I wonder if either of my regular readers have noticed a subtle change to the way I’ve been posting recently? In the past, I’ve maintained fairly well defined barrier between my private life, and what I’m prepared to reveal online. In the past couple of weeks, however, I’ve let that slip. First, I drew attention to my Flickr account. An then I went the whole damned hog, and posted a link to video of myself online: Note on Modern Liberty. This in turn allows those who are prepared to click their computer mouse a couple of times, the chance to see family videos and the like.
In the past, I’ve been careful not to provide details of my social networking presence on the blog. This is not because I believe that in so doing, I can totally maintain my anonymity… for this is manifestly not the case. Rather, it is that a small degree of privacy is retained. If people want to know about me, they have to go out of their way to do so.
Furthermore, I had hoped that by refusing (until now) to put my face, or the comings and goings of my personal life online, I’ve built a bulwark against the cynics and the ignorant who seem to think that blogging is nothing more than narcissism (though ironically, this little bit of meta-blogging is pretty narcissistic). I can assert with some credibility that it is a much more outward looking project. Or its a scrap-book. Its not narcissistic to create a memento, even if its one for your thoughts.
(Now I think of it, I did put a bit of my face in a blog post once, but there’s nothing to note that its me).
So what’s changed? Well, I think it is seen as less geeky to have a blog, and to post messages to it. On the rare occassions on which I have to explain myself, it is increasingly my interrogator who comes off as out-of-touch, a luddite, lacking the imagination to see why I might find this sort of activitiy useful. Clay Shirky provides some usueful ammunition here – his lecture on “congnitive surplus” is the definitive smack-down to those who sneer “where do you find the time?” In Here Comes Everybody, he also explains how the question has shifted from “why publish?” to “why not publish?”
Second, I’ve noticed that even the biggest of bloggers allow some private moments into their public square. Jason Kottke recently posted a graph of his wife’s weight during her pregnancy, and Andrew Sullivan’s wedding photos are online. So I think disallowing my face from an little-trafficked, eponymous blog is probably unnecessary.
Finally, I’m struck by the idea of personal or organisational “channels”. I now produce YouTubes, podcasts, blogs and Twitters, all of which appear on Facebook without me ever having to actually visit the site. Its an experimentation in communication, self expression.
Month: February 2009 (Page 2 of 3)
Christian Bale on a rant. I really wish people weren’t so obnoxious to each other, life is too short for this kind of unpleasantness.
What struck me about this audio is just how muddled Bale’s accent has become. At times he comes over all South London. At other times he has an American drawl, complete with the idioms. He was probably so red faced, he couldn’t hear it properly.
I quite understand how peoples who share an language can evolve different accents over time (e.g. Antipodean, Southern African, North American, The British Isles). But I’m never quite sure how it can happen within a single person? When I lived in Scotland, it was easy to pick up the idoms (“a wee baby” &ct), but not the accent.
Other people afflicted with Muddled Trans-Atlantic Accent Syndrome include Julie Andrews, Anthony Hopkins, and Madonna. Blogger Andrew Sullivan has it too. Who is your favourite?
At the fantastic and soon-to-be-essential techPresident, there’s a post on a new technological openness from Congressional Republicans. Although their site at GOP.gov carries pretty run-of-the-mill content, it actually has an extremely substantial API. For non-technophiles, the API is the Application Programming Interface, and gives all the information that programmers would need to interact with the site, and – crucially – to pull data from it. Nancy Scola notes that people have been wondering what the Obama Administration has in store for the whitehouse.gov site, and suggests that a robust API may be more important than ensuring that there are enough photos of the Obama’s for us to gawk at ( abug-bear from a few days ago).
And that raises the idea that for all the attention we’ve been paying whitehouse.gov, maybe thinking about the White House site as a destination is just wrong-headed. The focus should instead, perhaps, be on pushing clean data — and the engagement it can fuel — out from the White House , in the hopes of creating “government everywhere.”
Its Big Brother in reverse. A robust API removes another barrier to scrutinizing the government and legislators, something that will become ever more important as President Obama begins to spend the $800 billion or so in his ‘”fiscal stimulus” package, and the Senators and Representatives start to vote on any number of issues. There will be no escape!
I do think that the very fact of more information in the public domain will increase the trust people have in politicians, precisely because there is less room for obfuscation and drastically reduced room for corruption and misconduct. As I’ve noted previously, a Governmental cover-up is always worse, and much more annoying, than a Governmental cock-up. We saw an example of this earlier in the week, where President Obama made a swift mea culpa when it turned our that two cabinet nominees had not been vetted properly, and not paid their taxes. An early admission neutralises the story.
It also goes some way to restoring the trust that has been lost through the cock-up. Why? Because it avoids the possibility that Government spokespeople will have to engage in the sort of verbal and logical gymnastics, the mongering of letter-but-not-the-spirit technicalities, that characterised the Bush administration… and which still plagues New Labour.
Woolwich Common, 9am
The snow is an equalising force, and not just because its free. It also serves to cover up the mess and the shit of the city. But 36 hours after the snow stopped falling, its already melted away in central London, where I assume the heat of the traffic and the buildings turned it to mulch pretty quickly. Out in the boroughs, however, the vast array of public spaces are still blessed white.
It will be the snowmen who last the longest. They are packed thicker than the ground snow, with less surface area exposed. Passing through Blackheath Common yesterday morning, I enjoyed the sight of a few dozen mounds, decapitated snowmen, monuments to Monday’s frolicking. Free from the humdrum of work for a day, how interesting that we suddenly come over all pre-historic, and construct a set of monoliths, our very own snowhenge. I wonder if they are arranged along ley-lines?
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Philip Blond’s interesting cover essay for this month’s Prospect, ‘Rise of the Red Tories’, advocates a new form of Conservatism for David Cameron, centred around the Tories’ new thinking on social issues (I’m going to be as radical a social reformer as Margaret Thatcher was an economic reformer
says Cameron). Blond says the consensus that has emerged in British Politics – socially liberal-left, economically liberal-right – has failed on both fronts. The vice-versa, which would be a social conservatism alongside a leftist economy, seems a rather chilling prospect to my mind, but Blond thinks that an alternative could be to push through a full-blooded new localism which works to empower communities
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[Cameron] could start with four task: re-localising our banking system, developing local capital, helping normal people gain new assets and breaking up big business monopolies.
I suppose the emphasis on market forces (albeit at the local level) makes this a nominally right-wing policy, but with an emphasis on local, community ownership and assets, its not immediately clear to me why these ideas couldn’t be labelled left wing instead (indeed, I assume that confusion is why the article is illustrated with a graphic of Thatcher-as-Che). Yes, Conventional Wisdom would have it that a Labour Party under the Authoritarian Gordon Brown would not adopt such policies. But on the other hand, these ideas seem to be precisely the sort of wings that Hazel Blears’ Community Empowerment agenda requires, to get it off the pages of think-tank reports, and into actual communities.
Meanwhile, The Economist reports on ‘For-profit activism’, that is, harnessing the power of social networking to build-up buying power, to bend markets in favour of socially acceptable or environmentally friendly businesses.
Residents of San Francisco have been signing up enthusiastically for a new green-energy campaign called 1BOG. Short for “one block off the grid”, it aims to convince homeowners to switch to solar energy one block at a time, by organising them into buying clubs. Members get a discount on solar panels, and typically try to get their neighbours to sign up too. The city has also seen several recent examples of Carrotmobs—crowds of activists who buy everything in the winning shop in a contest between retailers to be the greenest.
As the article notes, we’ve seen these sorts of enterprises before, from the Body Shop, to Bono’s RED iPods, to Fair Trade Labelling, to the expensive soaps and hemp shirts you find in charity catalogues. Only this time, its local.
However, I would note a fundamental difference. On the national level, the kind of eco-friendly, ethical capitalism has found a niche within the retail economy. It has become successful, and crucially, normalised. On the other hand, the Carrotmobs and 1BOG seem to be one-off gimmicks. Indeed, the latter only works because a large company subsidises it as part of a marketing campaign. Its almost as if those people who are actually spending the money to make this work are participating in a leisure activity, rather than an everyday participation in a market that could sustain the local economy. We won’t be able to herald the coming of a ‘new localism’ until this sort of thing can arise and sustain itself without being shepherded by a well-meaning entrepreneur, or subsidised as part of a pilot scheme. Its not clear from these examples that this is possible.