicians to give up some control, as Don Tapscott, the author of Wikinomics states. And I guess that’s something what still scares some people. Understandably to a certain extend.

But democracy shouldn’t be about control anyway, rather than being about participation. And if politicians use these new tools attentive they can get a much closer look on what the people think, need and want, as through new media the thoughts, needs and beliefs of people are exactly reflected.

And then the “risk” of giving up control can be very rewarding in the end.

As Daniel Hannan states on his blog, it was really surprising for him how his speech hit the web. He posted videos like that since seven weeks, but they never got that much attention. And honestly, there are more entertaining videos on Youtube.

Maybe he just said what many people actually thought. Because I suppose people just get active, whether it is online or offline, when they see the need for a change.

When I was asked to set up a blog for my New Media course in the MA Public Relations, I felt some doubts against it.

When reading other Blogs or simply information in the Web, I always asked myself the question, who is the person behind the author? How reliable are they and the information they give? How can I know if it is true what they’re saying? And do we really need to know everybody’s opinion and experiences on every possible topic? I came to the conclusion that we don’t necessarily need to know all these opinions and experiences, but that it is a form of democracy to enable everybody to express their opinions and thoughts. Well, actually it is democracy.

Andrew Keen calls the web therefore in his book ‘The Cult of the Amateur’‘democratized media’. But he has an extremely critical view on this democratization through Web 2.0, as it opens unlimited channels for manipulation and blurring of the truth. Peter Mandelson seems to confirm that when he stated in his first post on LabourList, the Labour website which was launched last month, that ‘the days of command and control are over’ with the use of New Media.

Audience and authors become nearly indistinguishable in the web and consequently becomes the border between truth, manipulation and simply untruth. Blogs ‘blurring with the mass media’, as it could be read under the definition of the term Blog on Wikipedia.Therefore it is in fact hard to distinguish between real journalism – and therefore trustable information – and information written by non-professional journalism, which is appropriately enough also called democratic journalism.

As many possibilities Web 2.0 offers – and they seem nearly unlimited – as many dangers it holds. After my initial doubts regarding blogging, I’m now really looking forward to explore and describe my experiences and thoughts about Web 2.0 as ‘democratized media’ and its unlimited facets in this blog.