27 August 2002

eDemocracy is the Answer to Voter Apathy

By Hilary Burden

I don't vote. I know lots of people who don't vote. People who should know better. I too should know better. I agree with the new Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams who believes feminism is just as important an intellectual revolution as the theories of Marx and Freud, but, in this country, I still fail to use the right to vote that women died for at the beginning of last Century.

I tried once. I stood behind a curtain in a hall in a backstreet I never knew existed with a pen on a piece of string and ticked a name I'd never heard of because I live in a 'No Junk Mail' mansion block and I'm never at home when politicians door-step and don't consider myself tribal enough to join a party.

Reflecting about this, two things would make me vote: online and compulsory voting. Oh, and politicians from different backgrounds who actually look and talk like normal people. An added 'None of the Above' box, as recently proposed by the Electoral Commission, is like taking a feather duster to a criminal. It just won't do the job of admonishment.

I have no objection to be made to vote by the State (as long as it's convenient). Growing up in Australia where voting is compulsory, I took my right more seriously. There, voting is a rite of life. Turning 18 is equated with fully-fledged, legitimate drinking, driving and voting. As an integral part of the coming-of-age package, this social and personal conditioning sticks with you - like Spring Break nostalgia. Ergo, you're not a grown-up if you don't vote.

Whilst I acknowledge the shame of not voting in this country, I'm not a political atheist either. I'm one of the many 'disengaged engaged' people who are highly conscious of the erosion of trust in intellectual, corporate and political life but no longer feel they can live with the hypocrisy of tying themselves to these institutions.

We've moved through frustration, flirted with dropping out, refused to join, found other ways of being on the edges, as outcasts who would be incasts, balancing our autonomy with our dependency. The state, the law, business, marriage, public services are flawed, corrupt, power-based vessels for disconnected souls, positioning us as "passengers not navigators" of our destiny.

Where we navigate our lives is online. Where once we may have written a letter to a newspaper editor, now we email anyone who wants to listen, and interact. People who no longer feel connected have found other ways of being connected - and this is where the powers-that-be-rather-than-do must interface - in virtual now-moments.

It's about how individuals want to organise themselves to communicate with each other, and is being encouraged, defined, unlimited, if not driven by the power, scope and convenience of new technology. Modern society is being strongly influenced by the nature of new media, creating a kind of new classless Bohemia. At least some of the £3 billion allocated in the Chancellor's recent Spending Review for eGovernment enablement must be set aside to seek ways of targetting, accessing, organising and enabling new Bohemians, without using the traditional hierarchical, top-down rules - they won't work on the web - it's topless.

You can be a Bohemian anywhere, and that's what the one-size-fits-all model of the Internet gets totally; a global community of cyberspace citizens who think outside the box because they are; they're collaborative, constantly changing and evolving, linked not separated and more powerful than they've ever been because their location is virtual - it can't be taken over by commercial interests, property developers, tourists, or the next new thing. Its space is infinite - and you can't contain infinity.

The key to managing this network lies in the ability to organise the individual whilst maintaining the experience of having a one-to-one conversation with everyone you do business with. What's needed is a structure for group intuition to work.

Perhaps lessons could be learnt from the Bauhaus movement. Founder and director, Walter Gropius' 1919 Manifesto is, nearly a century on, where new Bohemians find themselves: "What will develop," wrote Gropius, "are not large intellectual organisations but small, secret, closed associations, lodges, guilds, cabals which preserve a secret core of belief until a general, great, productive, intellectual and religious idea emerges from the individual groupings, an idea which must ultimately find its expression crystallised in a great, total work of art… I dream of an attempt to create a small community here out of the isolation of individuals."

If it worked for the Bauhaus (much of the way our environment now looks is partly the result of this radical movement's approach to art education and the craft of design), then hopes may be well-founded that the groups of individuals connecting through new media will enable a new great idea to emerge. It can't be paid for or commissioned - it must emerge of its own awareness. I'd say that's enough of an argument for the government not to overspend on e-enablement. Just be ready to provide the net for what emerges. Meantime if, as the Prime Minister is hoping, an e-enabled general election becomes a reality by the end of the decade, he might just get my vote, and I will at least be able to recall the Pankhursts without shame.

Hilary Burden is a freelance commentator on social issues and the founder of Talent Circus, a new media creative agency and think-tank.

Hilary Burden's independent opinion appears courtesy of Prospect - a recruitment consultancy committed to 'enabling better futures' and sourcing the people to drive eGovernment. For further information go http://www.prospectmsl.com/ or e-mail info@prospectmsl.com