Harry Curtis will vote for the first time tomorrowFlickr: Mortimer62

When I found myself face-to-face with Daniel Zeichner, the Labour parliamentary candidate for Cambridge, outside my gyp room about two weeks ago, I was struck by how strange the situation seemed.

Of course, encountering politicians as I head back to my room, coffee in hand, is not an everyday occurrence. But this particular situation felt peculiar because, as a soon-to-be first-time voter, being approached by a politician and asked for my vote was a novel experience. That I was under a month away from being an active participant in a democracy for the first time was suddenly plain.

Campaigning for the upcoming General Election has, in effect, been underway in the media for months now, starting long before the dissolution of parliament at the end of March. But, throughout the campaign period so far, I have felt like a spectator. An interested spectator, but a spectator nevertheless. Political engagement (or lack thereof) is a huge issue, often put in terms of how people view politics. But equally important is how politics views the people.

“Thank you for sitting through this two-hour political marathon,” was how Nick Clegg chose to begin his closing statement in the seven-way leaders’ debate on ITV last month. No doubt intended as a somewhat light-hearted remark, it betrayed the way politicians view the electorate, and how the electorate is expected to view politicians.

Politics is generally considered to be something we engage in sporadically, a chore that we must come to every so often. In such a climate, therefore, to expect a real feeling of participation seems a little too optimistic. We are only really asked for political participation when the debates and General Election campaigns come around, and even those debates and campaigns are rendered spectacles, rather than opportunities for participation.

Of course, the representation of politics as a spectacle is, in no small part, down to the way it is treated in the media. Every morning, I can check the BBC News website and discern near-instantaneously what issue the preceding few hours of party press releases and editorial meetings have determined will be talked about that day. Issue after issue, successively framed. And we are invited to watch.

The media presents the General Election campaign to us in terms that suggest it will be won by sheer force of will on the part of the parties and their leaders. Bombarded as I am with the latest polls, and who has a two-point lead over whom, I could be forgiven for thinking that somewhere David Cameron and Ed Miliband are in a room, simply wrestling each other for the job of Prime Minister.

The fact remains, however, that, in the face of such invocation to behave, first and foremost, as a spectator, the need to actively assert yourself as a political participant before all else is paramount.

Soon I will have my vote counted in a British general election for the first time. That’s pretty momentous. And perhaps the very act of marking the ballot paper and casting my vote – a prospect that is both exciting and daunting – will be the one to finally transform me into a fully-fledged participant.

@harryjcurtis