Richard Stanton
Department of Media and Communications
University of Sydney
Political communication has a bright, expanding future. In the Asia Pacific region political communication research is undertaken to enhance private political activity. It includes news polling, political party opinion polling and government intervention campaign research. It is applied and theoretical. Political practitioners such as politicians, reporters and journalists use applied research to develop communication strategies while surveys and polling are the preferred tactics (Stanton 2014).
A simple evaluation of the level of brightness of the future for political communication could be measured by the number of graduate courses that surface each year particularly in the United States, Europe and the United Kingdom. The Asia Pacific region, excluding the USA, has been less enthusiastic but the historical lag in educational offerings followed by an accelerated boom means Asia will in the next few years account for a dramatic increase in academic political communications. It will be adapted and developed in non-democratic countries such as China and Vietnam.
The problem for political communication lies in the capacity of course developers to think beyond the tradition of political science. To be valorised in sociopolitical and corporate senses political communication must demonstrate a serious balance between traditional quantitative political science and more radical qualitative social science.
For me this has led to some experiments with emerging resources. I am interested in how vectors play out at the conjunction of teaching and practice. Teaching and practice in the political communication sphere can develop or adapt independently a variety of tools from other fields. So-called social media play an important role; Facebook is used as a tactic in the development of a political campaign strategies for example. Politicians and candidates post images to Pinterest, create blogspots, and establish large email databases in their quest to become netroots savvy and competitive (for more on netroots campaigning see Kerbel, 2008).
In 2011 I ran as an independent candidate in the state election in New South Wales, Australia. Campaign activity was proscribed by limited financial and human resources. The campaign evolved substantially around attempts to attract media attention for the various issues I thought were important. I also theorised about the campaign value of the microblog Twitter. Time constraints meant it remained theoretical.
Since the conclusion of the campaign I have experimented with Twitter as a teaching and campaign resource. I had been very interested in the microblog as a form of conversation – a resource for sharing globally and overcoming time zone differences – where a facilitator presents while anyone and everyone engages in the conversation by following a specific Twitter tag. In the communication world the value of #journchat or #prchat are evident. What was less evident was the value of commercial engagement. One that stood out for me was #agchat out of the United States and its ‘downunder’ offshoot #agchatoz. Both of these conversations are outreach mechanisms for regional, rural and urban stakeholders (it is a simple step to move from being a stakeseeker to a stakeholder in this sense) with an unprecedented opportunity to engage. The conversations offer layers of engagement from observation to deep technical participation. I saw this as a step towards taking the Twitter tag into the classroom and creating a lecture or series of lectures around a topic. In 2012 I announced to an undergraduate class that a one hour traditional lecture would be replaced with a ‘twecture’ – a lecture presented on Twitter. The objective was to restate a series of set pieces of information as a sequence of questions. Undergraduates were not expected to answer the questions, external experts were invited to participate in the conversation. I anticipated that students would act as they had in a traditional lecture, as observers, but they were free to do so from anywhere; they did not need to attend the classroom. The twecture was advertised in advance on Twitter (retweeted and favorited), on Linkedin (for its more serious business-to-business connectivity), and by email lists. The reaction from different stakeholders was mixed. Those students who had Twitter accounts apprehended and applauded. Those who were not Twitter stakeholders needed to be instructed in elementary Twitter culture. The biggest hurdle for undergraduates lay in the dynamic of the 140 character Tweet. They found it difficult to grasp the flow of the conversation. They attempted to inject irony. They failed. They looked for a single point of focus – a lecturer at the front of the class. They were affronted by being taken out of their comfortable classroom environment. They did not grasp the significance of the contribution made by global experts. Professionals who opted in, however, provided positive feedback. They were keen to inject their expertise into a university classroom. Some where keen to provide input based on their experiences since leaving university themselves. Some provided long-term perspectives.
More recently I took the twecture format to a different level. A regular Monday two-hour graduate seminar, repeated three times during the day and evening, fell on a public holiday. It was replaced by a one and a half hour Twitter conversation under the tag #polcomOz . The tag was created for the purpose of providing feedback and quantitative measurement: how many students opted in; how many external invited experts provided commentary and how many times they tweeted; how many tweeps with no specific connection to the topic tweeted (stakeseekers?) (the results are available by logging on to the tag). Traditional seminars included topic notes which were provided to students in the week before each seminar. In the twecture questions were framed against the notes for the week on linked topics: campaign evaluation and presentation of results to a client.
While the number of participants was not large the quality of the conversation was very good. Questions ranged around campaign capabilities, candidate image, campaign evaluation and presentation. Some participants provided experiential analysis of campaigns and candidates with whom they had worked at the recent Australian general election. Comments and answers were generally pragmatic – if a campaign or a candidate fails it is important to explain in detail how they could improve their next performance. Participants saw it as their job to keep candidates firmly within ethical campaign guidelines and to demonstrate their qualifications for public office through leadership, effective engagement and well-framed policies. I will analyse the tag in detail in the next few months.
Twitter, like Facebook, Pinterest and Youtube is a fine pedagogical resource.
Works Cited
Stanton R 2014 in Mazzoleni G (Ed) Political Communication Research in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, the International Encyclopaedia of Political Communication, London Wiley.
Kerbel M 2009 Netroots: Online progressives and the transformation of American politics, New York Paradigm.