Dr Tim Gopeesingh doesn’t want to be my friend. But I don’t think it’s because of anything I’ve written about him in the past couple of weeks. And I’m sure that if our paths happened to cross, Dr Tim would be his usual exceedingly cordial self.

What I really meant is that Dr Gopeesingh doesn’t want to be my Facebook friend, or at least hasn’t responded to my request.

For the two or three of you who are not on Facebook yet, it’s a website where you can post information about yourself, send public or private messages to other people, and read about their activities. It is, among other things, a good way to spread information quickly and cheaply: once you’ve posted a piece of news, all your friends on FB can read it, and then pass it on to their friends. (A ’friend’ on Facebook is simply someone whom you allow to link to your information; they may actually be only a passing acquaintance, or you may never have met them in person.) As well as linking to individual friends, you can join Facebook groups for every conceivable interest-sporting, cultural, political, you name it.

So obviously Facebook would be a very useful tool for politicians as part of their online repertoire. It’s generally agreed that without the Internet, Barack Obama wouldn’t be President of the US: during the election campaign he used it to get his message across, mobilise people and raise funds. One Obama Facebook group alone has 6,534,871 supporters.

Now that Parliament is on recess, you might expect our own politicians to step up their use of digital media to keep in touch with their supporters and spread news of their activities.

And what better way to reach people who aren’t going to come out to meetings? Or people who don’t read the newspapers or watch the news? A lot of them are young people, precisely the audience that politicians have the most trouble reaching, but who spend most of their waking hours online.

With all that in mind, I’ve done a quick survey online to see how local politicians have been using these powerful resources. First stop was the parties’ websites and Facebook pages.

Let’s start with the best: the Congress of the People has a lively site, recently updated (you can read the text of its leader Winston Dookeran’s Emancipation address), and featuring photos from its numerous outreach activities, such as a free medical clinic in Tobago on August 1.

Its Facebook page, with over 2,500 members, is also current. Some individual COP members are also very active on Facebook, telling friends about upcoming activities, urging them to donate to the party by text, and rallying the troops with messages like: ’Thank you all who made the COP Tuesday night meeting in Princes Town Promenade the success it was...and to the hundreds of people who came out to listen to the meeting...it shows that TnT is still movin’ with COP.’

If this is what a relatively new party can do, what has the well-oiled machinery of the PNM done to establish a commanding online presence for the ruling party?

Nothing for several years, it seems. The homepage of the PNM’s website bears the smiling visage of a youthful Patrick Manning, a photo presumably from the same era as the speech it accompanies-November 2005. The most recent item I found on the site was a story on non-energy diversification dated August 2007. And most of the links, for instance to ’major government achievements,’ are broken and lead to nothing.

The PNM doesn’t have a main Facebook group, although there are groups such as the PNM Youth League, with more than 500 members. This is overshadowed, however, by groups such as ’I Bet I Can Find 500,000 People Who Hate Patrick Manning’-which has yet to achieve its aim, but boasts over 10,000 members.

Still, the PNM online presence is more impressive than that of the UNC-because the UNC doesn’t have one. At www.unc.org.tt you’ll find a forlorn, undated announcement that the site is down for maintenance. There are various constituency groups on Facebook, but, again, no main central page for the party.

As for individual MPs, there are a number on FB. Several have pictures of themselves in party shirts, showing they see it as a political strategy. But not many are active online. And it’s striking how few UNC MPs are on FB: even Mickela Panday, one of the youngest, is missing, though her picture is on the page belonging to her Oropouche West constituency.

Why isn’t the UNC better represented online? Perhaps the party, which largely represents rural communities, knows or believes its constituency doesn’t have Internet access, just as the COP’s strong presence seems to bear out the perception that its membership is middle-class and, technologically, well-connected.

There are, however, several Jack Warner FB groups, but none of them made up of Ramjack supporters. Some are football-related, and none of them flattering: ’Odio a Jack Warner’ is the least offensive. I haven’t had time to check whether its members include Basdeo Panday.