Fortunately, psephological bloggers are on the case!

Both Antony Green and Possum have written thoughtful and well informed posts on just this topic.

I’d add a couple of points:

(a) It’s quite right to be a tad suspicious about whether polls are measuring something slightly different from voting intention. To me, the biggest gap in the polls we have is always the lack of any data on intensity of interest in politics, which could, I think, usefully be correlated with strength of commitment to a particular voting preference. Part of the advantage to incumbents, I suspect, comes from the fact that a lot of the people, a lot of the time, are just not thinking much about politics;

(b) As I’ve commented on and off again and again for years, politics is not amenable to prediction in quite the same way other forms of behaviour are. (A good contrast is with consumption, where the aggregation of individual purchases makes more sense, I’d suggest, than the aggregation of individual votes; the frequent conflation of political behaviour with marketing terminology is misleading – ‘brand loyalty’ is just not the same thing with political parties as with mobile phones or flavoured milk.)

It would be possible to expose any number of non-sequiturs, rhetorical moves, sophistries, and general incoherence in Stutchbury’s article.

But there’s a broader point here.

We live, we’re told sometimes, in an age of story-telling. Therapeutic cultures, cyber-utopian discourses, marketing moves – all encourage us to tell our stories and rearrange the bits of the world as narratives (if not ones entirely of our own making). There’s something here of what Michel Foucault diagnosed as the diffusion of the practice of confession – and an incitement to tell one’s truth – from the Church outwards into the culture. Now, it would be too simplistic to condemn this (or, for that matter, to offer an enconium to it). Sweeping judgements on social trends tend to say more about those doing the judging than the reality – revealing, all too often, the value judgements they attempt to conceal.

One question, though, could be addressed to Stutchbury – what is, in fact, involved in the demand that policy conform to a narrative?

It’s a demand journos, particularly at The Australian, seem to make very frequently. It obscures a heap of ideological baggage. It can’t be just any narrative. It has to be the preferred ‘reform’ narrative.

Let me get one last thing straight. I’m a fan of story-telling. I like to tell stories myself. But a narrative doesn’t have to be coherent, or sustained by evidence. It’s not the same thing as an argument. It might be a good thing if that were realised – that accountability to reason and truth and evidence can be the price of seeing everything in terms of narrative.

Update: On Paul Kelly.

In a way, as with so many other developments in new media, the user review replicates an underlying social pattern which is re-emerging as the closed media circuits of modernity fracture. The economics of film, like that of publishing and music, is typical of a certain enduring characteristic of the culture industries – the uncertainty of demand. While the quantum of production is closely tied to the number of screens, the art of predicting which films will make money is a most uncertain one. As a rule of thumb, one film has to make enough to subsidise a larger number which will lose money – what John Howkins calls the nobody knows principle. Producers can try to minimise risk by churning out sequels or franchise films, but the basic rule holds – it’s much harder to say which movie will find an audience than how many red cars will be sold.

So “word of mouth” has always been something that film marketers rely on, and indeed try to foster. And in a way, that’s what user reviews are.

There’s also a broader social phenomenon at work here – a decline in trust for authority figures of all kinds. In a real way, this is a positive development – because it represents a democratisation of knowledge. Though it’s not without its costs.

It does mean that there’s no particular premium given to the opinion of someone who writes a film column in a newspaper or a magazine – unless that writer has the ability to speak to readers on a basis of relative equality and to reveal their own personality. That may be why there’s much more affinity with film critics on tv – we all have opinions about whether we agree more with David or Margaret, or lament the absence from the box of Fenella Kernebone – because we feel we’ve come to know them as people. But there’s not much kudos for just being an “expert” on film – as with many other domains.

That holds whether we’re talking about mass market movies or niche indie or arthouse ones. There’s an interesting little stab at some research on the disjunction between the preferences of critics and scholars and film bloggers at Critical Culture. Pacze Moj finds quite a difference between -

“critical popularity” and “popular popularity”.

One of the factors, aside from what we might call the meta-level ones, that accounts for this phenomenon is that critics are often writing for a specialised audience. It’s well recognised, I think, that academic film criticism has its own vocabulary, interests and approaches – which is precisely why film is taught in universities. But I think it’s less well recognised that the classic newspaper film review has its own generic form, and its own view of what a “well made film” is which is quite distinct from that of vernacular audiences. Increasingly, it may be the case that a quite narrow set of criteria of value is being applied which appeals more to other film reviewers than to film viewers. And to editorial and journalistic canons of the “well made film review”…

For example, at the moment, I’m watching Doomsday on dvd. In many ways, it’s quite a silly film, but self-consciously so. It really is a postmodern pastiche of all sorts of post-apocalyptic science fiction action movies from the last few decades – making extremely conscious and obvious references to Highlander, Mad Max, The Matrix, and to other big box office flicks like Fight Club and Lord of the Rings. For critics, this is a turnoff. It’s also playing around with a bit of Shakespearian scene sequencing. It’s full of holes, and the mood and narrative pacing switches about a lot, but that’s part of the point.

For folk like me who like these films, all this is a positive source of pleasure… which is one reason why I’m likely to pick a film to watch based on the user reviews at IMDB and around the blogs and fansites.