GE15 gets a kickstart
We’ve just passed 100-day day on the election countdown, and while once again we’ll find voices calling it as the “social media election” (despite previous elections making the same claims) the thing that’s caught my eye is that it seems to be the crowd funding election. First it was the Greens, cro
We’ve just passed 100-day day on the election countdown, and while once again we’ll find voices calling it as the “social media election” (despite previous elections making the same claims) the thing that’s caught my eye is that it seems to be the crowd funding election.
First it was the Greens, crowd funding a candidate for every constituency in Brum, and now Labour’s PPC for Yardley has a campaign to build a war chest to help her fight against John Hemming.
Micro funding was always held up as being an important part of Obama’s success in the US, but a crowd funding campaign moves that idea to new territory: it heightens the sense of collective action, by rallying folk around the funding target. Crowd funding, so tightly wound into a discourse of innovation and disruption, also chimes with the rhetoric of UKIP earthquakes and Green surges, to the idea that we’re all activists now and everything is up for grabs.
We live in interesting times.