I've just caught up with the speech by shadow chancellor George Osborne on Politics and Media in the Internet Age, nudged by several non-Tories saying this shows the opposition have got the Net. Webcameron was the popular front, this is the serious back end. Open University professor and Internet observer John Naughton, Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University, agrees in Comment is free:
A shadow chancellor embracing the internet revolution? Whatever next? In his Olsen Lecture last night, delivered in St Bride's, Fleet Street, to an audience of journalists, bankers, lawyers and other low-life types, George Osborne extolled the virtues of modern communication technologies - which represent, he says, a profound cultural shift that politicians (not to mention journalists, bankers and lawyers) ignore at their peril. He also managed to slip in an assertion or two to the effect that the Cameroonies have got the message and the Blair-Brownites haven't.
It would be churlish to infer that Mr Osborne may not be quite as familiar with this stuff as his text implied. Not many teenagers would use Limewire for video and BitTorrent for tunes, for example, but we will let that pass. As Dr Johnson (a celebrated denizen of Fleet Street in his day) might have said, the wonder is not that the speech was done well but that it was done at all. The shadow chancellor has dined with the CEO of Google and met Tom Anderson, the first "friend" every MySpace user acquires. He knows that there are 57 million blogs and that an exabyte is a one followed by 18 zeros. He knows about Linux and Wikipedia. He's heard of Bebo and Friendster and may, for all we know, be a secret YouTube addict. At any rate he knows that "every minute, 15 new user-generated videos are uploaded" to that intriguing site. And he knows that all this Means Something.
Like what? Well, everything must be more "transparent" because nothing is hidden from Google's all-searching eye. So HMG should have a website which enables taxpayers to Google the government's squandering of their hard-earned cash. And official services should all be available online - because if they're not, citizens might use their new social-networking skills to organise nasty demonstrations and bring down the government. And so on and so forth.
I can only join my friends in urging you to read the speech, and maybe pass it on ... not for party political purposes, but because it is so extraordinary to find someone in a traditional political role explaining the importance of search, personalisation, social networking, and collective intelligence. Googling the speech didn't show up coverage in the traditional media, but then, should we be surprised?
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