Friday Nov 15, 2024
Friday Nov 15, 2024
Saturday, 6 December 2014 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Pictures have splashed city walls and have become both a cynosure and eyesore. The average onlooker feels the palpable cry “vote for meeeee”. The competitive mud-slinging and blatant character assassinations will soon follow. This process will animate both the urban and rural landscapes.
Then comes the much-awaited “excreta work”. Posters of one candidate will be attacked by the rival with bovine droppings or worse. The operation usually takes place in the wee hours. Reprisals follow and violence ensues. A few diehards may even end up under the surgeon’s scalpel – it’s all in a day’s work. This is Sri Lanka, our own unique electoral heritage.
By 9 January morning Punchisingho’s healthy herd of goats will be unleashed; they’ll have all the time in world to gobble up rare nutrients present in multicoloured posters of Indian and Chinese origin.
Paper merchants stocking up
Paper merchants may have stacked tons of poster paper in their go-downs in Colombo and suburbs already. It’s one season they wouldn’t want to miss. They’ll put their hearts and souls to make the kill. After all forecasting for such events is an integral part of their business plan. 
In which county would you find such an orgy of elections? Stentorian cries of “Sri Lanka Zindabad” must be reverberating in streets located in Colombo 11, 12, 13 and 14. Their overtime payments for months of November, December and January will be indubitably astronomical.
There’s no country practising democracy like Sri Lanka when it comes to elections; presidential elections, general elections, staggered provincial elections, local government elections, etc. These are great money-making events for paper merchants. Maybe more paper is on its way. Who knows if none gets the magical 51% there’ll be the inevitable second innings and more paper will be needed – hurraaaah!
Poster mania
Posters constitute a traditional and well-entrenched form of impersonal communication during elections in Sri Lanka. Most Sri Lankan politicians choose this medium to attract attention and disseminate their messages. It’s convenient, cheap and provides mileage.
Despite very clear local government bylaws, the task of displaying smiling faces on public walls will be carried out successfully by party stalwarts with characteristic fanfare. Researchers and social scientists allude many reasons for this phenomenon of “poster mania”.
They say print medium is the most cost effective way to reach the target market hence it’s unavoidable. This “poster mania” preoccupation has blindsided many local politicians to emerging realities of new media.
New media
Welcome to the emergence of online social media with its gamut of avenues to connect. The on-line medium has had a significant impact on the contemporary political landscape, yet our understanding remains less than complete.
Social media encompasses a range of information and communication technologies used for sharing information and opinions, often through explicit connections with other people or groups.
They include: Interactive websites that use techniques to encourage user contributed content (i.e. personal, publicly available journals) that allow anyone to report or comment on news and events; micro-blogging services such as Twitter that make it possible to publish, instantaneously, short messages to which other users can subscribe; photo and video-sharing services like Flickr or YouTube that let users publish material they have produced; and Social Networking Services (SNS) such as Facebook and the professional network called LinkedIn.
Powerful tool
Social networking no doubt offer powerful new ways to connect, influence and engage fellow citizens. This can usher in a radical transformation in the way citizens connect and influence their government and politicians connect with the public.
Online engagement between politicians and the public is increasingly spreading especially in the western world. In Canada no one launches into politics or public service without active Facebook and Twitter accounts. They get engaged with the constituency very often and the new media is a refreshing facilitator.
Most politicians use Twitter for political engagement, though some are more successful in this than others. Politicians throughout the democratic world have begun to embrace such tools as a new way to connect with their constituents, shortcutting the heavily-mediated connections offered by traditional media.
India and the US
Our behemoth neighbour India has made huge strides in this area. The Indian electorate has never been younger. Between 2004 and 2009, the voting population went up from 670 million to 720 million. The number is expected to increase to 800 million.
During the recently-concluded elections, PM Narendra Modi did a great job to engage with the younger generation using social media. A greater number of voters than ever before will be 25 years or younger.
The impact of social media on the US presidential elections too was a great eye opener. Many lessons were learnt. In a piece in the MIT Technology Review entitled ‘Facebook: The Real Presidential Swing State,’ writer David Talbot had predicted that “the outcome of the 2012 campaign could have less to do with grand vision than online data analytics and peer to peer voter targeting”.
As it turned out, the Obama victory is credited to just that. Obama’s followers on Facebook and Twitter outstripped Romney’s by a mile though a greater percentage of Romney followers were “talking”. Obama ran away with the election because he used analytics to do peer to peer targeting.
Multi-pronged strategy
Fighting a national election in the new millennium is a different ballgame altogether. You’re well-advised to arm yourself with all resources and strategies. In terms of resources, the human factor is crucial. You need experts, professionals and thousands of both skilled and unskilled volunteers. Social media is for engagement and your social media strategy must be multi-pronged, clearly delineating target markets and resource allocations.
In the 2012 presidential campaign, the media called Obama the digital candidate: President Barack Obama asked supporters to use Facebook to declare “I’m In!” for his re-election. The campaign unveiled its latest innovation in the usage of social media: It serves as more proof that Barack Obama is a master of the deployment of social media in political campaigns.
Our own MR too understands the impact of social media well and will strive hard to derive optimum impact. MS too will aim for maximum reach. The UNP with its close contacts with the advertising industry will also groom its candidate accordingly.
(The writer holds a MBA First Class Honours, Major in Marketing – VM University India and runs a small business enterprise in Toronto, Canada. He could be reached via [email protected].)
