Under the bonnet: The engines that drive digital democracy

The internet is having a dramatic and transforming affect on politics. This might not be obvious or even visible to many people yet but it is happening and it matters.

Daily Politics on BBC2 finally made mention of the speech by Daniel Hannan that the rest of the British media ignored. It's not the speech, the speaker or the argument that is important here but that the speech became newsworthy solely because of the power of the crowd to report and the power of the internet to disperse an incident that otherwise went totally unreported in the UK. By the time it hit the BBC, it was ‘old news' in the blogsphere.

The BBC story angle was more about the way that Hannan's speech spread virally through YouTube as it was about the content. This worries me as it continues the fashionable mainstream media trend of seeing the internet as a novelty, even a danger to the future of the civilised world. Of course, that isn't the case but it is, thankfully, a direct and powerful threat to the power of the mainstream media.

The power of the digital crowd worked in two ways in the Hannan case, both increasing the speed and range of distribution. Uploading to YouTube isn't enough, people need to know it's there and watch it - you've got to spread the word. This happens in two ways with Web2.0 - it happens through dissemination of the link, much as would have been the case with email but much more quickly thanks to blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social networking tools.

Second, it's about creating multiple entry points into the same piece of content. This is the clever bit because every additional click decreases the chance the user will see it. The power of YouTube is not their website per se, it's the engine that lies behind their website. One giant repository of video content that can be linked to and - most importantly - embedded in anyone else's content.

It's too simplistic to say that it's just the mainstream media that doesn't get it, it's that the mainstream doesn't get it. That includes political parties. For now. The internet will be a catalyst for the reinvention of political life in the UK. The only question is when. The transformation likely to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary but it will be nonetheless significant.

Andy Williamson