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Hi, I'm Dr Stephen Jeffares from the Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham.
For the last few years I have been interested in how policy makers deliberately create a
label or brand for a policy initiative or idea. Anything from New deal in the 1930s
to Third Way in the 1990s. More recently big society or one nation.
But In an era of social media and rapid online discussion I call this kind of activity hashtag politics.
Never has it been cheaper and easier to rapidly communicate policy to a wide audience, yet
never has it been easier to critique or undermine the initiative. In this game of hashtag politics
for every main initiative we remember, several more will be withering in this environment.
Within minutes of announcing an initiative jokes, alternative hashtags will circulate and gain momentum.
I think policy makers are resilient, they'll go back to their drawing board they'll Rebranding
HS2 as NorthSouthRail Bedroom tax -spareroom subsidy - privatising probation as transforming rehabilitation.
I think just focusing on the successful hashtags is not the way to go the ones that last several
years and are remembered decades later will not give us insight into why some hashtags
succeed and others fail.
At INLOGOV we're interested in week one - the first few days - capturing the discussion
and exploring any signs of an early shape of the debate. To understand this we need
to draw on the advances in online tools for crowdsourcing viewpoints and classifying and
categorising and indexing millions of social media items but all these tools are now available to us.