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‘People power will become an explosive force in history’
Matthew d’Ancona’s Coffee House quote from Gordon Brown’s lively and energetic speech to the Google Zeitgeist conference could stand as a strapline for the 2gether festival. If the key to understanding and harnessing the promise of the web in being at an authoratative centre of a innumerable series of open conversations, d’Ancona reckons that the PM has been taking the right sort of council:
Gordon’s answer was unequivocal: ‘people power will become an explosive force in history’. Social networking and blogging would give the public the ‘power directly to influence change’. Even foreign policy, he suggested, would be affected: if Rwanda happened today, he said, the images and stories dispersed on the web would make it impossible for the international community not to intervene. Indeed, the challenge in this era of ‘direct people power’ was for global institutions like the IMF, the World Bank and the UN to match this growth of a global demos on the web.
Powerful stuff from the most powerful politician in the UK. Yet as d’Ancona also notes, delivering the fruits of that visionary statement is likely to prove much more difficult. It is exactly those practical challenges that we hope Matthew and the Spectator magazine will help us flesh out at their high level cross party panel event on Wednesday lunch time, where we ask amongst other things: “is our politics big enough for the web?”
Definitely not to be missed!
Tags: Gordon Brown Google Zeitgeist, Matthew d'Ancona, panel debate, politics 2gether08, The Spectator Discussion
2 comments for “‘People power will become an explosive force in history’”
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If this is true (and I’m not sure it is) then where is there an example of it impacting on the top line of education policy decision making in the UK?
As for the Prime Minister’s comments about Rwanda, my immediate riposte would have been what about Darfur,Zimbabwe ……etc
Mick - equally, could not the question be: “is our politics *small* enough for the web?”