Learning something doesn’t always mean learning something

The election is over. It seems like only yesterday when the country united to tell The Conservatives that we kinda wanted them in power but not enough to give them anything to really brag about. But whilst we all got lost in the excitement of who would get the opportunity to pull the country out of the ground and then run it back in for shits and giggles, I was in the middle of researching a local candidate by the name of John Hemming. Hemming was, and still is, the MP for Birmingham Yardley, representing the Liberal Democrats with a face made for a Spitting Image puppet and a stronghold over his loyal constituents. I researched his name, his past, his voting patterns within the House of Commons, subscribed to his blog, and what did I learn in the end?

Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zero. Fuck -fucking- all.

In my naive stupidity leading up to the big May 6th political massacre of 2010, I was excited to be able to learn about the candidates in my given area and follow them via their social media platforms. That was a mistake. Turns out, politicians can’t all be as down and with it as Tom Watson MP of West Bromwich East. Of all six candidates representing Lib Dem, Labour, Conservative, the British National Party, the United Kingdom Independence Party and the National Front (oh my…), not one had a Twitter account, and only one made use of Facebook: Lynnette Kelly of Labour. No Twitter for her (if you google ‘Lynnette Kelly twitter’, the closest result is one of my tweets related to her), and her usage of the Facebook page and her personal blog died on, you guessed it, May 6th. Hemming had a blog and a personal website but updates are few and far between on the blog, whilst the website reminds me of my youthful early teen years when Geocities was all the rage. The times; politicians haven’t caught up just yet.

You’d also be surprised at how little online information there is about candidates in small areas, especially when targeting specific areas of interest such as the environment. Other than using TheyWorkForYou to discover how Hemming has voted during his time in power, and numerous stories of scandal and sleaze related to the BNP (I know, you’re as stunned as I wasn’t), it was almost impossible to discover anything from concrete sources whether using Google, party websites or social networking in any capacity below putting in some effort.

Looking back, I handled it all wrong. I messed up. I screwed up. I fuc… you get it. Sadly, I didn’t. Here’s why.

When you’re an online journalism student, everything seems quite easy in the early going because you are effectively using the internet almost exclusively. Tweets, blogs, searches, podcasts, audioboos, you name it, we cover it. We find news stories on various websites we saved in our Delicious folders and fed into our Google Readers. Then, we republished them with a new slant using social mediums and online contacts. Those stories made it onto our online news website for our online readers to view, and repeat ad nauseum until the end.

When you’re an online journalism student, doing online journalism, you must always, ALWAYS remember the real world. People always talk about how much influence the internet has over society and how popular and ground-breaking and life-changing it all is. But is it, though? Paul Morris didn’t think so. Meirion Jenkins didn’t think so. Lynnette Kelly only thought so until she lost. John Hemming thinks so… but only just. Sometimes, the news is simply not going to come to you just because of what we, as the internet, think of the internet. I didn’t learn from what Simon Jenner told me at the very start of this entire module; the most important thing about social media and having an online presence is going out and creating relationships in the flesh. Who else did what I did? Who else went searching for information on their candidates over the internet and found nothing? Wouldn’t it have been great had I gone out, met these people, collected information and audio snippets and pictures and videos and put them online so that there was no longer a hole where open information should have been? Hindsight is 20/20 and upon reflection, so much more could have been done on my part. I wrote many times about going out and being the story, and engaging with people. I didn’t do it. I hoped that the story would notify me through Facebook, reply to me on Twitter and pop up on Google. Of course, it didn’t. Why would it?

I say that I didn’t learn anything but I think I have, even if it is at my own expense. I’ve written on this blog about building communities, finding stories and being more than a good writer. We can add one more thing to that list: where there is nothing, make something. If that means going out into the real tangible world, gathering information that is not actively available online, and then uploading it all yourself, that’s what you should do. The internet is an open world of freedom – freedom to information, freedom to opinion, freedom to knowledge. The internet in its current form, however, is only a snapshot of what is really going on out there. Look out of your window: is your garden on the internet? Are your flowers on the internet? Is your walk down the road on the internet? Not everything is on the internet, but that’s just more reason to go out, find those gaps and fill them yourself.

Every week, we learnt about what new and exciting websites and tolls could be used to gather information – websites to talk, read, argue, agree; sites to ask, request, share, discover. I made the foolish mistake of thinking that everything was here for me to, pardon the environmental pun, recycle. It isn’t. Were I smart, there would be whole pages telling you everything you need to know about BNP candidate Tanya Lumby. Now, there may never be. I approached it wrong, and if I could have done it all over again, there would be Yahoo Pipes and word clouds flying out of my pants with information. Again, I missed a trick there.

It may seem like these blogs are nothing but a guy beating himself up about mistakes. They are pretty much just that. But I also note them not just for my own reflection, but on the off-chance that the class of 2010-2011 will also read this and take heed for next year.

Well, if they can afford to…