So we’re only hours away from a general election result, but the influence digital media has played on it all won’t be decided until the dusts of history have begun to settle. The fact that it hasn’t dominated the commentary has been refreshing. Perhaps as a society we are finally getting over the novelty of being able to communicate ideas/images in real-time from/to anyone/anywhere?

Having said that, the breathtaking lack of digital media savvy from the Brown team in the ‘Bigotgate’ incident (breathtaking to Gillian “You’re joh-king!” Duffy at any rate) in not only leaving a mic on the PM, but then not thinking that a BBC Radio studio might just have a webcam set up, shows we’re still at a pretty basic stage.

Bizarre Limbo

Something as steeped in history and protocol as an election is bound to struggle to keep up with the pace of change. It feels like a bizarre limbo between different worlds to go to a polling station where a man with a pencil and ruler crosses off your name on a big list, while the person behind you updates their Facebook status to “…is voting” to the world from their phone.

If anything, being social online really has inspired younger people to engage with politics this time, even if it is inevitably in a more presidential, personality-driven way. No party may have mobilised support online in quite the dynamic method of the US Obama campaign, but this was never going to work like that in the UK. Acerbic wit on Twitter is much more our style. What real effect that has on voting patterns is debateable. A outright victory for Nick Clegg would seem assured when looking at the Twitter search feeds, with David Cameron’s Torys repeatedly mocked, yet the polls tell us they lead.

Unwritten History

Our society’s digital divide clearly remains wide, and particularly split by age and, of course, media savvy. But whether we notice it or not, this election has probably squeezed that gap a little more. Even if the blue rinse Conservatives are not part of the digital conversation, the way social media is changing the expectations of those who are is having a profound, unstoppable social effect.

The result of the election has implications for our media history too. Will the newspapers still be able to claim it was their desperate front pages ‘wot won it’? Will a hung parliament be said to result from tribal populism for the Lib-Dems invigorated by TV debates and Facebook’ed up youth? Are pollsters more or less accurate now we’re all wired up? All will be revealed tonight. See you on #ge2010 for the real-time action…

Twitter is far more established and important that it was even during Barak Obama’s famous social media election campaign. And the UK already loves to tweet during political TV shows like the BBC’s Question Time. It’s a real shame that the many Twitter-phobes are missing out on this important new dimension. One day soon, all big live events will have a feed of comments as a standard part of the broadcast. Then, status updates will be see for what they really are – far from egotistical personal broadcasts, they can be a simple but effective ways for any audience to participate in a communal event.

It’s fantastic that just as digital progress seems to signal the ‘end’ of event television by making almost everything available on-demand, we have a brand new medium for live events, that also has the added importance of immediate political weight.

The Chancellors Debate showed the shape of things to come once the party leaders have their TV showdowns. Of course the negative side of all this real-time digital commentary is that those in the spotlight become incredibly guarded and bland, plus attempt to exert way too much control. However, like it or not, this technology will play a vital role in the Election 2010. And this is really just the beginning of a new political era, so resistance to things like Twitter will have to simply fall away.

The Daily Mail and others may still find value in running daily scare stories about social networks and the anonymity of the internet for some time yet, but the next month will be an important move forward in the acceptance of all the ‘new’ media technologies – and how to use them effectively. Even if politics continues to annoy and baffle, hopefully the relevance and power of digital media will become clearer.

It was a worthy achievement. It also served as a reminder that the physical newspaper, with it’s blanket retail distribution and attention-grabbing headline space, still carries weight. The same highly charged editorial was displayed in the racks and kiosks of 45 different countries at the same time. Even the most viral of digital efforts would struggle to hit all those eyeballs so effectively.

Such innovation shows the way forward for the future success of print. It parallels the advantages of digital content in terms of global reach and shared ‘links’, while enjoying the unique access and political significance of the printed newspaper. Collaboration could well save the industry, and without Rupert Murdoch’s bizarre protectionist model ever having to be proved unworkable too.

Climate change is going to be the biggest story in the world for many years to come. It’s the ideal topic to unite global media, who in turn exert national pressure on politicians and promote essential local level lifestyle changes. Print may yet see it’s most powerful era.

Whatever the outcome in Copenhagen next week, the realisation is that analog and digital media have a more central role in ensuring the success of carbon reduction than the politicians. It is our collective yet individual daily decisions that will ultimately ensure any legislative targets are met. Those who inform us are charged with actually making this happen.

With that in mind, it’s time to sign up to the excellent 10:10 project, which manages to find just the right balance of personal involvement, realistic requests, positivity and an excellent media campaign. Therefore Alchemy Content is now and we look forward to seeing how the next year pans out, for newspapers, socially networked environmental campaigns and all our unsustainable carbon footprints.

So firstly the omnipresent Mr. Big of news publishing announces he is to begin charging for his newspaper’s online content. Then his company dramatically pulls the plug on their free The London Paper title.

It’s a huge about turn on the direction almost all media has been taking for the last few years. So is Rupert Murdoch wise or brave, foolish or foolhardy? More importantly can he, even with all his global expertise in print over decades, really know what he’s doing in a media industry struggling with the economics of giving everything away for nothing?

Of course not. He’s just reached a point where the losses are really rubbing him up the wrong way and is deciding to take some action on it because the alternative is looking really, really bleak for his financial model.

A Little Savvier

Word has it that Rupert doesn’t use a computer and can’t be contacted by email. He is certainly not a fan of digital, and this drastic move against the tide may prove to be his big mistake. The outcome is very far from certain, but to execute such a gamble, I’d prefer it if the man in charge was a little savvier with his RSS feeds.

There was a time when News International’s digital policies looked relatively visionary. The redesigned Times Online (albeit following The Guardian’s lead), and even the purchase of MySpace (before users realised it doesn’t actually work very well) seemed impressively committed to the game. While launching a freesheet in The London Paper showed an apparent desire to keep on the cutting edge of the new print market trends too. But these projects are now busy laying off staff just the same as at other, less well prepared media outlets. Throwing NI’s clout at the projects hasn’t made them better or more profitable than their analog or digital rivals. All is not well and charging for digital content looks like a fairly desperate about turn.

Forward-thinking net commentator Jeff Jarvis said in his column last week, “Newspapers have had 15 years since the launch of the internet browser to re-imagine and rebuild themselves for the reality of the post-Gutenberg age. But they didn’t. Now they are trying to reclaim old business models for a new media economy — a link economy, I call it, in which links give content value. Cut yourself off from links, behind pay walls, and you cut yourself off from the internet and its real value.”

Unfolding Story

Yes, quality newspaper journalism desperately needs to find ways to be funded sufficiently enough to survive, but the new medium still being forged online relies on access to content be as fast and easy as possible. Blocked pages, registration screens, credit card demands..? Alternatives are always a single, rapid click away.

It’s great to see Murdoch shifting this unfolding story so significantly, but I think he’s potentially lost his touch here. He’s going against the grain too strongly in a battle that for once is much bigger than his own publishing empire.

Are we watching the dawn of a new sustainable age of digital news journalism, or the violent death throes of an outdated media hierarchy? Whatever happens next, it’s going to be dramatic and of huge, lasting significance.

But, with a couple of other celeb deaths today, the intriguing ‘news’ out there at the moment is of the ‘death’ of Jeff Goldblum in a fall while on a movie set, and of Harisson Ford variously going missing on a boat/helicopter, presumed crashed. We read they are both currently working on the same movie. I’d love to know the origins of these ‘stories’. Could it even have a distant PR connection?

Every week we see how tools like Twitter are shaping the instant nature of global communication – and how the worst, gossipy tendencies of us as a species are magnified along with the unquestionably liberating power that comes with all this too.

At times like this the mainstream newspaper sites start to look a vital, rather than shaky proposition. But newsrooms deciding on tomorrow’s headlines have got a tough task trying to keep up with the user driven aspects of an ‘event’ story like MJ tonight. They also better beware of printing misinformation pulled from any source (Jackson ‘suicide’, anybody?) – trust no site until this gossip frenzy has calmed down.

One look at the papers tells you that our favourite micro-blogging service has well and truly been picked up as the ‘trend du jour’ by the UK press.

From freesheets to broad ones, vast columns are currently stuffed full of Twitter related chatter. Be it lazy reporting on yesterday’s celebrity tweets, or repeated discussions of whether the platform ‘has become mainstream’ yet, it’s difficult to escape.

This obviously rubs some people up the wrong way. Witness the haters deriding Twestival on the Guardian PDA blog. And all that bile aimed at a charity event!

It actually really excites me when an emerging communications medium gets slagged off. Then you know it’s already challenging the status quo. Twitter is now so completely mainstream (how edgy can something that Phillip Schofield is using on This Morning really be?), but because the gulf between those who accept and use social media and those who don’t, or won’t, is so sharp, you can get the false feeling that using things like Twitter is still the preserve of a clued-up few.

It reminds me of when I owned a mobile phone back at college in 1995. I was hardly an early adopter, yet among my fellow students at the time, having it was considered totally bizarre. “But what on earth do you need it for?” was the regular question, along with sniggering about looking like a drug dealer or city slicker. And this was on a media and communications degree.

Sure the volume of bandwagon-jumping press stories and the cutesy twlingo is annoying. And as the experience of platforms from Friends Reunited to MySpace has shown, an explosion of up-take is no guarantee that your system is about to replace email just yet.

However it’s fairly safe to say that Twitter has proved that micro updates have a huge role to play in the future of how we communicate. (Way beyond having slightly weird ‘relationships’ with celebrities and being bombarded with impersonal PR messages, too.)

Fierce resistance is all part of the process these new tools undergo in becoming an essential part of our lives, but it will be quickly forgotten. After all, who thinks having a mobile phone is ridiculous today?