Technology played a key inspirational and mobilising role in both. In 2011 it was rolling TV, especially Al Jazeera, and the internet. In 1919 it was the telegram, distributing widely around the world US President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech which inspired claims to national self-determination. The pace of technology may have been slower but the spreading of hope from events outside Egypt was the same.

Being newer, Facebook got more of the limelight than Al Jazeera, perhaps thankfully so given the politics of Al Jazeera’s enthusiasm for reporting the Arab Spring’s Tunisian origins, a country whose government had a hostile approach to the station. How much was its coverage motivated by impartial journalism or commercial grudges? The answer in this case matters little, save as a reminder that questions of media power and agenda setting apply just as much when being exercised on behalf of the unquestionably virtuous as when in more questionable circumstances.

Aside from inspiration, would-be protests also need a reassuring answer to the question “if I turn out to protest tomorrow, will I be picked on for repression?” As Clay Shirky has pointed out this can become a chicken and egg trap – if only you turn up, then the changes of being the victim of a crackdown are much higher than if a million turn up, but the one million will only turn up if they know that they won’t be the only one.

Successful protests often beat this trap by using a cover which makes initial crackdowns hard or unlikely, gaining breathing space to grow.  In Here Comes Everybody, Shirky gave the example of the East German protestors who ended Communist rule. They initially used the cover of events such as music festivals, forcing on the dictatorship a choice between the high political cost of cracking down on popular, highly attended events or letting a small number of protestors protest. It was a lose-lose choice: either you increase unrest or you give space for it to grow. (The Communists chose the latter, and lost.)

Social media is particularly good at providing the virtual equivalent of space for protest that the music festivals gave. Ethan Zuckerman calls it the ‘cute cat theory of censorship’.  It is relatively low cost for a dictatorship to crack down on a small number of dissidents. But there is a much higher cost to restricting popular social networks. So if political dissent and cute cat photos are both featuring on the same technology platforms, it pushes dictators towards that same lose-lose choice.

Of course, protests predate not only social media but the internet itself, so the technology is not itself the full story. There are some cases where social media almost certainly was the determining factor, as in the fall of Philippines President Joseph Estrada in 2001 in the face of mass protests organised via text messaging.

But predictions and counter-factuals are an uncertain business. Tunisia was not an obvious pick ahead of neighbouring countries before its revolution happened. It is therefore both wiser to stick to broad tendencies, saying that social media makes the successful toppling of dictatorships more likely, even if only rarely on its own.

Nor is it a certain process, as the cases of Iran, Belarus and (so far at least) Syria tragically demonstrate. Moreover, as Evgeny Mozorov has pointed out, technology can be used not only by dissidents but also by governments. Mozorov has particularly highlighted the case of Russia, a flawed democracy where the state deals with the cute cat problem in the main not by trying to block but instead by trying to flood the online world with astroturfed loyalist content.

What matters too is not only how the government uses social media, but how united it is. One crucial difference between Egypt and Syria, for example, has been the respective roles of the military – in the former deciding its future lay in backing change (as they did with Estrada’s ousting too), in the latter in deciding its future lies with the status quo. The views of the generals matter more than Twitter.

So too with foreign governments, where the difference between examples such as Libya and the Ivory Coast compared to Darfur and Rwanda lies in the willingness of foreign governments to support meaningful military intervention. The views of China and its ability to veto UN Security Council resolutions matters more than Flickr.

Yet social media can play an important role in helping pose those questions to generals and foreign governments to which they then have to choose their answers.

And of course context matters too: what mattered most in the year running up to the Arab Spring was not the growth of social media usage but the one third increase in food prices across the Middle East.

That mixed picture is epitomised by the brave, inventive and smart Tunisian activist Astrubal. He made wonderful use of social media to crowdsource, document and map the extravagant use of an official government jet to take Tunisia’s First Lady on expensive shopping trips around Europe. Shared photos from plane spotters in many different companies were added to Google Earth to produce an effective and plausible video that turned abstract complaints about indulgent waste at the top into specific evidence.

And yet … this was done in 2007. Ben Ali did not fall until 2011. Did the work of Astrubal and others make Ben Ali more vulnerable? Almost certainly. Was it enough on its own? Certainly not.

This piece first appeared in the February edition of Total Politics magazine.

If the 2010 election can be summed up as “the XXX election”, it was first the TV election, with very traditional TV formats dominating. TV debates have been around since Sweden in the 1950s, and our debates were 90 minutes long – without adverts, fancy graphics, phone-in votes or cut aways to journalists broadcasting live from an empty street. This was old-fashioned TV taking on a new role.

It wasn’t just the TV election; it was also the election where the voting system did what it wasn’t meant to do. Proponents of first past the post like its habit of providing one party with an overall majority even when the most popular party isn’t that popular. This time it didn’t.

With traditional TV triumphant and the voting system failing to deliver on its own terms, how did the internet do? Certainly no-one is rushing to label it “the first internet election”. But – as Nick Anstead asked at a session we both did at the University of Salford – if 2010 wasn’t an internet election, what would one look like? Because, to extend his point, not only was the internet widely present, it also had an impact in many different ways – and if that doesn’t add up to an internet election, what would?

Opinion polling

Perhaps the internet’s most important contribution was in polling. Internet polling has both brought quicker polling in its own right and also helped move the phone polling industry into offering far quicker polls than used to be the norm. This meant coverage of the outcome of the first TV debate in particular was determined by what people told pollsters and not by what media owners told editors. Without the reputable poll results to box them in, would the partisan media have reported the first debate in the same way? Almost certainly not.

As essential as mobile phones

More generally, the internet’s impact on political campaigning was similar to that more generally of mobile phones. Both have become essential to the day-to-day working of people. Both speed up communication, eat away at the idea there is time off from work, are not quite as reliable as you’d like and open up numerous new possibilities. But neither have fundamentally reshaped events.

The rise of mobile phones has had numerous consequences: the phone masts on our skylines, the public phone boxes disappearing from our streets, the declining need to remember numbers, the ability to organise when and where to meet at the last moment, the massive numbers of text messages – almost all of which we read and read quickly. Thousands of people are employed in the industry and related endeavours.

Most high streets have more than one shop selling mobile phones or related products. Many people’s pensions are in part reliant on the profits from those firms. The list can go on and on. But whilst mobile phones have had many and diverse impacts, they have not fundamentally changed our society or our politics.

Similarly the internet has become essential, not just (to take James Crabtree’s terminology) in the visible form of websites, online petitions and Facebook pages but also in the invisible form of the online databases, the use of the internet to get artwork to printers and the use of email to organise when and where people meet for offline campaigning.

Pull the plug on the internet and you pull the plug on the ability of parties to organise and campaign – but the nature of those organisations and campaigns has not fundamentally changed.

New elites, not that different from the old elites

The internet has changed some of the faces on the political scene, as my own experience during the 2010 campaign shows. Blogging and tweeting certainly gave me a higher profile during the campaign – and one that wouldn’t have been possible in pre-internet days.

In the end, fun (and hopefully productive) though much of that was, having an ex-political party staffer appearing in the media is much more business as usual than a new way of doing politics. Nice though it was to be able to produce a spoof of a Tory election poster thanks to an online tool and see it reach a large audience via a reprint in the Daily Mail, expanding the pool of authors of political satire tweaked rather than revolutionised politics.

Looking at the range of Liberal Democrat pundits regularly called on by the media, there was a sprinkling of bloggers to vary the usual mix of MPs, ex-MPs and the like. It was a different circle of political faces, one opened up to some new – and very good – people, but still fundamentally a relatively small pool of people.

The political elite may be more open to new people joining it, but it is still an elite. This concept of an ‘open elite’ is one commonly found in other aspects of the internet, such as Wikipedia and open source software coding. In both cases anyone can start taking part, but there are hierarchies with some people more influential and more powerful than others. The elites may be more open to those with time and skill than traditional elites, but they are still elites.

Online blunders

Meanwhile, social media did give a few people their moments of unwanted fame with the smattering of occasions when a politician saying something foolish or offensive online was thereby exposed for all to see, with far more consequences than a muttered comment would have had in the past. Two candidates were dropped by their party and a third (an MP no less) faced a police investigation.

But in (another) sign of the continuing power of old media what was the biggest blunder involving a politician saying something unwise? Step forward Gordon Brown and the radio mike (first invented c.1949).

Despite numerous predictions – which I believed too – there was no major ‘gotcha’ event triggered by citizens catching politicians on film making a gaffe during the campaign, but citizen journalism had its moment on polling day evening. The photos, film clips and tweets of people unable to vote on spread the story quickly and got it into the mainstream media at a time when the media did not have much else to report. That in turn meant the problems got more mainstream media coverage than they would have – and increased the damage done to the reputation of our electoral system and the Electoral Commission.

The Facebook record

Whilst citizen journalism did not have its gotcha moment during the campaign, we did see the Rage Against The Election Facebook group ended the campaign with a membership more than double the paid-up membership of the Liberal Democrats. This was the first time the social media presence for a political party was as big as, let alone double the size of, the party itself.

However, the group earns a footnote as a record breaker rather than a headline for breaking the political system. As with so many other aspects of the internet’s impact, it was there, it was big – but it didn’t remake our politics.

The next first internet election?

The reason for that is in large part because many of those who have been asking “will the next election be the first internet election?” have been asking the wrong question. At the internal, organisational level the internet had already become essential prior to this election. What in effect many of the questioners (especially those in the style of Clay Shirky and Joe Trippi) have been hoping is that the internet will remake politics in a non-hierarchical style.

Whether politics – or other forms of human organisation – can be non-hierarchical is a very different question from what uses YouTube should be put to. It is one I am sceptical about, especially when you see how quickly structures have emerged in the communities growing up on tools such as Twitter which, at a technical level, are very egalitarian and non-hierarchical.

Where does this all leave us? In the end, the election was primarily about what politicians did and how the public voted rather than about technologies and techniques. And you know what? That doesn’t seem so bad at all.

For the third general election in a row, people are lining up to debate whether or not this one will be the internet election; the election when politics radically changes in the face of the technological change that has already swept the world.

Here’s my prediction. When it comes to the end of the year and we look back to see what impact the internet has had on British politics, we will find that it had a significant effect but not where pundits are currently looking.

That’s because the punditry is about the run-up to polling day; the big impact will be after polling day.

At least one political party will be in major crisis over the summer. If there is no overall majority, then at least one other party – not just the Liberal Democrats, but quite possibly also the SNP and Plaid – will be facing regular tough debates over what it should do. And a third party will be in government but facing unpopular financial choices and with sizeable internal disagreements over which way the party should head.

It’s against that background that the ability of the internet to bring like-minded people together, helping them to find each other, to organise, to campaign and to publicise, will massively shift the balance of power within political parties.

We have seen some small tastes of that already: the birth of ConservativeHome in the battles over the rules for electing the Conservative Party leader and the role of bloggers in giving momentum and credibility to Chris Huhne’s first leadership bid are but two examples.

It’s a question for another day why these abilities haven’t brought forth any significant new political forces fighting elections, but we are now close enough to polling day for it to be a pretty safe bet that this won’t happen in the 2010 general election. So far the new, internet based parties have only impressed with the dizzying fall from their heights of initial hype to the lowliness of electoral returns – at least for those who actually managed to end up standing candidates.

But it’s in the post-polling day internal maelstroms that these new abilities will really come to the forefront. Traditionally internal party debates and disputes have been fuelled from the top down: played about between Big Beasts with a supporting cast of MPs popping over to College Green. Not this time. This time, grassroots activists will be able to easily find others of similar views, wherever they are in the country and coordinate and campaign.

From the much under-rated power of email, through blogging and Facebook – and even Twitter – there will be a new pattern of power in those party debates.

It’s the ubiquity and familiarity of many of those tools – particularly email – which will give them their impact, and indeed the more cutting edge the tool, the narrower its use and therefore the lesser its likely impact. Or, to use the words of Clay Shirky from the same book as quoted in the first part of this series,

Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies – it happens when society adopts new behaviours.

The essential attributes of the general election campaign may run on traditional lines; the post-election battles will not.

For the last hundred years the big organizational question has been whether any given task was best taken on by the state, directing the effort in a planned way, or by businesses competing in a market. This debate was based on the universal and unspoken supposition that people couldn’t simply self-assemble; the choice between markets and managed effort assumed there was no third alternative. Now there is. Our electronic networks are enabling novel forms of collective action, enabling the creation of collaborative groups that are larger and more distributed than at any other time in history. (Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody)

Agree? Disagree? What’s the implication for public policy? Comment away…

What impact has the introduction of cheap colouring printing technology had on British politics? Almost none. Certainly many more leaflets are colour than used to be the case, more target letters contain colour inserts and a generation of amateur designers have had the opportunity to demonstrate just how many ways there are to use colour badly.

But politics has carried on the same.

The widespread use of colour combined with its lack of impact on how the political system operates is a reminder that not all technological development bring forth wider changes. Tempting though it can be to get sucked into the micro-details of the latest internet tools or service and see significance in the details, when looking for big picture change it is necessary to take a step back and consider broader questions.

With social media, it is not the details of the latest Facebook change that matter but rather its role in a broader trend. As Clay Shirky puts it in Here Comes Everybody,

We are living in the middle off a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.

That change is played out across a myriad of different tools and services and is happening regardless of their individual details and which ones are currently on the up or on the wane.

Clay Shirky’s point has been seen at work in a wave of different protests which have sought to influence the political system, or the rules that the political system makes, in recent months.

The Trafigura protest was a protest against not only Trafigura’s actions in seeking a super-injunction but also against the existence of a legal rule which permits such super-injunctions. Tools such as Twitter saw the swift mobilisation of public opinion and hence pressure. Notably absent from the fray were the different traditional pressure groups which campaign for freedom of expression or legal reform.

The protest simply happened too quickly and didn’t need them. Whilst in the past pressure groups were crucial in letting people of like mind find each other and organise activity, with Trafigura and Twitter there was no need for any such role to be played by a pressure group.

Many pressure groups are, despite being armed with a website and some email addresses, still slow moving bodies which look to be the fulcrum around which campaigning will take place on issues that they have selected.

But when people worked up by an issue can swiftly find each other, and the media, through social networks, events move at a pace where traditional pressure groups cannot keep up (several days to agree and write a press release? sorry, the world have moved on) and where they are not needed to be the fulcrum of activity.

That’s why it is they who are under serious threat over the coming years. The good news is that there are three different routes by which they can evolve.

First, there is the Liberty route. It does a fantastic job at getting Shami Chakrabarti regularly in the mainstream, traditional media. Its online campaigning is minimal, but if you view Liberty as primarily a vehicle for repeatedly getting an eloquent supportive voice in the media that does not matter.

Second, there is the think tank route. Campaigns can rise and spread quickly, but they require a body of evidence and detail to call on. The clearer a case is made, the more robust the arguments and the easier to find the evidence, the more likely it is that campaigns will spread. Being the supplier of evidence and arguments to others who then deploy them is similar to the traditional role of think tanks as the supplier of policy and evidence to others who then make policy.

Third, there is the nimble campaigner route. It sounds easy: ah, you just have to get with the internet, speed up your decision making and start making and riding some of these waves. But in reality pressure groups struggle to do this and hence the regular pattern of online campaigns on issues where traditional pressure groups exist, but who do not feature in the action.

But whether they pull off the third option or one of the others, pressure groups have to go for one – or face extinction.

Check back here, same time, same place next week for part two: why pundits searching for the impact of social media on politics in 2010 are looking in the wrong place.