The General Election.........

The opening days of 2010, saw the general election campaign beginning. In the red corner, an injured by the tabloid backlash along with self strangulation from party politics is Gordon Brown. Public opinion polls show a change in opinion towards Labour, the recession, War in Iraq along with infamous scandals such as cash to peerages have seem to tainted labour’s image as a part for change, and in the blue corner, sees the dubious, newly polished and air-brushed 2-d tableaux of David Cameron. Who, ironically along with the public appears to be utterly clueless as to how ‘change’ will be achieved without actually being aware of his policies. Perhaps we have another Gordon Brown on our hands, armed with smart rhetoric and pristine imagery, preoccupied in conniving the public to hand over valuable votes.
Indeed, “this is the year for change” (the slogan for the conservative campaign) as we have seen so far with the election campaign. David Cameron along with is fellow party members have been quick to utilise the new media. Both facebook & twitter have been utilised to get messages out, 3/1/10 saw the conservatives’ set-up their campaign with regular updates.
Barack Obama and the democrats, managed to successfully, utilise blogging, YouTube, facebook and other social networking sites. Gordon brown also issues a weekly podcasts from 10 Downing Street. However, the political blogger plays a most problematic role which can derail a political campaign. This provides even more scrutiny for bad political practices. One notable case is Boris Johnson who admitting to on camera, which it would in fact cost 100 million rather than 8 million to improve London bus services.
Michael McGregor, who runs the London Office of Blue State Digital the online consultancy firm which, provided the technology that powered the Obama campaign, remarks
“New media....isn’t a replacement for traditional campaigning; it allows you to do more traditional campaigning. One right, the new tools that online campaigning give means more and more people become closely involved in campaigns”