Mainstream politics is moving onto social media: Carl Miller

Carl Miller is the co-founder and research director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, a cross-party political thinktank in the UK. Miller focuses on finding ways to understand social media using sociology, anthropology, computer science and artificial intelligence.

In an interview to Malini Goyal, he speaks about the role social media can play in the political world. Edited excerpts from the interviews:

What role do you see for social media in democratic politics?

Social media is clearly becoming more politically important (and contested) as more and more people use it. In its early years, it was most heavily used by those denied a mainstream voice. Politically, these tended to be radical voices - in the UK, it was far-right groups like the English Defence League (a Facebook movement with a street-based wing), and far-left groups like Occupy.

Now, mainstream politics is moving onto social media. Mainstream political parties are hiring social media specialists, composing social media strategies, and spending more and more resources on building follower-ships and fan bases, especially on Twitter and Facebook. This trend is likely to continue in the mid-term.

However, I think the long-term trend will be very different. Social media will break up the Political Party - hierarchical, professional, and based on membership subscriptions. Social media is levelling the playing field - allowing many more people to spread their message, organise a 'ground-force' of willing volunteers, build a powerful presence and profile and raise money. Parties will either have to change or die; and become more organic, informal, and probably based on many millions cooperating in a lighter, more amorphous way rather than a small number of diehard activists.

Do social media reflect reality or is it more noise and less signal?

Social media is a new kind of reality that is importantly different from the offline world. It plays by its own rules - norms, culture - and has its own vernaculars and ways of doing things. Certainly many people are not on social media - especially those who are poorer, older and more rural - so it certainly can't be seen to be a perfect picture of what is happening offline. But it is a significant social space in its own right, and as it becomes more important, we will begin to stop comparing the 'fake' virtual world with the 'real' offline one.

What have we learnt about its role in electoral politics in other countries?
Electorally, social media is a new, important battleground that politicians and political parties will try to dominate. Especially, it allows highly granular and targeted messaging. Individuals - not areas, neighbourhoods, or regions - are now the level of detail that sophisticated campaigns will work on.

Unfortunately, the social media's dividends to actual democracy have been fewer. There was a fairly utopian view that 'digital democracy' was going to usher in a new age of participation and citizen-involvement, and my view is that we've really yet to see this delivered upon. It will be a real pity if it turns out that social media was principally used for winning votes during elections, rather than delivering more democratic, open, and responsive Government on an everyday basis.

Tech start-ups like Google, Facebook are shaking up the pecking order in the corporate world? Do you think this might play out in the political world too?

Broadly yes - we're rapidly moving into the digital age - and those political parties that are best able to adapt or, even better, begin from scratch, will have some early advantages in the digital-political battlegrounds. As a cautionary note: social media-only parties are unlikely to succeed. If parties are not able to translate online support into offline action - votes, volunteering, marches, mobilisation - they will obviously struggle. Academic studies have attempted to predict political outcomes on the basis of social media content (measures like numbers of retweets, mentions, Facebook followers etc). They are often quite successful until you add in Parties like the Pirate Party - which had, in the German elections, more social media activity than any other Party, but only won a tiny fraction of the vote.