I try to distance myself from political stuff, mainly because my views tend to be just plain trollish and then I and somehow end up voting people everyone hates. But this Urkintalaki thing has got me thinking about a minor detail about the “new ways of interaction” between the public and the democratic process. People who are involved in opposing things like Lex Nokia and Lex Karpela are the highly educated and technology and media savvy ones – the organizing is done over the internet, the anti-adverts are done in HD video and edited with professional quality. Mostly as a group effort – the costs of producing the highly professional content are cut because the people involved are the ones who could be/are doing it for a living (no idea which one is the real case). And the word is spread electronically, using social networking technologies like Facebook, to keep the movement from collapsing and the message being forgotten.

Now, compared to this, a protest by farmers that gets their only TV-time by the protesters pouring manure on the entrance of the Eduskuntatalo can be seen of being in a bit of a slump in getting their voice heard. And it’s not a matter of there being more people interested in Urkintalaki than there are of laws that affect the farming community, it’s just that the social demographic between these two groups is different, and one is way more efficient in handling itself in the field of high tech and media.

The way I understand representational democracy like we have in Finland is that we vote for people who we want to represent us. This set of people then is a nice, wide take on the Finnish people as a whole and what they/we want, as a statistical whole. We have been given the right to promote our differentiating views by protesting. So, the question nagging on the back of my head about if the Urkintalaki people are successful (the previous masinointi against Lex Karpela wasn’t) – Is media-savviness tilting this? IF the Urkintalaki campaign succeeds in changing the way the vote goes, where so-many low-tech campaigns about non-internet issues have failed, are we moving to a society that, as a political entity, is favoring a small elite that knows how produce pretty television adverts over the people who only know the traditional ways of making themselves heard.

I don’t think that would be what’s democracy is about.