Fellow euro-blogger Frank Schnittger posed the question last week, “Is TH!NK ABOUT IT dying?”
I must admit that the frequency of my posts has trailed off a little of late, but that has had much more to do with an onslaught of university deadlines than a loss of faith in the Th!nk About It vision.
Photo: European Communities
But in contributing to an article about this very competition for XCity Magazine (that’s coming off the printing presses as we speak), I discovered that Frank’s assertion seems to be a view shared by one of the UK’s premier media commentators.
Responding to the question: “Do you think blogging will succeed in bringing Europe to the forefront of the news?” Charlie Beckett, founding director of POLIS, the forum for research and debate on international journalism and society at the LSE, said the following …
I don’t think blogging can do that! Europe is of no interest to the public or political parties right now. They have enough on their plates and it would only revive old antagonisms. So irrelevant of new media etc I don’t think it is fair to expect bloggers talking in different languages in different media markets to cross boundaries and change political climates.
I find myself disagreeing heavily with Mr Beckett. Don’t get me wrong. I have very little faith that a blogging competition is going to engage the continent’s youth in European politics, even less, solve Europe’s varied ills.
But it is still an innovative attempt to engage people in the EU. What’s more, the big Euro news in the UK last week only goes to underline the importance of the internet in setting the political agenda. Daniel Hannan, an otherwise little known Conservative MEP took the opportunity of Gordon Brown’s visit to the European Parliament to publicly lay into him. Kristy posted a video of the attack here.
But more than simply seeing someone give the “devalued” Prime Minister a piece of his mind, the fascinating thing about this episode was how it was completely ignored by mainstream media, but developed a life of its own through the likes of YouTube and Twitter. Even more interesting, after getting thousands of hits online, TV stations and newspapers then started to take an interest.
Here you can see how the BBC covered it after its YouTube success.
Channel 4 also covered it afterwards:
And the Mail. And so on. It might not be Th!nk About It that does it, but it certainly looks like the internet is going to be what generates interest in the EU as the elections draw nearer.
(8 votes, average: 3.63 out of 5)
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If anything can stir up a bit of interest, it’s worth a try.
That was quick Helena!
As I have written earlier today, the Hannan example is the worst we could get, because it was a British politician speaking to a British politician about the British situation that raised global attention. Hannan nationalised the EP.
The EP was just the scene, and the timing was right, giving an already known eurosceptic blogger, MEP, and good speaker (http://julienfrisch.blogspot.com/2008/12/scrap-cap.html) the chance to criticise an already damaged Prime Minister.
The moral of the story appears to be that you have to be a little bit extreme or outrageous to attract the attention of the masses on the internet, and subsequently of the mainstream media, if you are writing about the EU.
So we get stories about straight bananas, about CAP overspending, or of bureaucratic inefficiency or corruption - anything which plays into the dominant “Europe is a bloated bureaucracy” narrative, but thousands of reasoned criticisms or good news stories get no coverage.
But you didn’t really address your title proposition that`”Th!nk About It is alive and kicking” or are you advocating that we should be more conroversial and extreme in our posts in order to get a reaction?
Certainly two of the posts which seemed to have generated some discussion are my rhetorical question “Is thinkaboutit dying” (deliberately provocatively put) and Ari’s piece on “Nato’s attack on Serbia” which outrageously seemed to suggest that NATO was morphing into the new Nazism.
But is Thinkaboutit achieving it’s objectives if only provocative pieces get a significant reaction? How do we measure Thinkaboutit’s success? - number of posts, comments, readers, links from other blogs, mentions in the Mainstream Media?
Perhaps teh EJC gave some success metrics to the EC in their funding submission? It would be helpful if we knew how the success of the overall project is going to be measured.
I can write polemics criticising e.g. the EU’s lack of coordinated response to the economic depression, or throw metaphorical insults at our leaders. If they are picked up by the MSM, does that represent success?
On the other hand if we only write worthy pieces stressing the importance of the EP elections which nobody reads or responds to but which please the European Commission, is that success??
Perhaps I should write a follow up story asking the basic question: What would a successful outcome to the Thinkaboutit project look like for you? Perhaps the EJC itself would like to comment?
I was at the Parliament when Hannan made that speech. He spoke for three minutes, finished and then it was on to the next speaker. When Gordon Brown responded to the Parliament, he made no mention or reference to Hannan whatsoever.
Though I was initially taken a back by Hannan’s language and tone when he began talking, by the end of the session I had entirely forgotten about him. Like Etan says, I didn’t hear a peep about it on the news afterwards either. Only yesterday, 4 days after the Parliamentary session, when a friend of mine played the video from a link on facebook was I reminded of it.
Maybe new media has a ways to go in political motivation, but it can certainly revive interest and draw attention to matters so often side swept by mainstream media. The European Elections are one of those things that news networks tend to overlook. I never would have thought of Hannan again had it not been for that FB link, and for the many others that have popped up since. This community/competition/website (whatever you want to call it) is dense with information from multiple perspectives - it tackles an issue that traditional media disregards and does it in a way newspapers and television can only dream of.
[...] Th!nk About It is alive and kicking [...]
hi, I found this web page from google and read numerous of your other blog posts. They are very informative. Please continue this great work… Cheers, Steve.