As internet users, we are all constantly warned about the dangers of embarrassing or criminalising ourselves online – your boss stumbling across dodgy drunk photos uploaded by careless friends on Facebook, criminals flaunting their guns and drug-taking on Bebo, hitting 'reply all' on an email when the person you're bitching about is one of the recipients, Stephen Ireland... well, just Stephen Ireland in general, really. And this week, our fine leader Brian Cowen proved once again to be a man of the people by making an arse of himself online.

An Taoiseach uploaded a wide-eyed, distracted and rambling video of himself to YouTube talking about the Irish soccer team's match against France. In just under two minutes, Cowen managed to provide some of the most inane football analysis ever which included such insightful gems as, "So I think we can be very hopeful", and, "We saw that the last day how well organised we are", proving the point that the majority of online content is just inane waffle posted by people keen for attention and affirmation. Perhaps Cowen is moving away from political messages on YouTube for more 'stuff people are interested in' kind of content. If that's the case, I await his videoed thoughts on Lady Gaga's new collaboration with Beyonce, or how to make the perfect hollandaise sauce, or a short play teaching children about racial diversity featuring colourful sock puppets, and so on, with bated breath. I don't know about you, but I sort of feel that Cowen has maybe a few little meany-miney things better to be doing than uploading videos of himself talking about how we're going to excel in midfield. What would he do if Sellafield exploded? Play Tetris?

Of course the wider context to this is how rubbish Irish politicians are at adapting to using the internet in a way that doesn't give you that same feeling that watching the tipsy uncle dance at a wedding does. Successful use of the internet in politics is all about not stretching the audience's believability. If you don't use it normally, then contributing to it seems off. And that makes sense, because no contributor accesses a service they aren't familiar with. Would you let someone who has never driven service your car? So do you believe that Brian Cowen whips out his laptop to check up on missed clips of Family Guy? I don't really know the level of Cowen's internet literacy, but by the way he uses YouTube, and with the history of Fianna Fáil's online incompetence, I can't imagine that he really has a bog's notion about what's going on online.

If Cowen did use YouTube, he'd probably find a rather unsettling reflection of how people feel about him. Entering the Taoiseach's name in YouTube, the immediate results that greet you are titled, "Alan Shortt is Brian Cowen on The Late Late Show", "Brian Cowen Nude", and a plethora of other satirical and slagging nuggets. Because that's how it seems people are only really able to interact with An Taoiseach online: satirise him or slag him. Unless Fianna Fáil changes that perception of Cowen, as a bumbling target to be ridiculed by people who feel detached from him, then there will be no way forward for him or for the party, given that the future of interacting with voters will be online connection.

As much as people are disconnecting themselves from Fianna Fáil in real life, or offline, the same thing is happening online. Just because Cowen and his party have started to utilise the internet, doesn't mean they're going to get a new audience and expand support. What they need to understand is that there's the same audience online as there is offline. But politicians in Ireland see the internet as some distant alien platform where strange things like 'websites' and 'blogging' can lead to unparalleled success. Fianna Fáil needs to comprehend that the internet is a social venue like any other, and interaction needs to be as real there as it is on the street when you're kissing babies and filling potholes.

The internet is the main point of communication and information access for the vast majority of young people in this country, which is why there has been a political rush online to harness that audience, often elusive elsewhere. Although there are some Irish politicians who do the internet well because they understand it (namely Trevor Sargent and Ciaran Cuffe), Cowen's blundering online just gives a generation of digital natives more ammunition against him.

They see him as even more out of touch when he tries to encroach on their turf with absolutely none of the tools of familiarity that they have. What would happen if Cowen tried to be their 'friend' on Facebook? Well, isn't that what the 'ignore' button is for?

umullally@tribune.ie