Due to English PEN’s various free speech campaigns, I’ve been cited in a couple of print publications recently. I welcomed Jack Straw’s announcements on libel reform in The Bookseller, and celebrated a minor victory on Criminal Memoirs for Inside Time. There doesn’t seem to be a permalink for the latter article, so I’m reproducing it below.
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Alaa Abd El-Fatah, Technologist, Egypt. Animation by Toby Newsome
Last Friday night I spent an interesting evening with the folks from the Tactical Technology Collective, who show communities and campaigning groups how to use new technologies to their advantage. I’ve long been a fan, because I think that their NGO in Box project (in its several iterations) is a simple idea that’s probably extra effective because of good design.
We were at the Frontline Club in Paddington for the screening of their documentary, 10 Tactics, which gave real world tips for digital advocacy. The tactics include presenting a visual message, using humour and animation to reach difficult groups, and amplifying personal stories to make a more effective message. We saw what free and open source tools were available to do this.
Much of the film focused on working in developing countries, where IT technologies are still emerging and people don’t have information at their fingertips. Many of the tactics have information delivery as an end in itself, for example, telling Zimbabweans where to vote or rural farmers in India where to find information on their land rights. This direct communication with what charities might call their “beneficiaries” is very different from many UK charity campaigns, which tend to be about raising awareness of a problem amongst people who are not suffering from it (in the case of PEN, say, we spend a fair amount of time campaigning to let our members in the UK know about the censorship and persecution of writers overseas). I would describe this type of campaigning as presenting a second order message (not “do this” but “do this for other people”) or even a third order message (“the government should do this for other people”) – I’m sure hardened charity campaigners have a more sophisticated taxonomy for these different types of message. One criticism I heard about 10 Tactics is that it did not offer enough advice for this second and third order campaigning. Perhaps we need another film which explains how to call people in the UK to action. Or maybe that’s a red herring, and the need for direct first order campaigning in the southern hemisphere should be the priority.
The after-film discussion was led by Darius Cuplinskas of the Open Society Foundation, who raised a concern that many people who are otherwise excited by New Media seem to have: what happens when “noxious” civil society groups use these tactics for “nefarious” purposes? Worse, how do we guard against the possibility that oppressive governments will use new technologies to spread disinformation?
Sameer Padania of WITNESS was bullish on this point. First, he said, activists learn from other campaigns around the world. Protesters in the Saffron Revolution in Burma in 2007 posted videos and images of their marches online, allowing the authorities to identify and punish them. But when it was the turn of dissidents in Tibet and Iran to protest, they had learnt the lesson of Burma, and covered their faces! They are also learning about ways to communicate when authorities shut down parts of the communicaions network. So people become much more savvy about the power of technology.
And with this savviness (says Sameer) comes a better visual literacy and media literacy. People have a greater understanding of how images and video can mislead. They are more likely to recognise propaganda and photoshopping in the first instance, and also more likely to question the veracity of sources, and to fact-check. We saw this in the #IranElection protests, where an important task of the Twitter community there was to fact-check itself, double-sourcing reports and debunking rumour. Very quickly, certain users gained more authority and trust than others.
My own addition to this thought is an idealistic one, which is that truth carries it’s own authority. Fakers and fraudsters can be exposed, but if you’re telling the truth then you can’t be caught out. Perhaps that’s the best tactic of all.
David Aaronovich’s column in The Times today warns that we might be sleepwalking towards a nuclear Iran. Stuck in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan, we don’t have the political stomach to seriously engage with the threat.
We almost lack the spare mental capacity to consider how to deal with the difficult “other”. We have intervened in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia and Sierra Leone. We have agonised over Gaza and Lebanon. We have debated Darfur and Zimbabwe. It is all so difficult, so intractable, that the easiest answer seems to be to withdraw, to let things alone, to hope that they will go away.
It is in this kind of ennui that we see the real, long-term damage of our reckless rush to war (now being exposed in a handy serialised form, thanks to the new Iraq inquiry). A mistake of such magnitude has had horrible knock-on effects for our foreign policy elsewhere. Not only was Iran emboldened by the 2003 conflict, but it looks like we have lost the political will (and capital) to appropriately deal with this latest nuclear threat. Aaronovitch advocates UN sanctions against the regime (specifically the Revolutionary Guard) but this requires the support of China and Russia. Do we have the political credibility to push them into agreement with such sanctions? If we do not, then we know where that credibility went: spilled into the sands of Iraq.
So Borders have gone into administration. In an analysis for The Evening Standard, Lucy Tobin describes how independent bookshops might benefit as the sector is hit by the rise in online shopping and supermarket competition.
[James] Daunt reckons his competitive advantage is his “bricks and mortar”. His stores host author talks and events “almost every night” — next month Michael Palin and Will Self are amongst the billing. “We make our stores really nice places to come into,” he says.
That’s the way to survive, according to retail analyst Neil Saunders, at Verdict: “The books industry is still a very difficult market to trade in. Margins are very thin in books, and a lot of people are increasingly focused on price.
“But there’s still a place for the book shop on the High Street because people do like to browse, and a lots of people go into book stores for reading inspiration — that wasn’t really the case with the music industry, and it’s a key differential.”
Tobin’s piece goes hand-in hand with Clay Shirky’s recent post on the decline of the American bookstore, and the Cnut-like attempts of the American Booksellers Association to induce protectionist measures from the US Government. Shirky analyses the ‘value-added’ model described by Tobin and her interviewees. He explains that bookshops will need to start charging for all the extra social benefits like events, or coffee, but also recruit patronage, philanthropists and local subsidies if they want to remain. Finally, he expresses pessimism as to whether this will be possible:
… trying to save local bookstores from otherwise predictably fatal competition by turning some customers into members, patrons, or donors is an observably crazy idea. However, if the sober-minded alternative is waiting for the Justice Department to anoint the American Booksellers Association as a kind of OPEC for ink, even crazy ideas may be worth a try.
One can only hope. The protectionist lobbying of the music and film industries are doing enough damage as it is, without the book industry meddling as well.
While we’re on the subject of the PCC: The new chair of the organisation recently said that she thought the commission should regulate blogs.
Over at Liberal Conspiracy, Unity has drafted a collective response to this outlandish suggestion. I’ve “signed” in the comments and urge other bloggers to do the same.