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Australian democracy is better off without Jones wielding his microphone (yes,he’s still on Sky but Sleeping Giants is after him there too). But,ironically,in reaction to him,Australian democracy developed a new form of expression. As McManus said yesterday,the Destroy the Joint campaign,“allowed all of these people,who for a long time had been voiceless,who had no way to take on the powerful,to come together rapidly and take action”. They could do it from home. Calling,writing,tweeting,Facebooking. We didn’t have TikTok in those days – that would have been wild.
Professor of political sociology at the University of Sydney Ariadne Vromen says Destroy the Joint lowered the threshold for political participation. It made it possible for people to feel as if they could contribute in their own way. It also developed a broad sense of community,opposing sexism and misogyny rampant in Jones’ comments,well beyond Gillard.
“The importance of social media is the rapid sharing of information through social networks,people sharing with friends they trust and who trust them,” she says.
And the memery around it,the short Facebook posts,the tweets,captured the attention of an audience who even then had information overload.
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Will campaigns like this always work? Government isn’t particularly brand conscious but business is,particularly when the social media going gets tough. See the MEa culpa from ME Bank last week. And big personalities may not recognise their own permeability but the organisations for whom they work certainly do.
“Everyone who is in the public eye needs to think more expansively about their audience,” says Vromen.
I’m not sure whether Jones’ audience really got sick of him but the advertisers did. They know that in their business,the kind of overt personalisation by Jones and others,the perceived violence of Jones’ remarks,won’t fly. The cheap gotcha and humiliation no longer pays dividends. Women are developing personal,political and financial power,slowly,not yet uniformly,but getting there.
Jenna Price is an academic at the University of Technology Sydney. She has a PhD in political sociology. Her supervisor was Ariadne Vromen.