Web 2.0 for Europe – but careful what you wish for…

While browsing blogs and tweets about the EU today I stumbled upon this very interesting post on Dick Nieuwenhius’ blog which carries an open letter to EU Commission president Barroso and incoming commissioners from the EC’s community of internet editors and webmasters. The title is “Harnessing the power of the Internet for better communication”.

In this letter, Dick and his colleagues make a strong plea for making more use of the full potential of web 2.0 in order to communicate better with EU citizens. I agree with absolutely everything that’s in there, as I think that a genuine revolution is happening which could finally help the EU become less of a mysterious black box for the average citizen. However, rapid technological developments could also do exactly the opposite if the institutions and the wider community of EU policy and communications experts will be too slow to respond.

This is because the rapid development of social networking, such as twitter or facebook can help to spread news to relevant, new audiences – but it may also help to spread misinformation and rumours about the EU if someone wishes to use it that way, and no doubt many will, and already are doing so (for example, this is very obvious to anyone using the European Parliament’s facebook “fan page”).

So my only word of warning would be “be careful what you wish for”! There is also a danger that we will all get caught up in something that generates more and more work and more demands on our limited time without necessarily solving some deeply-rooted, underlying issues related to the way citizens relate to politics more generally. I also don’t totally agree about mainstream media being in such a decline – in fact I think that for anyone working on EU policy achieving coverage on the FT, or perhaps on some specialist media outlet, is still far more important than a bit of buzz on social networks. But I could be wrong of course.

In the meantime, in any case, we have tried to start a web 2.0 revolution of our own, by starting up a new Twitter account for the Coolproducts for a Cool Planet campaign, which we co-manage on behalf of a wide coalition of environmental organisations.