“None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills.”

In a world dominated by post-truth politics, these words by Henry Jenkins in his book, Convergence Culture, are now more important than ever.

Collective intelligence allows the public to get closer to democracy, by merging together knowledge from different sources and interacting with the information available, in order to question and challenge authority. The emergence of the internet and online communities has given rise to unlimited opportunities for the public to become engaged with this information.

After dedicated news sites, social media is now the second most important place people discover news online. Politics has always been heavily influenced by the media, and in a world before the internet was invented, politicians and their policies could easily go unscrutinised. Now, however, even before a policy has been announced, it is often leaked by the media on to a social network, where members of the public can state their approval or disdain. Campaign groups and public relations practitioners can create communications almost instantly in response, and the Government can ultimately be lobbied before any official policy announcement has been made.

There are, however, criticisms of this kind of collective intelligence.

First and foremost, do politicians really care about what the public says on social media. After all, can those on social media, although now over 65 per cent of the population in the UK, really reflect the feeling of the wider public? A 2015 Ofcom report found that while 43 per cent of those who get their news updates online do so through social media, a huge 61 per cent of these are between the ages of 16-24 (Hanska, 2017), the age group who overwhelmingly vote for left wing parties.

Secondly, the rise of online collective intelligence has created echo chambers where post-truth claims can be reposted without rebuttal and opposing ideas can be dismissed as being biased without any checking of the facts. Anyone can now access the internet and post their opinions online as ‘truths,’ which are then often shared far and wide by those of a same opinion. Rather than sharing a post based on the accuracy of its content, users in social media bubbles share content based on emotions and feelings. This means that public relations practitioners on the future face a tough challenge to get their messages noticed among all other shared content.

That being said, the potential for social media to be used as a tool to listen and to learn from one another cannot be underestimated. As was seen in Egypt in 2011, social media allows people to come together to effectively question and challenge Government.

As more and more of the public take to social media, PR practitioners will need to become more intelligent and develop better strategies to reach echo chambers and to deal with the rising power of different communities.

References

Hänska, Max & Bauchowitz, Stefan. (2017). Tweeting for Brexit: how social media influenced the referendum.