The current General Election campaign in the UK has been billed as a Digital Election, a moment in history when the online community make a real impact on the results. There has been reams and reams of data collected, instant polls and so on to the extent that just trying to make sense of it must be like fighting your way through the Matrix populated entirely by bluff old ladies from Lancashire.

However it seems that the most active use of the digital space has been to satirise the whole campaign. Try as they might politicians just don’t have the charisma of say, Barack Obama, to really pull off an effective digital campaign, and given the UK’s proud tradition, think Spitting Image, of satirising politics, it’s not really that surprising that we’ve so gleefully embraced the opportunity to have a few laughs.

Clifford Singer’s website mydavidcameron.com has received a huge amount of publicity for its spoofing of the Conservative party’s poster campaigns. The site has received some 250,000 unique visitors and over 1,200 poster submissions, showing clearly not only how much people enjoy a good laugh, but how keen they are to get involved.

The sudden popularity of Nick Clegg after the first tv debate and the subsequent spin offensive by  some tabloid papers brought a swift and satirical response from the twitter community leading to the phrase #nickcleggsfault becoming a top trending topic and apparently accounting for  “a staggering 0.6% of all twitter traffic”.

And finally, just two days ago Gordon Brown was accidentally overhead by reporters describing a Labour supporter as a ‘bigoted woman’ sparking a media frenzy. Google currently has nearly 2 million results for ‘gordon brown bigoted woman’ and Youtube has  just under 600 videos. The spoofs have already started to appear with the return of Keyboard Cat.

The British have always had a tendency not to take things too seriously and it’s nice to see that tradition continuing into the internet age, but I worry that in the past where political satire was restricted to those with actual political views strong enough for them to go to the trouble of creating a poster or sketch show, it’s become a bit of a free-for-all.

The final spoof seems to be that while these virals start off as a political comment on the General Election, they turn into everyone trying to say something stupid or funny in a game of one-up-man-ship without any sort of relevance to the original statement, a problem Clifford Singer raised at the Progressive London conference in January.

Has all this satire served to raise politics up higher in the public consciousness, or has it served only to feed our apathy about government? All will be revealed next week when the voter numbers start rolling in.

Tags: digital economy, general election, virals