Ten years ago David Mercer wrote in Future Revolutions: ”The ability instantaneously to access — no matter where you are — all the information stored on databanks around the world, and to communicate with all its inhabitants, will radically change individual lifestyles and the structures of society as a whole.”
Ten years on his predictions are right — and the impact of technology in politics is even more astounding than he predicted.
Technology is turning the US election upside down. Millions of people watched last week’s exhilarating final presidential debate and, if the polls are anything to go by, made up their minds in favour of he who managed to manipulate this medium to his advantage. Besides hard-hitting television and radio commercials, advertising within popular video games has been deployed by Barack Obama to woo younger voters.
Besides his handsome intellect, as contrasted with his intellectually unsightly opponent, Obama’s campaign has woken up to this century’s most powerful revolution — information technology. In The Guardian Bobby Johnson observed: ”Barack Obama’s campaign for the White House has already proved itself one of the most high-tech in history — using his website to raise a record amount of funds, announcing his choice of running-mate by text message and even hiring a team of staff to fight internet smear campaigns.”
Closer to home, infighting within the ruling ANC has taken a new turn. But the painful spectacle of comrade insulting comrade has taken place through technology, used in its multiplicity of forms. It is plain to me that hearts and minds are unlikely to be won in hastily convened general councils or pointless conventions, but on how best IT resources are maximised between now and the 2009 poll.
It was a masterstroke for Mosiuoa Lekota to use a popular radio station to host a media conference, without the terrible bother of having to issue invitations and handle RSVPs. The whole thing was covered live on rival radio and television stations across the country and indeed the world. This was probably the most broadcast and talked-about event in South Africa since Nelson Mandela’s inauguration 14 years ago. The ANC used the resultant wave of broadcast interest to respond, albeit in an incoherent and contradictory manner. Mathews Phosa handed an olive branch to Lekota while Gwede Mantashe responded with ridicule — and the complacency that has lately come to characterise the ANC leadership.
If I were Mantashe, I wouldn’t label a technological and communications feat such as Lekota’s a damp squib. Nor would I take the dismissive view of one of the ANC’s remaining intellectuals, Dr Pallo Jordan, at a poorly attended rival rally competing Lekota’s maiden rally in Cape Town. He contemptuously compared the split in the ANC with the split that resulted in the formation of the Pan-Africanist Congress in the 1950s and the one that resulted in the formation of the United Democratic Movement in the early 1990s. This fatally flawed comparison is wearing what I call ahistorical blinkers. The simple difference, Jordan, is that today we are free and the choices even of ANC members are based on this wonderful thing so many died for: freedom of association.
But there is more. Unlike the 1950s, the ability of political parties to mobilise is now not only protected by a fantastic Constitution, but has been multiplied by the communications revolution. In 1959, when the PAC split, its leader was soon detained, never to be seen again, never to mobilise for his cause. Only a handful of people had telephones in their homes and no one owned a cellphone.
Today more than 30-million South Africans have access to cellphones, and millions more have landlines and access to the internet. At the time of writing this, and hopefully so to remain, Lekota and Mbhazima Shilowa were not in jail. With their teammates and backed by technology, they will criss-cross the country in no time, reaching communities and engaging them.
Their ability to mobilise for an alternative view compared with their counterparts of the 1950s or 1990s is chalk and cheese.
The internet, the birth of blogs, access to cellphones, supplementary knowledge communities such as Mix-it and Facebook, access to multiÂlingual newspapers and magazines, plus the reliance of many communities on radio stations — this and more provide a platform that will make the new and young voter in particular find reasons other than historical loyalties to vote for what they desire.
Onkgopotse JJ Tabane is group executive at technology and multimedia company Altron and a media commentator. He writes in his personal capacity