Before the 2010 general election, there were countless predictions that the internet would play a key role. The media told us (above) that online sources would help to shape and even lead the campaign agenda; that the electorate would debate issues through social networks; and that parties and candidates would use online technologies especially to reach younger people.
Within a couple weeks of the campaign starting, however, the internet was being written off as a campaign medium by papers that had previously celebrated its merits.
Now commentators queued up to declare we were being treated to a television election, dominated by the TV debates and 'Clegg-mania'. The internet was seen as little more than an echo chamber to the mainstream media. Iain Dale, a prominent blogger (below), even declared social media tools ineffective for campaigning given their lack of reach beyond the usual activist suspects.
Little hard evidence was produced to support these claims. Furthermore, definitions of precisely what an 'internet election' would look like were thin on the ground.
Project CODE, based at Institute for Social Change at the University of Manchester, tried to answer these questions, among others, and to assess to what extent 2010 was 'an', if not 'the', internet election.
Overall, our findings confirmed the general view that the campaign was indeed another 'false dawn' in terms of expectations of a web-dominated experience. According to our opinion survey of almost 2,000 people conducted a few weeks after polling day, the majority of voters did not undertake any electorally related internet activity. Those that did mostly favoured passive types of engagement such as visiting mainstream media sites and watching YouTube videos, rather than producing their own political content or actively helping candidates to mobilise undecided voters.
But alongside these somewhat uninspiring findings, interestingly, there was also a glass-half-full (or at least a third full) side to the story.
In a Hansard Society report based on the same survey findings, we also showed that one in three did undertake some type of electorally relevant activity on the web. This constituted a doubling of interest since the previous general election in 2005.
Those looking at official campaign information online increased dramatically, rising to around 15% of the population - a five-fold increase since the last election.
Now some of the growth of interest in the campaign online must be attributed to heightened interest in the election overall due to the unusually close race and the unexpected success of the TV debates. There was a strong suggestion that the leaders' debates drove traffic online, particularly in terms of commentary in the 'Twitterverse'.
Beyond this effect, however, an age-breakdown of these results shows that the internet has become the medium of choice for young people searching for information. And our survey also indicated that even among older citizens the internet is fast becoming a part of their everyday news experience.
It's true that, in terms of more activist online participation i.e. beyond news consumption, the internet remains the preserve of a narrow group of younger, male, educated individuals. But even here some intriguing details emerged.
There is now a group of voters who participate only in the online political environment, suggesting that at least a sub-sector of the electorate understands engagement with politics to be an exclusively virtual activity. Given the growing use of social media in everyday life, it is likely that this group will continue to expand into the next election.
All this suggests that the internet's electoral relevance is likely to grow rapidly and lose its 'minority' status by 2015.
This piece was co-written by Rachel Gibson and Marta Cantijoch.
Rachel Gibson is professor of political science at the Institute for Social Change, University of Manchester. She has worked in the area of new media and politics since taking up her first academic post at the University of Salford in 1996.
Marta Cantijoch is research associate at the Institute for Social Change, University of Manchester, and is currently completing her doctoral studies on the topic of 'online political participation'.
