Abstract Géraldine CASTEL

Géraldine CASTEL (Université Stendhal, Grenoble): « Web 2.0 communication in the post-spin era : party saviour or gravedigger ? ».

The shift of political communication in the last decades towards increasingly professional, centralized and tightly-controlled practices epitomised by the ubiquity of the now derogatory term of ‘spin’ has been the object of thorough analysis and heated debate, and repeatedly blamed for fuelling cynicism towards the political class in a more general context of democratic disengagement and declining party membership.

The growing array of web 2.0 tools available to parties since the first experiments in the use of ICTs for electoral purposes in the United States in the 1990s, ranging from sites and blogs to social networks and increasingly sophisticated data-managing software among others, could provide political organisations with the means to invert this trend, and therefore possibly alter the way they construct their identity, shape their image and seek legitimacy for the enactment of their project.

Indeed, in the post-spin age, instant messaging as well as various fact-checking devices or online vigilante groups have made transparency even more of a challenge. More significantly, the internet has contributed to creating new possibilities in terms of devolving creative and strategic authority from the centre to a variety of actors, be they local branches, activists or outside laymen. Crowdsourcing initiatives, for instance, have become far less complex from a technical point of view and could be instrumental to opening-up channels favouring a wider involvement into communication drives.

The potential for tools such as these and others to remodel not only the manner parties are communicating with the public, but also the elaboration of campaigns themselves within these organisations cannot be ignored. Yet how far have the parties truly gone in that respect during the 2010 general election ? To what extent have the internal relationships between the different layers of activism been affected regarding decision-making, agenda-setting and fieldwork implementation in this sector ? And from a broader perspective, are web 2.0 contraptions to be seen as the key to party regeneration, or rather, in an era when Facebook groups like Rage Against the Machine gather more members than the party they support, as yet another threat to their survival ?