Robert Sharp

Evenin’ all. I wanted to make a quick point about certain global news stories, and the relative amount of news coverage given to each.

Its fashionable, yet incredibly easy to complain that the Michael Jackson death has crowded out news of other more pressing matters. Shawn Micallef sounded an early word of warning about this attitude:

There is no need to compare MJ & Iran - completely dif, just intersect on same medium, not a social/moral lesson to be learned.

Then (again via Twitter, though the link is now lost in the maelstrom) I came across this MJ/Election mash-up, and it occurred to me that coverage (be it on Twitter, blogs or the international MSM) is not a zero-sum game, and that coverage of one piece of news could promote awareness of another.

If you consider Jackson’s output, there are actually loads of other songs that could fit a revolutionary template. Songs like “Heal The World” and “You Are Not Alone” seemed (to me) quite sanctimonious and irritating when they were released. But with the passing of Michael Jackson, the self-congratulatory element to those tracks seems to dissipate. They’re now ripe for the picking as a backing track to some feel-good montages of the peaceful demonstrations in Tehran. “Earth Song”, “Black or White” and (going back a little bit further) “Man in the Mirror” also carry that We-Are-The-World vibe… as does, of course, “We Are The World”! They could all fill the role of unofficial theme-tune to a non-violent protest movement.

Too cheesy? Not one bit of it: The “Yes We Can” generation of political campaigners are unafraid of such accusations. Meanwhile, tracks like “Beat It” could accompany comedic images of Ahmedinejad and Khameni and Keyboard Cat.

I meant to post this last week, so I feel sure I am behind the curve on this one. Yet a quick search through YouTube doesn’t yield further examples. Let us know your favourites, either in the comments, or via the tips form, and maybe we’ll do a round-up or something.

+posted at Liberal Conspiracy. Comment there.

I didn’t know that Salman Rushdie and Aung San Suu Kyi shared a birthday:

On this day, my birthday and yours, I always remember your long ordeal and silently applaud your endurance. This year, silence is impossible. It is not any action of yours, but your house arrest, which symbolizes the suppression of Burmese democracy, that is criminal. It is your trial, not your struggle, that is unjust. On this day, on every day, I am with you.

Rushdie’s message launches the Sixty-Four Words for Aung San Suu Kyi project. Citizens of the world are invited to leave a 64 word message for Aung San, in honour of her 64th birthday on 19th June. Alternatively, you can leave a 64 character twitter instead, using the hashtag #assk64.

http://64forsuu.com/

The project is led by the Burma Campaign UK and was created in only six days, which is a remarkable feat. In addition to Salman Rushdie, the site carries messages from Gordon Brown, David Cameron, and George Clooney. Why not add your message, and then let others know that you’ve done so?

Photographed at a press conference in her home, September 1996, after a government crackdown on her party. By flickr user taptaptap

The lives of those with distinguished World War II military careers still pepper the obituary pages, but not with the frequency that they once did.  I enjoyed this passage from his obituary by Roy Roebuck:

He first arrived at the Commons with his newly awarded Distinguished Flying Cross ribbon inexpertly self-sewn on to his uniform. A Conservative MP, who was a squadron leader in the RAF police, approached. “You are improperly dressed,” he told Millington.

“If you are talking to me as an RAF officer,” Millington replied, “take your hand out of your pocket and address a senior officer as ‘Sir’. If you are addressing me as a fellow MP, mind your own business and bugger off.” He did.

Millington famously won a by-election in the true-blue Tory seat of Chelmsford, standing for the short-lived Common Wealth Party.  Its objectives were “common ownership, democracy, and morality in politics.”  Perhaps it should re-form in time for the Euro elections next month?

(cross-posted at Liberal Conspiracy)

David at Minority Report offers some words of warning, regarding the slow trickle of citizen generated footage of alleged brutality at the G20 protests earlier this month:

Reconstructing events by using any number of restricted viewpoints is no replacement for vital missing facts. If I present you with a black box that contains a photo I made of a scene, I’ll happily let you make as many pin holes as you like - you will still struggle to make out whats going on. Especially if I choose the image.

Different circumstances, but I felt this way after Saddam Hussein was executed.  There is a real danger in allowing snippets of grainy amateur footage to act as the definitive account of an event.  The result in this case has been yet another trial by media, only this time the police seem to be on the receiving end.  In reality, we have no way of knowing precisely what killed Ian Tomlinson, and the account of the Nicky Fisher assault makes me uneasy (although admittedly this feeling is entirely based on her sightly spaced-out media interviews).

Was it inevitable that the police would lose this PR war?  Or is that some kind of optical illusion brought about by 20:20 hindsight?  My feeling is that these stories, which trickle out over a few days, played to our preconceptions, feeding into an easily understood narrative.  Clearly, the public have lost trust in the police.

This is a desperately dangerous state of affairs, of course.  However, I think the vilification that the police now receive is a delayed punishment for earlier and more egregious clusterfucks.  Despite the fact that no-one in authority was punished for the Jean-Charles De Menezes killing, it is not unreasonable to draw a line between that incident, and the current debate.  Although neither Sir Ian Blair or Cressida Dick (or for that matter Tony Blair or his Home Secretary Charles Clarke) lost their jobs over the incident, the security services certainly lost credibility as a result.  They were ‘punished’ in the sense that they lost the public’s trust, a vital form of political capital.

There should be a bittersweet satisfaction to this: we’ve learnt that institutions simply cannot maladministrate, or violate our civil liberties, with total impunity.  We’ve learnt how to ‘police the police’, and some thuggish elements will be brought to prosecution through evidence collected by citizen photographer.  However, its also true that the men and women currently tasked with policing our capital city were not the ones who ordered a policy of violence upon us.  Those people who made such decisions still walk free, and unaccountable.  This latest success for citizen journalism is a Pyrrhic victory.
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There’s a recently concluded debate over at the Liberal Conspiracy about ‘feeding the trolls’, that is, engaging with commenters on the blog who are just there to provoke an argument. I think there is a distinction between proper trolls, who are actively seeking to waste their own time in order to waste others’, and other people who simply have a wildly differing worldview. In the case of the former, it is rarely worth engaging. But in the case of the latter, debate can sometimes be helpful. It all depends on what kind of conversation you want to have, and on the Liberal Conspiracy, it is often impossible to talk about something at the level of detail you desire, if you are arguing first principles with someone else (be it a troll, or bona fide member of the seething classes).

Sometimes, I wonder if the mainstream media aren’t trolling. Today I spotted this headline from the Daily Mail, and feel confident that it has been written to waste my time.

Human Rights: Straw To Get Tough

Exclusive - Minister tells Mail how he’ll reform ‘Villiain’s Charter

Its not that I do not disagree with the idea of labelling the Human Right’s Act a “villiain’s charter”.  Its just that attempting to engage with it - especially on a blog - is a bit pointless. Its not as if they are making some kind of technical or categorical error that a plucky blogger might tease out and add to the debate. This article is speaking a genuinely different language. I have been silent on the ‘Baby P’ issue, because the debate was of this highly toxic, divisive type. Others gamely engaged with the trolls, so to speak, but there comes a point where its down to someone with a little more profile that bloggers to take up the political fight. This is why people often end up criticising political allies, for relatively trivial reasons, apparently missing the wood for the trees. Its not that we’ve lost our moral compass, just that we’re angry that other people are not speaking up for us in the places that matter.

As to the substance of the article, I’ll merely note again that it is the hated and the vulnerable who have their Human Rights violated first. The Declaration of Human Rights was created precisely to guard against populist tendencies in governments. They’re inconvenient, but then so is the task of retaining our humanity in the face of violence and antagonism.

For those with a fatigue for this sort of thing, I highly recommend a visit to the ‘Taking Liberties‘ Exhibition (no, not that Taking Liberties) at the British Library. It has the Magna Carta and other declarations of Rights and Freedoms penned by various men and women from around these isles.

The exhibition set me thinking about the Damian Green affair (something else that seems so divisive that there is so little common ground between the warring parties that debate seems futile). Whilst I personally don’t believe that Jacqui Smith ordered the police into Mr Green’s office, and I do not believe that the Speaker, Michael Martin, colluded in the warrantless searching of the Tory MP’s office, the outcry itself seems like a healthy thing to me. It is good that there is an ‘awkward squad’ barrage of questions every time there is any hint of impropriety. Far from us living in a Stalinist State, as some alledge, it is the indignant calls to account which prevent us sliding into one.

Update

Heh - I wrote:

its down to someone with a little more profile that bloggers to take up the political fight

Ask and it shall be delivered unto you.

If, like me, you have a knee-jerk reaction whenever anyone suggests regulating the Internet, this A List Apart article on captioning/subtitling of online videos is a challenging read. Joe Clark argues that the voluntary approach to developing a good, standardized captioning system has failed, and that only governments can enforce some sort of progress:

In short, disabled people’s right to be free of discrimination trumps the belief, however fallacious, that the internet cannot or should not be regulated.

Earlier this year, the Liberal Conspiracy take on Andy Burnham’s recommendations on Internet regulation, was that it was merely a sop to the powerful music lobby and their outdated business models.  Contrast this with the case of subtitling, where it is the lack of regulation which has allowed the studios and broadcasters to ignore their obligations to provide accessible content, in favour of greater profit margins.

It was the political concept of ‘accessibility’ that got me interested in web design, and fuels my current love of all things social networky. When we made The Unrecognized, I took particular pride in the subtitling, a project I worked on alone and probably took as long as the edit of the film itself. We were in a sense lucky that the film featured three languages, because it meant that a captioned video was the norm, as Joe Clark now recommends.

The internet can and should be an equalising force, yet for deaf people the online landscape is still an unwelcoming jungle.

The Sun crows over the Shannon Matthews case:

The prosecutor said cops recovered at [Michael] Donovan’s flat a copy of The Sun from March 11, with the headline: “£50,000 for Shannon. Sun ups reward to find lost girl.”

Police also discovered a copy of the Daily Mirror which had been ripped up and dumped in a bin.

Its bizarre that The Sun should choose to delight in this little factoid, because it draws attention to a few rather negative interpretations:

• “The Sun is paper of choice for evil scheming child abductors”
• “The Sun falls for trap set by evil scheming child abductors”

or worse

• “The Sun’s dubious track record inspires evil scheming child abductors”

Karen Matthews and Craig Meehan pose with a 'Sun' branded reward poster, February 2008

Now the paper’s editors will no doubt suggest that by offering their reward, they were merely acting as good citizens who just wanted to see Shannon found safely.  However, the crass branding of the reward poster, which they gleefully reproduced in today’s paper, shows that their motives were altogether more commercial.  Not content with merely reporting the story, they insisted on influencing it.  They delighted then, and they still delight, in the part they played.  But the shocking truth is, by quickly fulfilling the plotters’ prophecy and advertising a reward, they inspired the kidnappers to keep Shannon hidden for longer, thus prolonging her ordeal.

Of course, if Karen Matthews and Michael Donovan are found guilty, then they will be rightly condemned for their actions.  They have free will.  However, blame is not a zero sum game.  We do not live in a vacuum, and the media can send signals which inspire others to act in negative ways.  Usually, violent films, rap artists, or computer game producers shoulder the criticism.  When they are put in the spot-light, these groups usually cite free-will, but also agree that they should act responsibly, that they should add caveats and warnings to their art, and that it should not be marketed to the vulnerable or easily impressed.

I note that this contrite and defensive attitude is nowhere to be found on the pages of The Sun.  They have fuelled this case, sparked a sales bonanza, and will surely do it again the moment they are given another opportunity.

And next time - mark my words, there is always a next time! - it is likely that the disappearance will be genuine.  Another pair of worried parents, bamboozled into supporting “The Sun’s Campaign” to find their child, followed by a period where they themselves come under suspicion.  Its a winning formula for The Sun, and not one politician will call them on it.

Cross-posted at the Liberal Conspiracy, please comment there.

An avatar looks at the Public Sector 2.0 event poster in Second Life

I’ve just had word that one of the SMF’s conference fringe events will be streamed into Second Life on Monday morning. I know that politicians in the US have held events in Second Life, but we think this will be a first in the UK.

The event is titled Public Sector 2.0: How can emerging information technologies improve public service delivery? and will feature contributions from Tom Watson MP and Jerry Fishenden from Microsoft. Watson is the Cabinet Office Minister responsible for E-Government, and of course one of the first MPs to inaugurate his own blog.

It is an 8am breakfast meeting at Charter 4, Manchester Central. In Second Life it will be in the Manchester Central Hall on the Manchester ‘Island’.

The Government’s fairly poor use of the web is a particular bugbear of mine, so I am looking forward to attending the event (in the flesh) but also encouraging people to submit questions and comments via Second Life. Given that the event is inside the secure zone, opening it up online obviously increases access to the discussion. However, there is the perennial risk of disruption, but since the event is on a fairly specific subject matter I confidently hope this will not be an issue.

A wider point is that Web 2.0 technologies allowing better communication and broadcasting of ideas, at a lower cost. They are therefore inherently equalizing, and something that the Liberal Left should welcome in public service delivery. It would be great if some Liberal Conspiracy readers and writers could join in the discussion, although I appreciate 8am is a big ask. At least in Second Life you don’t need to shower and shave before joining in.

Cross-posted at the Liberal Conspiracy.

Amid the cacophony of speculation about the future of Gordon Brown’s premiership, the imminent electoral meltdown, and the future direction of the Labour party, I think one aspect is being marginalised, which is the future of the party at a local level, and in local government. It is clear that current crisis is playing out on a national level, with national and international problems catalysed by Westminster intruigue and a failure of national leadership that can speak to the concerns of the people.

Now, the fall-out from this is obviously felt at the local level, as Labour’s loss of councillors in the May elections demonstrates. But it is not clear that the existential worries currently afflicting Gordon Brown and his parliamentary colleagues are shared by their Labour friends on local councils. In Tower Hamlets, for example, the Labour group recently increased their majority after four defections from Respect, and a by-election win (after a popular Lib Dem councillor stood down for health reasons, no less).

Of course, if the local parties are not suffering from the same crisis of purpose, this is probably to do with the differences between the nature of local and national governance. Localities like Tower Hamlets have very specific problems, to which a Labour council can confidently respond within their current ideology, without having to worry about national unity, or whether the same policy would be effective in different boroughs.

So, as the columnists and bloggers search in vain for a viable alternative to Brown, and a new direction for the party, I wonder whether the most coherent and confident voices might come from local government, rather than the national scene, policy wonks, or the unions. They are ideally placed to comment on pressing issues such as community cohesion and knife-crime, and how other concerns such as the environment and immigration can be dealt with in practice.

These are purely my anecdotal thoughts - what are the thoughts and experiences of other Liberal Conspiracy readers and writers?

Cross-posted at Liberal Conspiracy.

When we think about blogging and the development of human interactions through the web, it is easy to assume some kind of historical determinism.  The Internet is one huge sandbox, with new blogs and campaigning sites being launched all the time.  Most peter out (I’ve been involved in a couple of those myself) but others persist, and grow.  This trial-and-error approach suggests that we are at least inching towards a more sophisticated and empowering blogosphere, which exercises more influence over politics and therefore the direction this country is headed.

The Blog Nation event earlier this week raised some of the key issues that the Liberal Left needs to answer in order to become more effective online:

• Are we campaigners or pseudo-journalists?
• Will it suffice to form ad hoc coalitions to fight single-issue campaigns, or should we be forming a more formal and wider coalition to try and affect a broader cultural shift?
• In order to be effective, do we need to promote the rise of super-blogs or power-bloggers to rival Guido Fawkes?  Do we need a figure-head like Barack Obama around which we can coalesce, or can a leaderless network build momentum on its own?

As I crouched in the front row of the event, rubbing my temples and trying to think of answers, the following thought occurred to me: What if this is all there is? By which I mean, perhaps it is impossible to become much more organized.  I refrained from articulating this thought at the time, but it did seem a deft, if nihilistic way of avoiding giving an answer to some of the questions posed, above.  Perhaps there is no historical determinism to any of this, and we are not destined to develop anything significantly more efficient than what we have now.

Now I don’t know whether I really believe things to be so hopeless, but if its true it may not be such a bad thing.  Rather than grandiose ideas of the blogosphere become some kind of Fifth Estate, perhaps we should aspire to nothing more than another tool for the people to use in checking the power of the elite (both elected representatives and others who hold positions of influence).

Of course we should ask how existing bloggers and activists can work better together, but that is just oiling the machine, rather than inventing a new one.  A more important focus is to try to increase access to the new information and opinion that is appearing online.  Just as increasing literacy strengthens democracy and promote equality, so computer literacy can strengthen it too.  So, my suggestion for the next open source campaign - introduce one relative, friend or colleague to blogging each month.  This need not mean forcing them to set up their own blog.  Instead, just a gentle explanation of the power of RSS, and the suggestion that they bookmark one - just one - of the fine sites listed on the right.

Cross posted at the Liberal Conspiracy