Social media is often credited with reviving the democratic process, heralding a world of instant access to our political masters and open and honest debate. Unfortunately, as Daniel Finkelstein pointed out in his Times Opinion piece yesterday, the public (by and large) “are serenely indifferent” to the world of politics. It is not that the crowd is too stupid to understand political issues … it simply has better things to do with its time. As a consequence, in the words of Finkelstein: “the gulf between the amount of attention politicians and pundits believe voters are paying and the amount they are actually paying is vast.”
You can apply the same reality check to the commercial world. By and large, companies delude themselves that their customers are interested in everything that they do. In reality, for every activist scrutinising corporate behaviour, there are tens of thousands of people wh0 simply don’t care, unless that behaviour directly impacts their own lives. This doesn’t mean that corporate behaviour is unimportant, but that interesting and engaging a distracted and indifferent crowd is not that easy.