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Tactic: Why Don’t Chilean Parties Use Web Tools?

Written by Jorge Jorquera on May 3, 2008 – 2:55 pm -

Description: Last week El Mercurio (one of the oldest newspapers in Chile) published a report about the use of Web technologies by political parties in the country (original source in Spanish). The article stated that what the parties were using was very very basic and lacks the “social” element. Even though each one of these parties have a website (list here), they don’t apply the latest interactive Web 2.0 technologies.

Organizer: The political parties of Chile

Purpose of Action: To win elections and gain voter support

Organizing tools not used: YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, or blogging

Outcome: The impact of this new situation is uncertain, but if access to the Internet increases and the activities of young voters online continue to increase, we will see a very different electional process in 2009. The fewer the number of parties that understand this, the lower the probability that they will understand the phenomenon of “Politics 2.0″ that is consolidating around the world and may produce very deep changes in the way we understand “Government”.

Ease of Replication: If we look at the political campaigns in the US, and search a bit about the use of this tools, we can see that, for example, Obama has more than 800,000 followers in Facebook and Ms. Clinton has 150,000. In the past presidential elections in France, the Internet was not only important in the campaigns (in fact Nicolas Sarkozy opposed using it to debate with other candidates), but also it allowed to spread the news who was the winner, due to the bloggers who had fresh info that the media couldn’t get at the same time.

Not using the Internet for politics seem counter-intuitive for technological and cultural reasons. In Chile, bandwith connections grews to 1 million this year, in a country with a population of 16 million and a voter basis of 8 million. The government is pushing to get 2 million users by 2010. This means that at least 10% of the citizens will have access for the next presidential election, which will take place in December 2009.

Traditionally, voters got their information from the traditional medias (TV, newspapers, and radio) which also came from a few media companies so the message was more or less homogenic. Political parties are still living in this world. But Internet and blogging (and derivates) bring new ways to get information and also open a space to spread alternative messages, which are especially being used by the new organizations that are rising (social and political). These organizations are changing the conversations at the bottom of the pyramid: the voters. They are having an impact on, paradoxically, the generations that are less connected with politics: youth and the disenchanted.

Photo: El Rancahuaso

Tags: barackobama, chile, elections, hillaryclinton, politicalparties, web2.0
Posted in Americas, Blogs, Social Networks, Tactics, Video |