There’s been a lot of talk, obviously, about how the internet will affect the election. Obviously a few months back we held our debate on whether technology or policy will win the 2010 election, and the overwhelming consensus at the time was that it would be policy.
Since then, the media seem to have gone along the same lines, and we’ve seen surprisingly little of the horrible hyperbole around ‘socialmediayoungtwitterpersonsrevolutions’ or whatever. Policy does seem to be the main issue at hand.
That said, has the web affected the election in any way? Well yes, possibly. Mark Pack puts it well here, that the public outcome of the two leaders’ debates so far shaped the subsequent news agenda, rather than just the opinion of journalists being what were reported.
And how did the public outcomes come to be so well known so quickly once the debate had ended? Well, the internet undeniably played a huge role in that, from statistical polling being carried out online, to less statistical polling on news website, to more general things such as Twitter sentiment analysis.
As has been said on here before, the internet may not influence everyone in the world, but it’s now undeniable that it influences those who influence everyone else.
