Easy as Qwerty

A quick but public thanks to the Lib Dems' innovations team for helping make online campaigning so much easier.

A particular local issue has arisen in my ward - a proposal by the County Council to close a popular underpass. Within 20 minutes, thanks to some techno-wizardry available to any Lib Dem party member, I was able to create from scratch a dedicated web presence and online petition, Headington SOS. You can too, here.

Within an hour, 17 people have signed up... It's no substitute for door-knocking and leaflet delivery, but it's a handy alternative if you're working late at the office anyway.

The worst of Times

Is this perhaps the ugliest, slowest, cruddiest newspaper website around?

It’s like stepping back 10 years in time. Admittedly, it’s slightly less illegible in Firefox than Internet Explorer… but only just.

The guys responsible for TimesOnline's re-design talk about it here.

Maybe a little less time choosing the colour, and a little more beta-testing might have been in order?

What if...? How would we react to Diana's death today?

Here’s an interesting counterfactual to conjure with - how might the media coverage of Princess Diana’s death have been different in today’s ultra-connected world?

The question is prompted in my mind by a story in today’s Telegraph, ‘BBC had regrets over Diana coverage’:

Confidential BBC documents show that nearly half the population (44 per cent) felt alienated by the blanket media coverage of the Princess's death and funeral, which they thought was excessive and over-emotional. …

A BBC debriefing paper on the coverage of the death of Diana, dated January 1998, stated: "One of the things that became clear about the death, and the immediate aftermath, was that there was a range of public reactions to the death. The BBC, perhaps, did not pick up quite quickly enough on these differences in reactions. We were not always precise enough in our use of language, especially when we started to use phrases such as 'the mood of the nation', 'the grief of the public'. There was no single public mood, rather there was a variety of moods."

The conclusions were based on audience research carried out in the months following the Princess's death on August 31, 1997 and funeral service at Westminster Abbey.

I was one of those who felt utterly disenfranchised by the mawkish response of media coverage, and repulsed by the moralising mob-rule of those hell-bent on dictating to the Windsors what should be their emotional response to this family tragedy.

Pundits commenting with hindsight often seek to separate the ‘public mood’ into two distinct phases: first, in the immediate aftermath, stunned, grief-stricken hysteria; and, then, in retrospect, a certain shared embarrassment at our collective national breakdown. (A breakdown from which the execrable Express has yet to recover.)

The BBC’s research shows quite how inaccurate such glib, hand-sweeping generalisations can be.

No sentient being could have been unmoved by the cruel despatch of a glamorous young woman in her prime; nor by the sad prospect of two young boys destined to grow up with ever-fading memories of a loving mother.

And those of us with any empathetic sensibilities will have also appreciated quite what a mixture of conflicted emotions must have intermingled in the hearts and minds of Prince Charles, the Queen and Prince Phillip. To lose someone you love is hard enough; to lose someone you used to love can be even harder.

At such times, you need space and privacy for your family to try and make sense of it all. What you absolutely do not need is a baying press demanding you expose your guilty grief to the masses to satisfy some mediaeval pain-lust which has momentarily taken grip of a minority, and been projected in real-time onto the soul of the nation.

In the claustrophobic week which smothered us all between Diana’s death and her funeral there was scant space for such reflections. Media coverage was driven not by those, like me, who spared a thought or prayer for her and her family, and then moved on; but by those who queued to exhibit their ersatz anguish in full view, to assert their über-humanity, and show the rest of us how grief ought to be done.

Back to my question: how might media coverage of such a momentous news story differ in today’s Internet world?

Well, the 44 per cent of us who had no voice, and began to wonder if we were the only ones with any sense of perspective, would have soon realised how widely shared was our reaction. Blogs, Internet forums, newspaper websites - all would have reflected the spectrum of public opinion.

That, in turn, might have prompted the media to take a step back, to look with rather more cool analytical detachment at the varied response of the public, rather than assume an entire nation had lapsed into a self-absorbed stasis of group-think emotional incontinence.

The job of journalism is to make that which is complex accessible to the public: to simplify, but not over-simplify, recognising that society is rarely so obliging as to supply easy answers.

Update: Iain Dale has posted an alternative take here.

Why the Labour Party cannot grow up

Oh, for goodness’ sake… Everything I most dislike about the Labour Party, and which prompted me to quit its ranks seven years ago, are encapsulated in these words of Matthew Taylor, the Prime Minister’s ‘chief strategy advisor’:

"We have a citizenry which can be caricatured as being increasingly unwilling to be governed but not yet capable of self-government," Mr Taylor told the audience [at an e-democracy conference in London]. Like "teenagers", people were demanding, but "conflicted" about what they actually wanted, he argued.

The reason I left Labour was not that I had abandoned the cause of social justice - that is as important to me as it always was - but the realisation that ‘the left’ view social justice as something which government does to people, rather than something government enables people to achieve for themselves. The state will give power to the people, but only once they accept that it is on loan, and that it can be called-in by the government if it feels the people are abusing their freedom.

“Not yet capable of self-government” - perhaps the most astonishingly brazen (yet remarkably honest) descriptions of Labour’s core attitude towards us, the citizenry. Perhaps Mr Taylor would like to advance his frankness, and define what steps the public must take in order to come up to the mark, to show ourselves to this Labour Government to be worthy of being entrusted with the power to rule ourselves?

I suspect it would mean agreeing with what the Labour Party says and does. Only at that stage would we have proved ourselves to be sufficiently mature.

Mr Taylor’s argument continues:

"The internet has immense potential but we face a real problem if the main way in which that potential expresses itself is through allowing citizens to participate in a shrill discourse of demands. If you look at the way in which citizens are using technology and the way that is growing up, there are worrying signs that that is the case."

I love the patronising tone - “the internet has immense potential”… well, yes, it does. It also has an immense presence in the here and now. What really bothers Mr Taylor, I suspect, is that his government doesn’t have the ability to mould it, to tame it, to control it.

I imagine Mr Taylor and the Labour Party would prefer to see the Internet resemble a canal system, with varying water levels carefully regulated by ever-watchful lock-keepers. They believe themselves to be the true gateways to equality, enabling easy navigation, and that without them no journey is possible. Sadly - for them, but not for us - the Internet is a torrent, incapable of being dammed (although frequently damned) by over-officious patriarchs who consider they know better.

It’s true the medium veers towards the shrill, though most of the blogs I read - and those which are most widely read - present rational arguments, albeit with an earthy vocab, and from an unabashed vantage. Guido Fawkes is perhaps an exception, but to criticise his glibly partisan coverage is to miss the point - you might as well bemoan the lack of fair-minded balance in Private Eye’s HP Sauce column.

Besides, the readership of blogs pales into insignificance compared with the numbers who listen to radio phone-ins, which are - wholly, universally, and without exception - vacuous, vicious, and vomitous.

And finally:

"What is the big breakthrough, in terms of politics, on the web in the last few years? It's basically blogs which are, generally speaking, hostile and, generally speaking, basically see their job as every day exposing how venal, stupid, mendacious politicians are. [Can anyone point me to a more egregious example of poor sentence construction? “Basically”, “generally speaking” - both repeated twice… FFS.] The internet is being used as a tool of mobilisation, which is fantastic, but it only adds to the growing, incommensurate nature of the demands being made on government." … Part of the problem, he added, was the "net-head" culture itself, which was rooted in libertarianism and "anti-establishment" attitudes.

I’m unconvinced that blogs are “the big breakthrough” for politics on the web. They remain a minority interest, albeit punching well above their weight. As for being “hostile” (I assume he means to Labour), what was he expecting? Rank upon rank of virtual cheerleaders for one of the most authoritarian governments on record?

Blogs are often, by their very nature, obsessively monotonal. So what? Readers are sufficiently clued-up to decide for themselves both what to read, and what to believe of what they read. I offer opinions, tempered by facts. In that order. This blog does not exist to inform (though it may do), but to stimulate, and (occasionally) to persuade.

Mr Taylor may regard political blogs’ indulgence in ‘fisking’ as a destructive force (especially if he happens upon this article). But surely it is just that kind of robust, detailed, line-by-line deconstruction which shows the Internet at its best? Whatever your viewpoint, it’s hard to see how it detracts from the sum of human knowledge.

Indeed, Mr Taylor’s argument is a little muddled. If the ‘net-head’ culture is ‘rooted in libertarianism’, it’s hard to see how this “adds to the growing, incommensurate nature of the demands being made on government”. Unless Mr Taylor is complaining about that rare breed of libertarians which demands more government intervention.

What I think Mr Taylor’s argument is really about - though he’d deny this - is the resentment of those who’ve been accustomed to being at the centre of political debate, intrigue and gossip finding their club is no longer as exclusive as it once was.

Labour politics is ironically circular: in order to continue fighting the class war, the class war must never end. As a result, Labour politicians are imbued with an impregnable aura of self-righteousness: because it is their job to save the lower classes from themselves. It is the ultimate in infantilisation. That they do not, cannot, trust the public is why the public increasingly distrusts them.

The rest of us are growing-up. Perhaps the Labour Party might care to join us?

Election multi-tasking

Okay, so I'm currently watching MSNBC.com, 18 Doughty Street and Fox News (spit) online, with Sky News on the telly. And I'm surfing between Political Wire, Wonkette, PoliticalBetting.com... and, of course, the good ole' Aggregator.

What did we do before the googleinterwebulator was invented?

Webcams, Alexander Graham Bell and promenades

Just three of the topics covered in this two minute tour de gloss vidcast:



(Or you can watch it on GoogleVideo here.)