One perk of working for English PEN at the Free Word Centre is the annual festival, which includes the welcoming of a poet-in-residence. Last year we had Ray Antrobus and Joshua Idehendropping the rhymes. This year Kate Fox has been reciting poems to us at our desks. Under the alternym Kate Fox News, she quickly writes and publishes poems about current affairs, such as the Pope’s visit and the party conferences. Kate recited for us an experimental poem she wrote yesterday entitled “Nick Clegg’s Conference Speech Remixed“. She has spliced some of Clegg’s soundbites together with realtime Twitter commentary.
Just imagine how different our country will be. Not exactly a vision thing Stick with us It wasn’t a bad speech Stick with us Looks all so sincere Stick with us We’re stuck with U
I like this format. For one, it includes a random, crowd-sourced element. It is surprising how often the act of yeilding some control of your content to The Cloud or The Rabble yeilds something true and pleasing – Cybraphon and FOUND are the arch mongers of this type of art. I also like the juxtaposition of the primary source material – the speech – with the commentary. A poem that could not have been created before social media tools became ubiquitous.
This week I’ve read a couple of articles that discuss the ennui of the Internet age. The first is a Salonprofile of the hip New York writer Tao Lin, which features an excerpt from his book Shoplifting from American Apparel:
Sam woke around 3:30 p.m. and saw no emails from Sheila. He made a smoothie. He lay on his bed and stared at his computer screen … About an hour later it was dark outside. Sam ate cereal with soymilk. He put things on eBay then tried to guess the password to Sheila’s email account, not thinking he would be successful, and not being successful.
Daniel Roberts discusses Lin’s style of prose:
[The] term, “depression,” is a bit too clinical in this context. Where Lin is coming from, and what his readers share, is a sense of loneliness. The malaise is not specific to New York, of course, but it is typical of a certain ilk of detached 20-somethings across the country. The loneliness could be attributed to the Internet. Lin and his literary peers spend hours and hours online, and although doing so fosters a sense of connectedness, it is equally isolating. No matter how many fans or fellow writers Lin “meets” online, at the end of the day it’s still him, sitting at his laptop alone. Any moments of delight or engagement that the Internet prompts are separated by longer stretches of boredom, as implied by the title of a short story by Brandon Scott Gorrell, a member of Lin’s online literary gang. The story is called “Minimizing and Maximizing Mozilla Firefox Repeatedly.”
Meanwhile, the New York Review of Books blog discusses China’s One Child policy, and the detached scions it has produced:
The more he spoke, the more anguished he sounded about losing his son in other ways, too. Even as a youngster the boy would stay in his room glued to his computer avoiding human contact, rarely going out with his few friends. Other Chinese parents I spoke with said similar things about their children, complaining about their remoteness, their social isolation, and their obsession with technology. They seem an alien race of free-floating individuals.
Night lights Kyoto by my friend strangerpixel, whose images you should really check out on Flickr by clicking the image
The latest YouTube craze is to take a common film or TV cliché or plot device and splice them together. Its a diverting way to highlight the many recurring scenes that we see in our media, the audio-visual grammar of our entertainment. A couple my favourites are Cool Guys Don’t Look At Explosions and Let’s Enhance, below.
Via that video, I came across the massive time-sink that is tvtropes.org. I think a wiki-style project to create a YouTube video for every TVtrope listed would result in a fantastic media- and film-studies resource. A good use of our cognitive surplus, I reckon.
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.
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.
