Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Tag: Internet Philosophy (Page 34 of 39)

The Point of Vanishing Interest

30 October 2006 / / 12 Comments

I have said before that the operative word in ‘citizen journalist’ is not the latter, but the former. Fay Young’s short, personal report on the happenings of an Edinburgh City Council meeting seems to be a good example of ‘citizen journalism’ and the importance of new Internet technologies. The happenings at the meeting were probably not newsworthy enough for The Scotsman or even the Edinburgh Evening News, so a reporter might not be paid to file a report on it. Now, Fay is an established journalist, but it was in her role of ‘citizen’ that she was present and able to post her report (“Hot air stifles climate change debate”) on her blog. More information for the rest of us, which we hope leads to a more accountable, participatory democracy.
Fay was not impressed by the councillors’ collective time-management:

The meeting rattles through some fairly important stuff about poverty … Then the meeting spends 25 minutes debating whether to replace or restore the old Davenport desks and chairs. Finally one Labour councillor protests at this waste of time when there is still a motion on climate change to debate, not to mention the capital city’s alcohol problem. Still they drone on, and it is another five minutes before they vote [27 to 29] to replace the old heavy mahogany with something that can be easily shifted and stacked when it is not in use.

I wonder if Fay Young has read C. Northcote Parkinson’s eponymous Parkinson’s Law? This is a fantastic compendium of satirical essays, first published in the Economist, and collected in book form in 1958 (I have a fourth edition from that year, which carries some delightful illustrations by Osbert Lancaster). In his essay, “High Finance; or, The Point of Vanishing Interest”, Parkinson describes a committee that bears a remarkable similarity to that which Fay witnessed last week. Finance committees are, he says, made up of people who know nothing of millions, but well accustomed to thinking in thousands:

The result is a phenomenon that has often been observed but never yet investigated. It might be termed the Law of Triviality. Briefly stated, it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.

So, Fay’s experience seems all too familiar! Parkinson also presents an amusing essay on the ‘Coefficient of Inefficiency’, definied as the size at which a committee ceases to be of any effective use whatsoever. This he puts at somewhere between 19 and 23 members. It is interesting to note that the number of councillors voting at Fay’s meeting was more than double that estimate…
Whatever the accuracy of his theories, Parkinson’s Law is a great read, and a highly recommended stocking filler for the economist or policy wonk in your life.

The Impact of Blogs

28 October 2006 / / 8 Comments

There has been a spate of articles in recent months about the impact of blogging. I wrote a short article for October’s Writing Magazine, tackling the subject from the point of view of the aspiring writer. It was fun to try and condense all I have learnt into just a thousand words. I guess seasoned bloggers will find very little here that they don’t already know, but I hope it provided some thinking points for those who have yet to venture online.
Call it blogging or ‘citizen journalism,’ online self-publishing is becoming an unavoidable part of human discourse. High-profile bloggers are invited to comment on radio programmes, while broadsheet newspapers run a daily round-up of the ‘blogosphere’. Top American blogs (such as Instapundit and Boing-Boing) receive thousands of hits every day. Every political campaign has an associated blog, and MPs are using the medium to re-engage with their constituents. In March, the Guardian inaugurated www.CommentIsFree.com, a ‘super-blog’ with contributions from the paper’s regular columnists.
Clearly, blogs are something that writers must engage with. The Internet is changing the nature of writing – especially journalistic writing. Aspiring and established journalists should seek to understand the implications of this 21st Century medium… even if they have no intention of writing anything online themselves.
Continue reading

Government ministers are shit at the interweb

6 September 2006 / / 4 Comments

I’m annoyed. Junior Minister Tom Watson has resigned, and I have been forced to learn this from the BBC News website, like some blogless plebeian. This is despite the fact that Mr Watson has his very own blog. But at 1:50pm today, I find no response from the site at all.

Meanwhile, David Milliband has had his own efforts to embrace the new technologies foiled (via DK). His ‘Envrionmental Contract’ was supposed to be edited as a ‘Wiki’ by members of the public. Unfortunately, the ‘Wiki’ was comprehensively defaced, and DEFRA had to abandon the project.
The ‘cyber-vandalism’ was, as Milliband says, rather juvenile. I have very little sympathy, however. The use of a wiki for this purpose was ill-conceived. New internet technologies provide many different ways for people to engage in dialogues and collaboration. But that does not necessarily mean that a wiki open to millions of people, to create a government policy that will affect millions of people, is necessarily the best use of the technology! Such tools will, I believe, be much more effective when used at the lower echelons of democracy – Between civil servants around the country sharing ‘best practice’; or between the members of rural or island councils, say, who may have long distances to travel. Central government will have very little success when it tries to use the ‘Smallweb’.
This jumping on the Wiki/Blog band-wagon in this manner reminds me of the dot-com boom-and-bust we witnessed a few years ago. The people getting burned (or, in this case, custard-pied) are those who assume the new technologies can somehow overcome all laws of economics and politics. I very much doubt Milliband would make policy by standing at Speakers’ Corner with a flip-pad, writing down all the suggestions from passers-by. Sooner or later someone will begin heckling. So why try it online?

Hyperlinks in print

21 August 2006 / / 0 Comments

An interesting beginning to Patrick Burgoyne’s editorial in this month’s Creative Review:

Looking through this month’s issue, the sharp-eyed amongst you may notice a few words underlined in red like this … They are simply devices to indicate links in E-CR, the Digital Version of Creative Review.

Usually, web design follows print design. We still see many fixed dimension layouts online, while many other website designs make a reference to paper and the physical world (my own site being an example of this). It is interesting, then, to see the reverse happen: print design being informed by web-design. In Creative Review we see the humble ‘underline’ evolve from something to denote emphasis, into something to denote more information elsewhere.
As it happens, I’m not sure whether this particular quirk will survive. I’ve noticed that many contemporary websites choose not to underline their links, favouring a change of colour instead. Colouring a word blue, the usual default for links, may ultimately be understood by more people. I once heard of a system – invented I think by Wassily Kandinsky – whereby different colours denoted different meanings in text. In the twenty-first century this idea may be realised. However, his idea was that the different colours denoted emotions, not meta-information. Either way, if a colour-based standard was adopted, the Accessibility lobby would hate it – What about the colour-blind?
As we emigrate to the multimedia world, we must learn (and indeed invent) new symbols, as part of a global language. The play, pause, record and stop symbols have been well understood since the Walkman first hit the streets. We had to wait for CDs before the ‘skip forward’ and ‘skip backward’ symbols also became ubiquitous. The drive to standardize the symbol for syndicated content (for example, RSS) is already underway.
At the same time, other symbols fall out of use. Why bother with numbered annotations, as many websites still do, when a hyperlink will more than suffice?

Blogs and newspapers

13 August 2006 / / 8 Comments

At Comment is Free, Sunny asks why newspapers are beginning to turn against bloggers. Are they worried about competition? Is building something up then tearing it down just how newspapers work? Or are the columnists scared of the militant and unfettered argument?
One thing I’ve noticed is that blogs have become, for me, sign-posts to the newspapers, and not the other way around. Take a couple of articles on how to combat terrorism which I read online. My attention was drawn to them by bloggers, not headlines on the news-stand! First, I come to this opinion piece by Sam Leith via Tim Worstall:

The terrorists succeeded: they caused terror … More and more, I wonder about something. What if, after the attacks on the World Trade Centre or the London Underground, the West had taken a difficult and strange course of action, and done nothing at all? What if we had, as a society, turned the other cheek: mourned our dead, rebuilt our cities and allowed the senselessness of the attacks to stand exposed for what it was?

I’ve been whining for a more radical and unexpected, even counter-intuitive approach for a while now, although I have not had the guts to stand up and say that perhaps we should simply turn the other cheek. Leith fills that gap, Worstall agrees its something to consider, and there is an interesting discussion in his comments box.
Meanwhile, it is via Rachel From North London, in turn via Chicken Yoghurt, that the latest column by the fantastic Matthew Parris: “Let’s treat the plotters as common criminals, not soldiers in a global war”:

How sides seem to have been switched since the last century turned. Rebels and mutineers used to insist that there was a war on, and governments used to insist that there wasn’t. Hardliners took the view that people who blew things up were common criminals, to be dealt with case by case. Liberals argued that it was more useful to see them as idealists in a warped and misguided army … Now it’s the other way round. Hardliners see a war between opposing forces. Liberals see a more fractured picture, a rebel cast of dangerous but messed-up people, idiots, nutters and psychopaths, some organised, some clever, others out of control: essentially a matter, however grave, for the police.

Hopefully I will be another link in the chain, as people click through from here to read Parris’ thoughts in full.
Crucially though, I haven’t bought either The Telegraph (Leith) or The Times (Parris). I have, however, become extremely efficient at recieving the benefit of their wisdom, for free. Newspapers should be worried by blogs, because blogs increase the likelihood that the likes of me are essentially ‘free-loading’ on the papers’ good work. I’ve certainly bought less newspapers in the past year. Worse still for the newspapers, I think I have a right to do so. Newspapers form an important of public discourse, facilitating the democratic debate before any democratic vote. With the right to free speech comes the right to listen uninterrupted, and if they put their content behind an Independent-style firewall, they will hear me moan. The business side of newspaper publishing is hindered by their aspiration to facilitate the public good.
We might be able to tolerate this is the case of behemoths like the Telegraph Group and News International, who can in any case plug the leak by selling online advertising. But what of the chap who runs the corner shop below my flat? Selling copies of The Telegraph and The Times are an important loss-leader for him. My failure to buy the papers, and instead read the juicy bits from each from three-storeys up, could begin to impact upon his ability to stay in business.
I’m off to buy a pint of milk before he closes.

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