Yesterday we enjoyed our best Albion Society yet. We were filled to the rafters, with people having to stand at the back to fit everyone in. Those who couldn’t make it were following on Twitter, like @debkhan who tweeted “@albionsociety stellar panel -fed up to miss it-following up via Twitter love-in”. So massive thanks to all those in the audience who set the twittersphere alight with your quotes during the session. It’s not surprising that this was our most talked about Albion Society with a high calibre panel second to none.
Alan Rusbridger, Editor in Chief of the Guardian Media Group talked about a series of interesting binaries facing both journalism and politics now: Us Vs. Them; Open Vs Closed; and with direct reference to Murdoch’s Paywalls, Pay Vs. Free. ”If you are open that means you want to be part of the way the web works rather than simply on the web,” whereas, being authoritarian, top down and proprietorial, whether in politics and journalism, is ” just completely antithetical to the way everything is going”.
Justine Roberts, founder of the influential online community Mumsnet, hailed this as “ the first social media election. We have a have a power in agenda setting, because all the journalists and therefore the politicians are all watching social media”. However she dismissed suggestions that this made communities such as Mumsnet the new block vote saying that if anyone tried to tell her members that they all had to do the same thing, they’d be more “like an octopus with PMT” all going their own direction.
Tess Alps, Thinkbox Chief Executive, praised the space for criticism provided by the mediation of professional journalists: “I don’t want politicians and the public to always have a direct unmediated relationship because next time it will be Nick Griffin. I think Goebbels would have loved the internet for that reason!” She made an impassioned plea for us all to continue supporting professional journalism saying “Politicians without online communities would be worse, but online communities without journalism would be utterly meaningless.”
Dan Thain, Senior strategist at Bluestate talked about how digital campaigning doesn’t replace real world campaigning, rather it is a way of stimulating “real activism in the real world. The fundamentals haven’t changed. Peer to peer contact is still much more important and high value.” Digital campaigning however, enabled the two important elements to any successful political campaign “Money and Mobilisation” a strategy they’ve developed by “looking at participation, what matters, what gets results – seeing what works and focussing relentlessly on that”.
Read what the Telegraph and Brand Republic had to say.
Next time Albion Society gets together at Patisserie Valerie will be in June. Make sure we have your details if you want to be invited to come along.
