Getting engaged

So there is pent-up demand, and a Long Tail effect seen in other sectors which pushes demand down the curve.

What impact is the internet having on present day politics? Do we see the beginnings of political opinions being unleashed?

William Perrin, technology policy advisor to Tony Blair from 2001-04, wrote in Social by Social:

"As it gets cheaper and easier for individuals to engage in a political or civic process, the result will be a massive increase in engagement.

"This trend is critical and runs through almost all of the examples in this handbook. The 19th Century processes of democracy act as a throttle or choke on democratic expression. High hurdles are presented by going to a meeting in a drafty town hall at an inconvenient time in the evening (or while you are at work) where there is no childcare nor even coffee. Most MPs, councillors and public bodies still prefer a letter on paper, despite the massive social decline in letter writing. When a 21st Century interface is put on the system to bring engagement down to a few clicks, the number of people who will engage increases by one or two orders of magnitude – this is very difficult for any organisation to deal with.

"The Downing Street e-petitions service is instructive: an 18th Century system was put online using a simple, robust interface. 1.8 million people signed a petition on road pricing, huge numbers through a viral email which was then on the front of every newspaper for weeks in a self-reinforcing circle of promotion. There have been over 8 million signatories to petitions on the system as a whole, so far. If this scale of democratic engagement were applied to something less constitutionally benign than petitions the impact could be remarkable.

"19th century methods of engagement still dominate political discourse and rely upon face-to-face time. Processes are dominated by the self-confident, literate, often males and people with lots of time to spare to go to meetings in out of the way places at inconvenient times or read long documents. If people in the modern world wanted lots of face-to-face time to do things they would not use Amazon nor eBay nor Tesco Direct nor even Netmums. The agents of the democratic process and the public sector will have to reflect this in the way they engage. This goes beyond service delivery online but in the way they engage in debate on policy."

But the way internet engagement has taken place so far, for example through the Number 10 petitions website, has disguised its true impact on political parties.

So far it has been about lobbying politicians, parties or the government, not about creating new parties and providing new options for people to vote for.

The next major shift in the era of internet politics and governance will be to take existing tools one step further so they are not just about interacting with today's politicians and their organisations.

Next generation tools will be about creating entirely new parties.