As a researcher in the INC group, I have closely been following the Danish Election Parliament election campaign, which culminates tomorrow, Tuesday November 13th, election day. With the aid of an hardworking assistant and in co-operation with the Danish blogportal Overskrift.dk, this friday we discovered that at this election campaign, it looks like 250 out of 808 candidates running for parliament have started (or continued) blogging – and there have also been quite a lot of activity on places like YouTube, Facebook and Myspace. So it looks like “social software” functionalities have really been taken into use this year which also marks a breakthrough in terms of the amount of money the political parties have spent on online campaigning. These facts have in themselves generated quite a lot of media attention which means that as researcher I have myself tried new forms of communicating to the public, through appearance on web-tv, more precisely DR Update for which I was interviewed about my
impressions of the campaign together with the blog editor of Politiken, Kim Elmose. Also for this first time I participated in a podcast, as part of the site Beocast’s weekly podcasts.
Regarding the innovative part of the politicians’ and political parties communication online, my survey of the content so far indicates that politicians still tend to be somewhat monologic in the way they think about their online communication; and users have not been that eager to enter into dialogue with the politicians either, perhaps because they experience that the politicians are “absent present” most places. Read a more thorough analysis of the experience of the online election campaign up to now at my Danish blog called Walgblog.
In relation to all this, last thursday, I was informed that Nordforsk have granted a group of Nordic researchers and me funding to start a network and project on Political Culture Online in the Nordic Culture – it is not just in Denmark that the use of online media in politics is changing radically this year. I look much forward to discussing the data from this election campaign with them when we meet up in January!
