Politics & Social Media? Boring? Wait For 2030!

And so finally today Australia has a government (according to my Twitter feed anyways)! After a long election campaign that bored half the nation to sleep, followed by secret talks that scraped in on the lowest rung of news-worthiness, we can now get on with tweeting and posting disgruntled comments about our newly-appointed representatives.

Looking back over the 2010 election there seemed to be a dissatisfied taste in a lot of people's (read: "nerd's") mouths about the limited application of social media in this campaign. The Gillard/Abbott camps seemed to apply social media as an afterthought, without any real sense of influence or excitement about the medium.

It seems politicians are yet to wake up to the digital tools they have at their disposal...

But that's about to change.

Last month when I was speaking in Melbourne at XMediaLab we began discussing convergence in social media, and what the landscape might look like in 2030. Wonderful technologies like facial recognition, predictive search, video tagging and geo-location tracking were all bandied about in a beautiful dream-like conversation. The future seemed so exciting and transparent with all forms of history on a global and hyper-local level at our fingertips.

But transparency and history are the enemy of politicians, who week after week are forced to resign as uncovered truths from the past or present are splashed across ever-widening social networks at ever increasing speeds.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt even came out last month and said:

"perhaps people should change their names upon reaching adulthood to eradicate the potentially reputation-damaging search records Google keeps"

Interesting tactic, but I think it is a realistic vision of the future.

In the election race of 2030, all the teenagers and twenty-somethings blindly posting and passing on their personal history will be around 40-50 years old - prime politician age! And oh how that will come back to haunt them. Any photo you're in (from any point in history) will be automatically tagged by powerful facial recognition software. Even if your face is in a mask, in the shadows, side-on, you're not safe from the computing power of 2030 (which will be on average 64 times faster than 2010). It will analyse a database of locations that match the interior of the room and give the image or video a location. We can then search the corners of the web for blogs, posts, comments or any byte of information that connects to that time and place, and suddenly the world can be pieced together through the countless insignificant comments of a generation.

Essentially the vast pile of decades of tagged social media will provide the public with the drama it has sought in its election campaigns. A Stephanie Rice-esque tweet that may have gone unnoticed in 2010 will be there for all to see and judge when it's scooped up by smarter, more accurate search engines of the future.

The internet never forgets, and the hazy parts of its memory will only be focused and clarified as time and technology march on. This is certain to revolutionise our expectations of political figures, as well as provide some much-needed scandal and drama for the voting public in the years ahead.