You’ll have seen the billboards – they’re rather hard to miss. Share your opinion on education, on football, on anything you choose! Go on, let it all out. Hard to resist, really.
A massive poster campaign suddenly appears and we’re offered a vast public arena to vent, chat, post, share video. Like BBC’s Have Your Say on steroids. Wow! We’ve been after something like this, for ages, haven’t we? Haven’t we?
I’m not so sure. I’m a bit of a cynic. A skeptic. Suspicious by nature. The first question in my mind (not unreasonably given I work in the field of digital engagement between state and citizen) was: “Who’s asking?”
With Britainthinks it’s really not obvious. A political party? The TaxPayers’ Alliance? A think-tank or lobbying group? A charity? Perhaps even The Government??
The answer, courtesy of the Guardian, is here. OK, big deal: so it’s the traditional outdoor advertising industry showing off its power to harness opinion. A bit weird, to my mind, but thanks guys: you wanted to show you are still relevant to “national debate” (whatever that may actually mean) and I suppose, in a way, you have. I’m writing this, aren’t I?
What possible harm can it do?
Quite a bit, actually.
For the next obvious question one might have when considering participating is: “What difference will it make?” – Will your opinions, for all their careful crafting, actually influence anyone? Be taken seriously by someone in power? Have a chance of changing anything?
Probably not.
But, as we see on the site, we don’t even have to put up with the lame topics and polls suggested by the site authors – we can submit our own! At least we can create those areas that are of most interest and get things moving. Surely someone will notice. This is more like it!
But who is selecting those that make it into the public arena? – again a shroud of invisibility descends.
Why is all this light, pub-banter ‘engagement’ so bad though?
Two big reasons – firstly, the content execution is poor (notwithstanding the smokescreen about who’s actually behind it).
Simple ‘choice’ questions are a poor way to prioritise public spending and activity. Do you want higher taxes? NO! Do you want more schools? YES! Do you want tougher benefit rules? YES! Do you want *your* benefits cut? NO! Even trade-off questions simply cannot be meaningful without some presentation of the context in which they’re made. Guns or butter, anyone? Bullet-proof landrovers or kidney machines?
The most likely parts that will be picked out for further debate (and possibly action, but I doubt it) will be some of the poll findings. Here’s a good one. Who’d have thought it? Or this. 86.2% of statistics don’t bear detailed scrutiny, particularly if they’re shaped by advertisers trying to populate a site quickly, rather than professional pollsters or policy researchers.
The richer content – those impassioned user-generated videos – stays right where it is on the site. No sharing tools or social media integration that I can see, anyway. Not exactly going to go viral and capture the imagination of a nation that way, are they? Still glad you put it up there? Were those five votes of approval that you got on the site worth your time and trouble?
Secondly, the opportunity to galvanise a nation towards digital engagement is a precious one. To offer it, see the offer accepted, and then fail to deliver any meaningful outcomes is unforgivable. Who will be so keen to participate next time? When it might really inform a policy or a major public choice.
It’s a pretty good product, it would seem. No doubt about that. Superficially, it has a clear proposition, even if its aims are lacking. Which makes the whole thing even more frustrating.
But the point that sticks in my mind, having thought through the questions “What if the current government did this? What if this were part of a pre-election campaign, covert or overt? Is a newspaper behind this? Is this just trying to sell me insurance*?” is: what is the “trusted space” in which we’d actually undertake such opinion sharing?
Does such a thing exist? I am not sure. Someone’s got to run it. And to do so with absolutely no baggage is a much harder task than it may seem. Can a “declaration of neutrality” ever be more than a pretence? Perhaps the opinion blogs of the newspapers do this job far better? At least their participants understand what they’re involved with.
“Britain thinks”, indeed. Well, Paul thinks we deserve a bit better than this.
*Stranger things have happened. The “tea-bot” – a mildly irritating automated twitter feed that repeated any tweet containing the word ‘tea’ – was actually part of a Direct Line campaign. No, I have no idea why, either.
Nicely put.
I think the same, but haven’t your gift of writing it all down!
Well put – quite ridiculous campaign
I learnt a lot from that post. I’ll ignore now if I see it.
Well said. Reminded me of when my own teachers used to let us pupils say what we wanted – only to then do what they intended anyway.
You THINK you have a say in things, but this is not always the case, I’ve learnt.
Nice post. I enjoyed this and it’s food for thought. I think you’ve captured a couple of key challanges for effective engagement here. First is how do we get people engaged and then participating at a level where we can be sure they are informed enough about the issue they are discussing. Second how do we authenticate debates and their ulterior motives!
Andy
Had seen mention of Britain thinks but not seen any billboards, (London only? ) thanks for elucidating so well.
Re. Trusted space – would the community engage more readily if they had a hand on the levers as well as the microphone? Could that be practically achieved by employing Free and Open Source software principles, methods and structures to service delivery?
Hi Paul- a much better analysis than anything in the press so far, thanks.
HSBC funded a similar website a few years ago called ‘Your Point of View’, supported by an advertising blitz at airports all over the world.
I don’t think it was a great success, even if the concept of gathering comment on key themes across cultures was a worthy one- and still is if the data is reliable, properly analysed and is used to inform decision making on cultural relations activity. I don’t think it was any of these things, unfortunately.
One of the reasons we started Yoosk was because we thought the whole concept of collecting random comments with no defined end was probably counter productive: both in terms of building participation in society and informing policy decisions. Better to enable people to direct questions at decision makers and try to get answers and give feedback on them.
I don’t pretend that we have achieved a critical mass yet or fully proven our model. Take one of our current projects, which gives users the opportunity to put questions to 4 government ministers in the lead up to the Afghanistan Conference next week (I won’t provide a link because I’m not trying to plug it here).
We know the voting which helps decide which questions should get asked is open to being hijacked and gamed. We know not all questions will be answered and that those answers, despite being rated by the users, may still be seen as formulaic government spin by some people.
But at least there is some end result for those who choose to participate, hopefully some of them feel that the surface has been more than scratched. And the act of formulating a question often leads to a more balanced, concise and insightful comment from the users, of that I’m sure.
If only we had access to all those billboards!