FUCU versus Facebook-fu ? Has technology made politics explosive again?
With the electoral shocks of Brexit and Trump against the odds (5/1 and 150/1 respectively) you could be forgiven for thinking that you don’t know anything about how the other half think.
Gillian Tett writing in the FT this weekend has put forward a new acronym to help us understand the disruption: FUCU
FUCU stands for:
- F = Fragmentation —social technology creates filter bubbles so we only see what we have chosen to see
- U = Untrusting — we now trust peers in our tribes more than the “experts” and traditional authorities
- C = Customisation — as consumers we define ourselves by our personal choices not by what we produce or which community (or political party) we’re part of.
- U = Unstable — digital media allows for speedy decision making — we’re all butterflies now.
All of this leads to greater unpredictability says Tett.
However, it may be that the disruption is simply caused by skills difference between those who understand the new digital mindscape and how to play it, and those who don’t.
Simon Kuper, in the same magazine, “How Facebook is changing democracy” explains how the political parties are learning to campaign digitally — they are micro-targeting political messages.
That means you might receive one message while your partner receives another.
Both Remain and Leave campaigns invested millions of pounds in digital advertising. Indeed the Remain campaign put 98 percent of its £6.8m budget into a billion targeted digital ads, mostly on Facebook.
So what was the difference between them?
Dr Andrew Mullen writing in Leave versus Remain: the digital battle says
“the Leave campaign was much more successful at targeting than the Remain campaign”
So, there we have it — one campaign used Facebook like a new direct medium, they are masters of “Facebook-fu” while the other used it like an old mass medium with one message for all.
While FUCU is a useful new acronym, the real change is more mundane : as with any new technology — the people who have learnt to harness its power first, are the earliest winners.
