The digirati are not happy bunnies. Why? The Digital Economy Bill (now Act) was passed last week and is controversial for a whole number of reasons, not least the predicted decline in free public wifi spots and the threat of kicking illegal downloaders off the Net permanently. Just how enforceable the Act is time will tell, but what last week did demonstrate is that sometimes the Twittersphere is a bit of an echo chamber.
By all accounts, we have a right to be angry – the debate was rushed, barely attended and clearly most ministers don’t understand the Web or the implications of the Act – scarily, this apparently includes the man charged with developing the UK’s digital economy. I’m not in favour of the Act at all, but this blog’s not about the Bill/Act, there’s been enough of those already, it’s about social media’s impotence in the face of the legislation’s passing.
Social media users have grown used to getting their own way in recent months – think about how they really stuck it to The Man (in this case Simon Cowell) by out-buying his Christmas No.1 candidate with Rage Against the Machine. Yet, for all the noise within Geekdom – particularly Twitter and the blogosphere – against what it we saw referred to as the #debill, there was no changing of minds. MPs weren’t listening. Twitter and, let’s face it, its few tens of thousands of active and vocal UK users, were not being heard. The Guardian, of course, didn’t miss an opportunity to blame to Tories for the Bill’s passing, despite it being a Labour-driven ‘initiative’.
This underlines the limitations of Twitter. It’s great to engage with those within it and they can be incredibly useful connections, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that ‘influencers’ on Twitter are necessarily the same as influencers in the real world.
