Last week, Anthony Painter launched a Digital Election Analysis he wrote for Orange. A key conclusion was the that the eager awaited ‘Digital Election’ we had all been expecting (after the fantastic Obama ’08 campaign) simply failed to materialise, and it was TV wot hung it. My thoughts on the events were blogged elsewhere. However, since Sunny has just posted his provisonal Blog Nation programme, I will offer a quick addendum to my earlier thoughts here, which is simply that it is the Labour Leadership Election which will prove to be the Digital Election we have all been waiting for.
I note that David Miliband is becoming prolific at posting AudioBoos (short podcasts, for those not yet up to speed); and Ed Miliband’s campaign team are turning around a particular type of on-the-hoof, off-the-cuff campaign video with efficiency. Tom Watson MP, former Minister for Digital Engagement, is running Ed Balls campaign, so I am sure we will see some innovative uses of social networking courtesy of the man from West Bromwich. All the candidates seem to have Twibbons, an innovation which I fucking hate but others seem to enjoy.
The difference here, compared to the General Election campaign in April, is time. Much like Barack Obama’s gruelling journey to the White House, the campaign for the Labour leadership will be a drawn-out affair. It will allow all five candidates to experiment with the different technologies on offer, and develop a deeper and more sophisticated conversation with their party… and each other. Groups like Compass, The Fabians, LabourList, Left Foot Forward and, of course, Liberal Conspiracy, will also be able to plan and launch multiple interventions, as will entirely independent initiatives like the unofficial Ed Miliband for Labour Leader campaign. Who knows, we may even see some ‘swift-boating’ or negative campaigns, like #KerryOut – the doomed attempt to unseat Kerry McCarthy MP from Bristol East through the medium of Twitter.
The next hustings event is tonight, and is hosted by the Fabians. Expect your Twitter streams to be cluttered with multiple, competing commentaries. Expect images and video to pop up online before the weekend. There will be no spin room where Machiavellis, Mountebanks and Madelsons can suck our attention away from the substance of what is being said, and the digital commentary will count for much more that it did during the #LeadersDebates in the spring. This is the Digital Election we have been waiting for, so get stuck in.
Month: June 2010 (Page 2 of 3)
We’re only three days into the World Cup, and already I’m tired of the drone. I speak not of the Vuzuvelas, but of the naysayers who dismiss the World Cup as being somehow xenophobic. Laurie Penny was at it last week, now quoted approvingly by fellow Orwell Prize nominee Madame Miaow. Even my friend Ste Curran was at it earlier, and I expected better from him.
These curmudgeons assume that any time two teams from different sides line up against each other, it is inherently warlike. They assume that whenever anyone chooses to support a team based purely on nationality, they are indulging in a form of blind patriotism akin to the worst excesses of political nationalism. And while the tone of these writings is, yes, a little knowing and light-hearted, I detect real sentiments of contempt in what they say. How strange that these writers cannot perceive the knowingness of the football fans at which they sneer, the tongue-in-cheek tone with which real sports fans approach their passion.
In particular, the charge of ‘patriotism’, or of any kind of ‘ugliness’ does not stand up to even the most cursory of examinations. Christ, you do not even need to go to South Africa to do this – the evidence is right there on the TV screens. See those idiot fans, cheering and leering behind the po-faced TV reporters? Look closely at their shirts, their face-paints, and you will see the colours of many teams, of many countries. The fun of a football tournament like the World Cup lies as much in the meeting of new people from distant shores, as it does in actually watching the game itself. The rowdy fans at Rustenberg and elsewhere know this – it is why they bother.
I think that it is precisely because football is “only a game” you find its purest form in the international competitions, not the club game. In the latter, I think the naysayers have a point – the excessive sums spent during tough economic times on ringers from overseas does seem obscene, bizarre and unsporting. By contrast, managers of national teams are limited in who they can pick. They cannot buy in new talent from elsewhere. In this sense, their situation is closer to the game as most of us play it – you’re stuck with whoever is available. At school, teams are usually organised arbitrarily along classroom divisions, or else by means of the dreaded ‘line-up’ so despised in the childhoods of the sportingly challenged. Either way, the talent pool is limited and the team is stuck with whoever they are given. In pub and amateur football (or any kind of team sport, really) you are similarly limited to whoever can get off work or out of bed in time for the 10:30 kick-off. Likewise in kids’ football, which tends to operate on a subscription model over which the person picking the team has zero control.
The fun of most sport, indeed, of most games, lies in these arbitrary constraints. We agree on some rules to abide by, and set ourselves other random constraints (such as the players, the cards, the dice)… and then we try our damnedest to win. The fact it is all made up; that we have chosen to spend our time like this; that the outcome does not actually matter to our lives one iota; that it is entirely and necessarily divorced from our day-to-day existence: That is where the ‘sport’ exists. The fact that it doesn’t matter is precisely the point, because it is an escape from things that do matter. Pointing out the futility of the exercise, usually by reference to the well worn “grown men kicking a pig’s bladder” cliche, is like the irritating snoot who tells everyone else how the magician does his tricks, thus spoiling the show.
Cheating in sport is despicable because it similarly breaks the suspension of disbelief in which the rest of us have colluded. Related, I think, is the way in which the obnoxious amounts of money spent on footballers’ transfer fees leaves a sour aftertaste: buying in new players seems like an attempt to rig the initial conditions. The presence of Kevin Pieterson in the England Cricket team makes many of us uneasy, despite his undoubted talent… because switching nationalities looks like an attempt to rig the initial conditions.
Football is so popular because most of us have the emotional intelligence to be able to buy in to the spectacle. The utter frivolity of what is at stake is the perfect excuse for a great big global party, in which people of all ages, from all continents and from all religions, can participate. The simplicity of the rules means literally everyone can understand what is going on. Yes, there have been idiots who use football as an excuse for violence… but the game was always the excuse, and not the cause of that particular type of stupidity. These men do not define the sport, and they are a dying breed. In their place steps an ever growing number of sports fans who just want to watch the game with their friends, old and new.
Are we wasting too much media attention on the unfoldings of a meaningless tournament in South Africa? I find it hard to be annoyed. Once every four years, the eyes of all of humanity turn towards the same place. Everyone, whether they like it or not, is distracted by the same thing. It is not religious, it is not violent, and it cannot be bought. Its a delightful phenomenon, one we should cherish.
English and German Fans mix in Cologne, before a World Cup 2006 fixture
Cross-posted over at Liberal Conspiracy.
The division wall through Jerusalem under construction, 2005. Photo by Yrstrly.
Back in the ‘Six, the author Jostein Gaarder caused a bit of a storm with a ranting criticism of Israel that bordered on the anti-Semitic. At the time, I wrote a brace of posts trying to tease out what might the legitimate parts of his argument, from those in which he confused Israel with Jewishness and slipped into a lazy racism. In particular, I wrote about how Israel might be termed an ‘apartheid’ state, an idea which attracted some no small criticism in the comments. Katy Newton led the charge; here’s a flavour:
Robert, you disappoint me. … This is just another example of the typical overstatement that characterises current criticism of Israel. The comparisons with South Africa are not apt here at all. … There is undoubtedly racism and prejudice directed at Israeli-born Arabs but to say that the position of Israeli Arabs is the same as the position of black South Africans under apartheid rule is utter, utter arse. … My patience and goodwill are sorely tried when Jostein Gaardner publishes that sort of “apartheid state” claptrap and when intelligent men like you promote and support it.
After that I conceded that it was a divisive and not entirely analogous term that it was best not to use… and subsequently risked the ire of those on the other side of the debate who thought I was being too timid, too much of a weather vane. It was a good example of a robust online debate that still remained relatively civil (back in my heyday of blogging, when I still had time to argue with all-comers, and before my readership was decimated by a period of downtime). But the legacy was ultimately that I became much more equivocal on all matters Israeli, and much less inclined to use words like ‘apartheid’ in that context.
Yet recently, in relatively quick succession, I have happened across three instances of that usage with regards to the Israel-Palestine problem. Its worth bookmarking them here, and perhaps revisiting the argument I had with Katy et al, nearly four years ago.
First, I noted back in February that Ehud Barak, former Israeli Prime Minister, no less, broke the “apartheid barrier” in a speech to the Herzliya Conference:
If, and as long as between the Jordan and the sea, there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or non-democratic… If the Palestinians vote in elections, it is a binational state, and if they don’t, it is an apartheid state.
Its important to note that this is a slightly different concept to that discussed earlier on this blog. What K-Newt took issue with was my characterisation of the current state of Israel as practising apartheid within its internationally recognised borders (i.e. not the West Bank, Gaza, Golan &ct):
But Israeli Arabs have a vote, they stand for government – as a result of which there are Arab political parties in the Knesset; they are able to apply for the same jobs as Jewish Israelis, they teach at the universities, some choose to serve in the army, they own property, they are not forced to live in certain areas – they have the same civil rights as Jewish Israelis.
Quite right. There is clearly a chasm of difference in the political rights experienced by Arab Israelis, and the Palestinians of the West Bank/Gaza. If you understand Israel to be a country which excludes these territories, then the country is nothing like apartheid. There may be racism and prejudice, and organisations like Adalah would say that there are institutional biases against the Arab population… but at least everyone has a vote, which is a world away from the arrangements in pre-1994 South Africa.
On the other hand, Ehud Barak’s comments refer to the idea of a ‘Greater Israel’ which includes the West Bank and Gaza. He is trying to debunk the idea that a comprehensive Med-to-Jordan state (still the goal of many hard-line Zionists) could be a feasible Jewish state. More recently, John J. Mearsheimer expanded on this idea at a conference with an altogether different ideological starting point, the Hisham B. Sharabi Memorial Lecture (Sharabi was an academic, pro-Paletinian activist and anti-Zionist, while Herzliya was the ideological father of political Zionism). He says that a single state solution is not politically practical, and that there is no political will for establishing a viable two-state solution. The current state of limbo will remain. Unfortunately, this liminal situation denies the Palestinians a share in the political sovereignty over those who wield power over them. The reality is, that their economy, their energy supply, their food supply and their security are all controlled by a government and a parliament for whom they cannot vote. Such power (says Mearsheimer) will never be properly transferred to anyone for whom they can vote. They are destined to be serfs.
If we are being honest and practical, words like ‘nation’, ‘state’, ‘country’ or even ‘Authority’ do not describe the West Bank and Gaza. Instead, we are left grappling for words like ‘ghetto’, ‘enclave’ (charitable) or even ‘Bantustan’ to convey the political and social situation of the people that live in these places. Many people claim that the Palestinians brought this on themselves, because they rejected opportunities offered by previous Israeli Prime Ministers in the 1990s, or because they elected the murderous and racist Hamas faction to power. I think such a stance is enormously unsympathetic to ordinary Palestinian people. But even if it were fair; and even if one refused to use the word ‘occupation’ to describe the current reality of the West Bank; one cannot deny that the Israeli government still wields incredible, disproportionate power over these territories. However the decision was made, this is the outcome. And if this power relationship is not counter-balanced with a Knesset vote, then one has a huge civil rights failure in the space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And if that civil rights failure is based upon ethnicity (which it is, because Israeli settlers in the West Bank retain their vote), then we are nearing ‘apartheid’. Since some Arab Israelis, living in places like Haifa or Tel Aviv, may retain the vote, then perhaps formal use of the term can be staved off for a while. But the longer the situation continues, the more this label will stick. The fact that people like Ehud Barak have used it (whatever the context) is a tacit admission that the term is legitimate and acceptable.
Finally, and perhaps most shockingly, there is the claim that Israel became a key ally of Apartheid South Africa in the 1970s. Max Blumenthal reviews The Unspoken Alliance by Sasha Polakow-Suransky, calling it “the most authoritative account to date of Israel’s scandalous dealings with the apartheid regime of South Africa”. Embattled and isolated following the 1973 war, Israel entered into a security pact with South Africa, supplying $200m worth of weapons to its new ally. I don’t think this proves that all along Israeli politicians have been plotting to bring about apartheid in Israel too, but it is a unfortunate, uncomfortable and shameful chapter in Israeli history that lends even more rhetorical weight to the apartheid charge.
The tragedy of all this is that Israel as a single secular nation would not be at all bad. The ancient cities would look infinitely more beautiful without the concrete walls snaking through the streets. Tourism would flourish, and Jerusalem could become a cosmopolitan centre that could compete with London or New York. A single state would be a place where the Palestinians were treated as native citizens and not as aliens to be corralled and managed. The hatred and anger they currently show towards the world would dissipate. As we saw in South Africa, there was no widespread massacre of the whites, no settling of scores… and now they’re hosting the World Cup.
Yesterday, I went to the launch of the Orange’s Digital Election Analysis, a report by Demos Associate Anthony Painter. A key, yet slightly depressing, conclusion was that funding matters. The Conservatives were able to run a ‘retail’ campaign (a point agreed by Rishi Saha, their head of digital communications) whereas Labour had to plump for a more modest approach, using existing social networking tools to get people speaking and get feet on the pavement. Meanwhile, the Lib Dems were unable to capture the wave of enthusiasm that the #LeadersDebates gnerated, because they simply did not have the digital infrastructure in place… again, due to lack of funding.
Another insight from Saha was how important Web 1.0 technologies still are. The Tories have a 500,000 strong mailing list, which dwarves the readership of most national newspapers, and it generated several hundred thousand pounds worth of donations in only a few targeted mailouts. Lynn Featherstone, whose website was declared the best of the MPs campaigning websites, agreed – she has spent a great deal of time building up a thick and detailed e-mailing list that helped her increase her majority on 2005.
As the report acknowledges, there was a huge expectation that digital technology would transform the 2010 election. The fact that old media stole the (specifically the TV debates) was therefore a little disappointing. I think the lesson here is that social media and online engagement is something of a slow burner. The high watermark for this sort of thing, the Obama ’08 campaign, was two whole years in the making! With such long lead times, comprehensive sites like Fight the Smears and remarkably sophisticated yet unofficial campaign videos (my favourites were Vote for Hope and Les Misbarak) could be launched, tested and tweaked. A four week campaign doesn’t allow for similar innovation.
A lack of money can also be alleviated by a surfeit of time. Thousands of large and successful internet communities and pressure-groups have arisen online in the past decade, which at first glance might contradict Painter’s suggestion that the Money Matters. However, all these shoestring projects took months, if not years to grow. MP’s like Featherstone who want to exploit new technologies need to put months, if not years into the project. Launching a Twitter feed three weeks before election day means you can never build relationships, or gain a reputation as a trusted source of information, in time for that to pay dividends.
Digital Government
I am reading James Harkin’s Cyburbia at the moment. The book charts how computers and networks change the way we think and interact, and how they have inspired new forms of cyber-realist art like Memento, Crash, 21 Gramms and Sweet Fanny Adams in Eden. The new conversations that politicians are having with their constituents might be the analogous development in the world of politics. However, these developments, which the Orange report chronicles, concern politicians, in particular politicans as representatives. This is different from government and legislation, which still seems rooted in an earlier age. Nick Clegg, during his leadership campaign, made this point in a speech to the SMF:
For young people don’t any longer just aspire to be in control of their lives. They expect it. They’re not waiting to be given the power to decide things for themselves. They’ve already got it. they’re already using it.
And choice isn’t something they hope for. It is something they are conditioned to – something they exercise instinctively, unconsciously, every hour of every day of the year.
Yet – and here’s the crucial point for the political community – this increasingly affluent, well educated, self confident cohort are still treated as supplicants when they knock on the government’s door.
The MySociety projects (like TheyWorkForYou, WhatDoTheyKnow and FixMyStreet) are changing this, but it ios noteworthy that these are not government innovations. Direct.gov makes an attempt, but this is largely about administration of existing services, rather than introducing a different relationship between the government and the governed. I have previously sketched how this relationship might look, the beginnings of a cyber-realist politics – rather than hold central records of all our comings-and-goings, the process might be entirely reversed, with each citizen granting access to our records (NHS, benefits, tax, MOT, &ct) to civil servants, should we want to take advantage of a government service. My own ideas probably need a little refinement, but it would be interesting to know whether similar approaches are being seriously considered outside of the groovy think-tanks like Demos.
Additionally, the formal lawmaking process seems rooted in the nineteenth century. Debates are cut-short or undermined by pathetic time allocations and the whipping process, and the actual legislation produced by parliament is all but inpentrable to the layman. A cyber-leglislative approach, on the other hand, might see each clause and sub-clause given its own hyperlinked web-page. Debates could be exposed via webcams and interactive archives, rather than being buried in Hansard, which even in its online incarnation is still clunky metaphor for the printed and bound document, rather than a living, interactive resource we can all access and understand.
The Orange Digital Election Analysis shows that the task of persuading MPs to modernise is already well underway. Now for the Lords, the civil servants, and the bewigged, stockinged clerks in the Palace of Westminster.
Watching Chief Constable Craig Mackey on the news on Thursday evening, I became very distracted by the number of photographers bobbing around in the back of the shot.
The ‘reverse angle’ shot has become a staple of the news photographer’s repertoire (see these British and American examples). An image showing the subject from behind, facing a wall of journalists and camera lenses, is very meta, post-modern, ‘clever’. Such photos make the statement that the importance of the event is proportional to the media frenzy surrounding it.
My favourite cliche is slightly different, but makes the same statement – the ‘camera-in-the-camera’ image. Continue reading