Spalpeen

Like a lot of politicians, Alan Johnson realises that the internet is “important”. More accurately, his PR guy does. Now, I know there’s a lot of controversy (see Miliband’s civil servant shadow blogger) over when politicians have shadow writers on blogs and other online mediums, but if we face reality, politicians are very busy people. They tend to have other people (like PR reps) to do stuff like communicate with people for them. That said, I don’t think it’s right if politicians aren’t open about who is posting on their behalf.

Take Alan Johnson for example. I know for a fact that he doesn’t write his own twitter entries over at Johnson4Deputy. How do I know this? Because I asked him at the Sheffield Hustings. He has a PR guy called Stuart Bruce running his twitter accounts, and it’s vaguely clear that the “Johnson4Deputy” campaign is being run by him (see the imprint section on this page). Still, I don’t think that makes is right for his twitter/facebook/flickr/meetup/youtube accounts to be written in the first person. He should acknowledge that the person updating his twitter isn’t him.

Putting aside the mildly deceptive element of the tactic, there’s the problem of what happens if a PR guy fucks up. Alan has to take full responsibility right? Well, it would probably force him to blame his PR campaign, which would then undoubtedly blow open the concept of why exactly he was letting another person speak on his behalf. Sure, his twitter account is a very staid affair (taking the “What are you doing?” concept to the absolute extreme), but that doesn’t mean it’s not potentially open to manipulation.

What I’m getting at with all this is that the internet has a potential that is greater than a simple PR campaign. It can be used for reasoned debate, when it is instead being used as a way to create buzz. What a deputy leadership candidate does now is directly indicative of what he/she’ll do when they get power. If Alan Johnson considers the internet as nothing more than another outlet for building buzz, he’ll go into power thinking of it as nothing more than a way of building popularity and as a support base.