Question Time, the BNP, Twitter and #bbcqt

Last night, amidst massive protests, the leader of the British National Party*, Nick Griffin was allowed onto one of the BBC's premier political programmes, Question Time. This is a debate style program, typically 5 people - 3 politicians of the main parties, 2 people from other walks of life (or minor parties) and is very high risk for politicians as the audience can ask some difficult questions and their sharp comments can undo the best prepared polemic.

But to me the really interesting thing about Question Time (and other TV programs) is that the British Twitterati have got into the habit of chatting and commenting on the programme using the hashtag #bbcqt, and that to me is the really interesting bit, for 2 reasons:

- The dream of people interacting around TV programming via social networks, a key plank of Joost's original pitch, has been shown to be valid - its just that people are using a microblogging service on standard terrestrial TV rather than herding sheeplike into the Web TV players' own social networks

- Why Twitter - I hypothesize that its because:

(i) Its a mass-chat based system and easy to apply in this sort of live-comment usage

(ii) Assymetric follow - I can see the opinions of people I don't usually follow - adds richness

(iii) 140 Characters - what killed debate in the earlier email based UseNet were people writing massive polemic essays and swamping the textwaves. 140 characters means a light touch of easily digestible views

There is also fascinating implication here - the same internetworks that are breaking up the media are also capable of re-combining audiences in the social media systems. I can't imagine how you would use Facebook to do this (too cumbersome) or IM (too small an audience reach).

Update - two good points/clarifications:

- Richard Beddard notes in the comments below that on of the issues now facing something like #bbcqt is the sheer volume (it was hitting 1,000 twts a minute at one stage) these hashtag based comment aggregators can get, and the need for better filtering

- Matt Locke noted (on Twitter) that the #bbcqt did not unify all opinion, and interestingly the opinion on the BBC "Have Your say" website was very different in flavour. The thought I was airing above is that Twitter was more an aggregator of many off-the-BBC-site comment subnetworks that would otherwise not have been seen in one place.

Incidentally, in my personal view the audience collectively came out as the most sensible attendee in the Question Time debate - which is fascinating in itself too. The other panel members (Liberal Democrat excepted more of the time) succumbed to the temptation of pillorying Griffin, whereas - in my view anyway - if they had STFU he would have hanged himself on his own petard, without getting any sympathy. Trust in Free Speech .....

(*For the uninitiated, the BNP is a classic "far right" party - their policies are almost designed to make the liberal left splutter into their FairTrade lattes. The fascinating problem is that the BNP now have similar sort of elected political support in the UK to the Greens, Welsh Nationalists etc (primarily due to the Government totally botching up massive immigration over the last 10 years) and thus - in a free speech country - deserve access to these national TV platforms. This has led to the fascinating spectacle of the liberal/left leaning politicos all dying to deny free speech, rather than support it as one would expect...... )