In the event that you’ve been holed up in solitary confinement for the last couple of weeks, you may have missed the release of (and subsequent press hoo-ha around) â??webCameronâ??, David Cameron’s video blog. I can’t help feeling that this could be a watershed moment, not for the Tories, who I imagine after a brief resurgence will just slip further into social irrelevance, but for the web and the youtube / myspace / blogging ‘movement’…
OK, great, well done Tories, you’ve realised that the web exists and there is this blogging movement, and young people are like, really into it, and you’ve hired a pre-pubescent google ex-staffer with rightwing leanings to show you how to work the internet, but I still can’t help feeling that this is another fine example of confusing the medium with the message. When â??Marshall McLuhanâ?? stated that ‘the medium was the message’ he was making a valid observation on the nature of media and communication at the time, but it was by no means a validation of it. He interestingly is also ascribed to have said “politics offers yesterday’s solutions to todays problems”, a quote perhaps more fitting to this particular quandry. By concentrating such energy in to how, and through which channels, Cameron is going to communicate to the general public, they seem to have completely overlooked what he is going to do, and more importantly how he is actually going to do it.
The advertising industry has long realised that people are less and less interested in mass selling, and mass-market messages, and that there are these grassroots communities evolving where people can exist outside the traditional media-space. They know that this peer to peer culture exists, but the problem is that most are simply trying to take their existing ideas about advertising, brands and selling and shoe-horn them into these new spaces. Our cultural past is littered with examples of how everthing that advertising touches turns to shit in the end, therefore the logical conclusion would be that we need to readdress our thoughts on the role and purpose of advertising (not the medium through which it is conducted), the role and activities of our corporations, and by extension, the advice to Mr Cameron would be to design some radically different ways of doing politics, before coming up with new ways of talking about them.