Barrister
Things that happen to me, or things I do
A few weeks ago I suggested that a project be launched to publish the thoughts and policies of the Tahrir Square think-tank. The nearest realisation of this I have come across so far is the #18daysinEgypt project, which seeks to retroactively collate and tag all the content produced during the uprising that culminated in the resignation of Hosni Mubarak.
2nd February 2011, in Bab El Luk, Cairo. Photo by gcawflickr on Flickr.
Time again to plug the upwardly mobile Edinburgh tinkers/tinklers, FOUND. Their new album is entitled Factorycraft and is launched on 14th March by the extremely respectable Glasgow label Chemikal Underground. Here’s a short trailer for the album, put together by Adam Proctor. Its an aesthetic not unlike videos we have previously admired on this blog.
FOUND, you will recall, sold music to fund their trip to the SXSW festival, and created the marvellous yet moody steampunk musician, Cybraphon. They’re playing at the Voodoo Rooms in Edinburgh on 3rd March, and Dingwalls in London on 7th March. Yrstrly has some small psychological stake in their success, having helped create an earlier music promo ‘Static 68‘ while I worked at Fifty Nine Productions.
Housekeeping: I’m fed up with the 500 Internal Server Error Messages that keep being generated, and I know others are too. I am not sure whether it is the del.icio.us API or the postalicious plugin itself that is at fault. Since Yahoo is trying to ‘sunset‘ del.icio.us I am guessing the former is more likely.
But until I work it out for sure, I shall have to disable it the regular posting of links. These automatically generated posts with no useful content are ruining what little credibility I have.
If you take a stroll down Farringdon Road, from Exmouth Market towards Clerkenwell Green, you will come upon a magnificent sight-line into the City of London. It is not until you reach the Betsey Trotwood and the Free Word Centre that St Paul’s Cathedral emerges on the skyline, but from further up the road, a new landmark is emerging – Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’ Shard of Glass, currently under construction.
Since I work at the Free Word Centre, I regularly happen across this view. I often take a quick snap with the camera on my phone. Below is an example that has been filtered through Instagr.am.
A better attempt with an SLR and telephoto lense is on Flickr:
Birth of the Shard by yrstrly on Flickr
Photograph of the HMS Ark Royal, taken from the top of Holt Hill in Birkenhead, by Chambré Hardman.
Overlay my last two posts (on digital tools for Boris Bikes; and how to wage cyber-resistance) and I think an interesting question arises: How much code should a Citizen know?*
Its clear that literacy and numeracy are essentials for active citizenship as they are for Life and Work. For millenia, the ability to communicate your thoughts in a clear and pithy manner has been a prerequisite for campaigners, dissidents and indeed anyone who wanted to be part of the civic discourse. In recent decades, I would certainly add ‘A working knowledge of Microsoft Office’ to that list, along with an ease at using the Internet. They teach all this at school now.
But is that enough? My feeling is that, at the very least, basic HTML skills should be included too. you need to know the difference between your <em> and your <img> and your <a href> tags if you want to communicate efficiently. For the professional political campaigner, these are certainly essential. I cannot shake the feeling that they should be equally indespensible for the average citizen, too. Do they learn this stuff in school yet?
And when HTML and CSS are taught in schools, what more should political campaigners be learning? If I want to start a mass movement but have no scripting skills, am I missing a trick? If I want to start a new local campaign, but have no clue as to how to pull and push data from an API, am I doomed to failure?
I am reminded of The New Liberal Arts prospectus:
A generation of digital natives is careening towards college. The economy is rebooting itself weekly. We have new responsibilities now—as employees, citizens, and friends—and we have new capabilities, too. The new liberal arts equip us for a world like this. But… what are they?
‘Coding and Decoding’ and ‘Translation’ are two of the skills listed briefly, but the authors don’t go into specifics. It would be interesting to put some flesh on the bone.
* I deliberately capitalised ‘Citizen’ to distinguish between the literal sense of the word (i.e. someone of a particular country with the rights afforded to all citizens; and a person who participates in that democracy.
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