Yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was in Britain, giving a speech before the Conservative Party’s annual conference, and he also made some news in an interview with the Financial Times where he talked about the internet’s impact on politics.
A lot of what he said made sense, though it wasn’t particularly new, including:
** “Many of the politicians don’t actually understand the phenomenon of the internet very well. It’s partly because of their age . . . often what they learn about the internet they learn from their staffs and their children.” Tell it, Eric!
** “If television created this generation of politicians, what will the internet do to the next generation of politicians?” Yes, good question indeed.
** “The internet has largely filled a role of funding for politicians . . . but it has not yet affected elections. It clearly will. Given the take-up rate of broadband and the number of people online – it will happen here.” Duh.
But when Schmidt ventured to make some more concrete predictions, things got weird.
As the Financial Times reports, Schmidt thinks that within five years, “truth predictor” software would “hold politicians to account.”
Voters would be able to check the probability that apparently factual statements by politicians were actually correct, using programmes that automatically compared claims with historic data, he said.
Politicians “don’t in general understand the implications” of the internet, Mr Schmidt argued. “One of my messages to them is to think about having every one of your voters online all the time, then inputting ‘is this true or false?’. We [at Google] are not in charge of truth but we might be able to give a probability.”
What’s odd about this forecast isn’t that Schmidt thinks voters will use online tools to quickly figure out whether something is factual. It’s that he seems to think that this isn’t already happening. With more people carrying web-enabled phones, as well as lightweight laptops with wifi connections, our capability to quickly fact-check their asses by looking up the historical record is already widely distributed and widely used.
The other thing that is odd is what he doesn’t foresee. Nowhere in Schmidt’s thinking about the internet’s impact on elections is any sense that he gets the social element. People are connecting with each other in powerful new ways, and that is the what is driving the sea-change in politics that we are living through. Unfortunately, if you run a search engine–even one that is a massive media company like Google–it seems that you only see people as individual atoms, or consumers, and thus can only imagine them individually pinging a piece of software to “hold politicians to account” instead of banding together to dig up dirt, organize rallies, gather petitions, generate new ideas, raise money and mobilize voters.
It’s good that Schmidt is pointing out that the internet is changing politics; but I would hope that if he is talking to politicians, he would talk to them more about how they might use it to reinvent their relationship to voters and communities, rather than just predict more “gotcha” behavior aimed at catching them in lies and obfuscations.
While I’m on the topic of Google and politics, it’s worth noting in this context that the while the company stands at the forefront of online innovation, it’s shown itself to be painfully traditional when it comes to engaging in its own political pursuits. Recently, the company has hired a raft of DC lobbyists, most of them Republicans, including some creepy firms, and is spreading its cash around the Beltway, desperately trying to catch up to the telco interests who already have Congress on a short leash. It would be far better, and more powerful, if Google were to ask its users to band together to help fight for such worthwhile causes as network neutrality. The company has already shown how to reinvent commerce; wouldn’t it be cool if Google applied some of that same ingenuity to reinventing politics?
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