O’Conall Street

It has been very interesting to track how society has reacted to Iris Robinson MP, MLA’s comments on gay people. Whilst there is a small but well organised lesbian and gay lobby in the North of Ireland, reaction from members of that community has been spontaneous and driven by separate individuals rather than strategic or coordinated.

A decade ago it would have been very difficult for a disparate group of people to keep a debate going for this long as the traditional media would not have been able to accommodate the diversity of views or such a widespread response. The media traditionally go to representative groups for comment because programmes or newspapers simply do not have the time or the space to allow a conversation to continue in such an unstructured fashion. This is why organised lobby groups get a much greater share of voice. They provide the traditional media with a single voice, tipping the balance of influence in favour of coordinated campaigns and organised groups at the expense of the individual.

What is so different today?

Firstly the media has changed. All over the world the broadcast media has become more audience driven. The Nolan Show is a case in point. Producers and editors are surrendering more control to the listener and allowing the conversation to continue off air via websites. The same is happening with the print press where a story is now more widely debated through online comments. Finally blogging and social networks allow individuals to act and campaign without having to secure airtime or even be quoted in a news story.

For example, this week two gay men, John O’Doherty and Andrew Muir used the media to publicise actions they proposed taking to hold Mrs Robinson to account. Both are politically active, John in the SDLP and Andrew in the Alliance although he was also an SDLP member for some years.   As such they would have some experience of the media and the means and experince to get themselves on air.

Others have been doing their own thing outside the traditional media. Over the past two days a Facebook group has been created under the banner ‘Northern Ireland does not need homophobic politicians’ and a petition has been launched on the 10 Downing Street Website.  The latter has collected 732 signatures at the time of writing. A Google blog search shows over 200 sepearte posts on the issue in the past five days.

So despite the introverted nature of northern society it appears social and digital media is becoming increasingly popular and advocacy driven campaigns are spontaneously igniting when an issue captures the public imagination.

It will be interesting to see if this influences the Assembly’s response over the coming months.  

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 9:11 am and is filed under Business, Current Affairs, Politics, Public Affairs, Public Relations, Technology, The Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.