Blue Tick Tyranny - how modern government, media and administration is a rennaissance court.

A lot of people are bemused at how the brutal killing by police of a black man in a faraway US city has resulted in a worldwide outpouring of protest badged as 'black lives matter'. It's not that people are unsympathetic but rather that the protests seem to have taken on a life of their own, spreading beyond the spontaneous reaction to the killing to attacks on the police, the destruction of statues and the silencing of old comedy shows. Why, these people ask, did this happen? Most people aren't like that, they proclaim, ordinary and decent people will prevail won't they?

The problem is, and this is shown every single day, that ordinary and decent people aren't the ones in charge. For sure we all get a chance to vote once every few years and we elect a load of politicians who we hope reflect our feelings, views and opinions. We did this in December and elected the current government - I guess that, after further efforts to prevent it, the headline policy of leaving the EU will happen. But on everything else forget ordinary and decent people - social media will determine policy overwhelmingly through the dominant influencer that is Twitter.

But, I hear you say, Twitter isn't representative of people's views, most people don't use Twitter. And this is true, what passes for debate on Twitter doesn't reflect what ordinary and decent people think or say, but this doesn't matter because the people who who make the decisions, are on Twitter and do treat it as if it reflects what people think and say. Or rather the only people who matter - those blue-ticked people and institutions who dominate the medium.

It's telling that, when the supposed evils of social media (fake news, mobs and such like) are talked about by our policy-makers - all, of course, blue-ticked ones on Twitter - it is always Facebook that's in the crosshairs of regulators, Facebook that's encouraging the wrong sort of news, Facebook that targets advertising, and Facebook that is abusing privacy. Never Twitter.

There's a reason (blue-ticked celebrities aside): the ordinary and decent people who "don't think that" and aren't on Twitter, those folk are on Facebook. If you want to reach lots of people in that mass media way we used to use telly for, the best way is using Facebook. And the government, the media and those blue-ticked Twitter policy-makers hate it. Most of all they hate it because, unlike Twitter (which they love), Facebook is democratic, inclusive and makes it hard to crush your opponents through sheer weight of abuse. Facebook provides a place for community groups, for shared interests, for swapping, buying and selling. The great and good with their Twitter blue ticks cannot control this place so they disparage it, sideline it and return to the cesspool of Twitter.

As we've noted already you and me, ordinary and decent people, are not in charge. Even those we elect to hold those policy-makers to account aren't in charge. Those blue-ticked people and institutions (plus thousands who aspire to this exulted status) are in charge and they do not think like you and me. Or rather they are trapped in a world where you have to negotiate round the risks of being accused. Those doing the accusing will, of course, not be ordinary and decent people but other blue-ticked agenda-setters, each with their weaponised following - a sort of online snarling pack - ready to pile into the accused and bring them down. Usually the blue-ticked person then stands back benignly exclaiming shock or distress but "you know, people are angry".

The best way to understand what's happening is to see our political system as a rennaissance court rather than any kind of democracy. All those blue-ticked people are the courtiers and do what courtiers always did, cluster round the powerful barons hoping for advantage and preferment. The advantage comes in the form of jobs, appointments, selections and endorsements meaning that these people control the institutions that adminster the ever more complicated rules and regulations governing our society. And the game is not to have the institution (anything from the Royal Society of Arts through to a local council parks department or a little town museum) improve things for ordinary and decent people but rather for it to promote the interests of sponsoring baronries while not causing offence to other powerful groups or people.

This means that the people appointed to run (and therefore the outlook and ideology of those they set on to help them run) big institutions reflect the dominant ideology of other people within the court not the wider population. And this dominant ideology, if it merits such a grand description for a thing this cynical, is to avoid the risk of being pulled down by a media and social media mob. Therefore the leadership of institutions, at every level of society, falls back on safety first by, for example, endorsing the dominant 'woke' ideology around race and gender. Since falling foul of this idelogy will result in the institution (and the individuals running the institution) being socially excluded and damaged, many of the leaders promote and endorse ever more extreme versions of this "wokeness" so as to secure additional safety from the mob.

All this makes sense because leaders have the interests of the the institution (plus, of course, their own advancement) at heart. But it means that those who actively promote the ideology are given more power and influence than their numbers might otherwise merit. So, while it is true that Twitter doesn't represent the "real world", it does absolutely represent the court of people who actually run everything in our society and their fear of that mob - got up by their courtly competition - pulling them down by accusing them of sins against the prevailing ideology.

If you think of our political, media and bureaucratic system as that rennaissance court with Twitter as the vicious gossip between competing groups and factions then you'll understand that you and I don't run things, our voting makes little difference, and only by changing the prevailing ideology can you change the policies and priorities of the institutions that affect our lives.

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Don't burn the platform - social media, ad fraud and regulation

Look I know you don't like advertising (or at least lots of you say you don't) and get irritated by men in ill-fitting suits and bad shirts telling you that "the brand must be a hero" or some such nonsense, but can we stop shooting the messenger please? Advertising is not the reason why Google and Facebook dominate social media, advertising is not the reason why kids are fat (if indeed they are), and advertising is not some sort of sinister manipulative force responsible for all the evils of capitalism. Nope - advertising is just businesses talking to you.

Even the FT, what was once capitalism's leading journal, is at it:

The need to sell advertising is at the heart of the toxic behaviour of many of the social media companies. The online ad market is dominated by Facebook and Google, and appears to be fraught with bots and fraudulent clicks. Hence France, Germany and Australia are all conducting inquiries into online advertising.

First let's get one thing clear, online ad fraud is a problem and one that is more of a threat to the advertising business than to us as consumers (and because of this - it's a threat to Google and Facebook's revenue streams as well):

According to a 2016 report from The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and WhiteOps, the loss from ad fraud was $7.2 billion in 2015—primarily from bots. To put that into perspective, total spend on display advertising, according to the 2015 report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, was only $12 billion, excluding Google and Facebook.

Note the last part of this - the largest part of online ad fraud takes place elsewhere than Google and Facebook (or for that matter Twitter, LinkedIn and so forth) because these are 'walled gardens' - closed platforms - that control what you and I see. That's not to say there's none of this stuff on Google and Facebook - online advertising (operationally and in terms of regulation) is still in its infancy with the technology options and the creativity of fraudsters running ahead of those policing the system. It's probably more important to focus on the shared interests of advertisers and consumers (neither of whom like fraud) rather than seek to break up, control or regulate the platforms.

One of the issues here is that regulatory regimes for advertising vary enormously and there is very little international cooperation - ICAS (the International Council on Advertising Standards) was set up in 2008 but only formalised with an independent secretariat in 2017 and, as yet, doesn't include China or Japan (the biggest source of on line ad fraud). Moreover, advertising standards regimes have historically been far more focused on advertising content - 'legal, decent and honest' - than on the sort of technological deception that is undermining online advertising effectiveness. This is made more difficult by the fact that much ad fraud is not illegal (or it's hard to prove ill intent):

One of the biggest reasons fraud is so rampant is simply that it’s not illegal. Unlike credit card fraud, nobody is going to jail for ad fraud, and it’s not exactly the sort of activity that elicits a crackdown from law enforcement, which means there is significantly less risk involved. And yet it’s extremely lucrative.

Imagine a bad actor is weighing their options. On one hand there is credit card fraud, which has modest rewards and very high risks. On the other is ad fraud, which is very lucrative and very low risk. It’s a no-brainer.

Partly this is because of online purchasing models (PPC and variants) but mostly it's because governments have focused attention on other online risks (terrorism, pornography, communication with minors) rather than on advertisers getting some of their payments scammed. As the FT observed governments are now conducting enquiries into ad fraud but this has got little or nothing to do with allegations of "toxic behaviour" levelled at social media companies. That makes for a cool headline, gets you (ironic) clicks but completely misses both the problem and the solution. Regulators and governments need to be working with the platforms rather than seeing them as the problem - they have as much interest in dealing with ad fraud as any government.

In calling (foolishly I believe) for a "publicly funded model" to compete with Facebook, the FT and Diane Coyle confuse two issues and in doing so suggest that Facebook, Google and other 'walled garden' platforms are at best turning a blind eye to fraud and at worst complicit in that deception. Coyle further confuses the issue by talking about using "competition powers" to 'break up' Google and Facebook - quite whose competition powers she wants to use escapes me - when the issue isn't competition but public confidence and the lack of effective legal recourse against fraudsters (after all the BBC, Coyle's much-loved institution, enjoys a de facto news monopoly in the UK).

And, to cap it all, the online market is international so requires international responses - setting up some sort of taxpayer-funded mini-Google in the UK simply isn't the answer. Perhaps a thoughtful government (this may already be happening) might consider using the WTO - or some other international body - as a means of looking at how to coordinate online advertising regulation? Google and Facebook are not angels but it is misleading to suggest that they are complicit in online fraud - more than anything they stand to lose out from fraud as advertisers look for different ways to engage online.

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You too can join the Twitter Stasi - sign up as a volunteer 'trollhunter'!

It was only yesterday I commented on James Higham's post about die inoffizielle Mitarbeiter - the 'volunteers' who acted as eyes and ear for East German state. As James reports:

Almost every apartment building in the DDR maintained a kind of superintendent (known as a “Hausbuchbeauftragter”) who kept notes on who visited whom and when. In total, this group included around 2.1 million people, and many of them were willing to share their information. The Volkspolizei also had around 173,000 “voluntary helpers.” In addition, school directors, heads of youth organizations belonging to the “Free German Youth” (FDJ), election helpers and factory heads were also part of the army of potential informants.

My observation was that we should guard against any moves to empowering people to act as voluntary behaviour police.

This morning I awake to the news that the Metropolitan Police and Home Office have launched what the papers are calling a "trollhunter squad" with the intention of responding to 'hate speech' in social media - all part of an 'Online Hate Crime Hub'. Now this is, in one respect, just more of government wanting to control speech but this time there's another chilling aspect - die inoffizielle Mitarbeiter has arrived in England:

A team of volunteers will search out material they deem inappropriate on social networks and report it to the unit. The allegations will then be investigated and the culprits prosecuted, if caught.

That's right folks. A collection of self-appointed guardians of the web will act as informers, snitches, grasses. And any person with any sort of profile - political, business, artistic - will face constant scrutiny from these collaborators with those who want to suppress free speech. Here's a bit more:

...Twitter and Facebook will be asked to help fund a "community" element to the unit, in which volunteers "skilled in the use of social media" will "identify, report and challenge online hate material", it reports. The detectives' role will be "identifying the location of the crime" when online abuse is reported, and refer it to "the appropriate force area and social media providers".

The slow death of free speech in England continues. Just listen and you'll hear: "if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear" and "hate speech isn't free speech". We will see a step change in online fussbucketry as, with each passing day a new form of 'offensive speech' is discovered, reported to the authorities and punished. It's not just that £1.7m is a lot of money just to protect the sensibilities of some Twitter users but that we're licensing the worst sort of judgemental puritan as agents to enforce an attack on free speech. As I said in a Tweet - welcome to the Twitter Stasi.




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Don't kill free speech for the sake of sensibility.

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Somewhere - I don't know precisely as I've not been paying it all that much attention - there's a gathering calling it self "Reclaim the Internet". My Twitter timeline is filled with a steady dribble of reports from this gathering - many from Labour MPs but also photographs showing earnest folk talking about trolls, abuse and how the Internet is a horrible place stuffed with nasty people who live under bridges.

Now I've no doubt - indeed I've witnessed it - that there are plenty of thoroughly unpleasant people hiding in corners of the Internet churning out pretty vile and personal stuff. Anyone who has encountered the less intellectual parts of the 'alt-right', especially the American 'alt-right', will have enjoyed a collection of choice insults, gun-toting threats and plenty of racism. And the sort of stuff that's levelled at Jewish public figures like Luciana Berger is straight up revolting.

So I get the idea of 'reclaiming the Internet'  presumably drawing on the experience of 'reclaim the night' marches that have been a feature of feminist campaigns down the years. Indeed the use of moral suasion and solidarity to sway public opinion is pretty valuable - the fact of saying 'you're not going to stop us, this is our space too' is powerful.

What worries me is that we get - especially when there are politicians involved - a sense of 'something must be done' where that something is almost certainly some form of further constraint on free speech. It's fine for organisations - in the real world or online - to have rules and to enforce those rules (my local Conservative Club is pretty tough on bad language, for example) but when this becomes a means by which the difficult, the challenging and, yes, the unpleasant can be shut down warning bells should go off.

It's even worse if the result of these campaigns is that governments take 'something must be done' as permission for creating a policing system allowing argument to be closed down by reporting the 'abuser' to the authorities. Don't get me wrong here, there are times when this is absolutely right, but too often the opportunity is taken to close down real debate and, worse, to conduct a political attack using reporting.

The, now thankfully neutralised, 'standards' process in local government tells me that having a quasi-legal process driven by reports of supposed wrongdoing presents less scrupulous politicians with the opportunity to undermine opponents, to destroy careers simply through reporting someone to the beak. And it doesn't matter much whether the person reported actually did much wrong, the fact of the reporting is sufficient.

So when you see someone Tweeting "I've blocked and reported @pigeonpost for being a vile troll", what you are seeing is something that is an attack on @pigeonpost - by all means block and report but waving this fact around the Internet is pretty poor behaviour when it might be that the worst @pigeonpost has done is lost his or her rag (and it's not your call whether the medium's terms and conditions were breached). It's also indulging in the same trolling behaviour you're accusing @pigeonpost of using.

In the end the price of free speech is that people can be - and often are - pretty vile. This isn't just true online (as any visit to a city centre pub late on a Saturday night will tell you) but clearly causes some consternation online. So complain and protect, encourage good manners, insist that terms and conditions of social media are adhered to, but please don't use abuse as a reason for restricting speech, for giving to politicians, public officials and campaigners the tools to shut up those whose only offence is to be rude or inarticulate in their opposition to such folks' agendas.

Free speech matters. It is one of the protections - too few of them - we have from the worst of government. Governments don't like free speech and will find ways to limit it. Ways to stop you from saying what you want to say. Too often I pick up little whispers - "I know I'm not supposed to say this but..."  And yes, sometimes this is racist, sexist, anti-gay but I can challenge that, explain why it's wrong - if they can't say it and take that challenge will they not remain racist, sexist or anti-gay? And won't that speech become hidden and in doing so become more extreme by developing only with affirmation and never challenge?

So, in reclaiming the Internet do remember that you're reclaiming a place of free speech, filled with the jokes, opinions, stupidity and rudeness humanity churns out. It's mostly ephemeral, often thin in thought, but for many people it's the way they get to sound off, to explode with fury, to celebrate, to share joy. Don't kill this because there's a few who think it grand to swear and cuss, to issue threats and to parade their nastiness for all to experience. Don't do in free speech for the sake of sensibility.

PS There probably is a Twitter user called @pigeonpost and I'm sure they're not remotely offensive - it was just slung down as an anonymous name, hopefully no-one's upset!
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Sorry LGA, controlling stuff on social media really isn't the purpose of local government

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The LGA is a lobby and support organisation for local government. Some of us have long harboured doubts about its value and on occasion its purpose. However, it is wandering into areas that really are nothing to do with local government, I'm guessing to get a headline:

"We believe social media operators have a responsibility to provide health warnings to user groups and individuals. The LGA is looking for these corporations to show leadership and not ignore what is happening on their sites. We are urging Facebook and Twitter executives to sit down with us and discuss a way forward which tackles this issue head on.”

In quick order:

1. Social media owners have no such responsibility
2. Even if they do it really is nothing to do with English local government

Mission creep pure and simple.

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What you say is more important than where you say it...

In this age of instant broadcast, of social media, blogs and Skype we've become obsessed with the place where we say things. "Are you on Facebook?", "Do you use Twitter?", "Oh you must get a blog - everyone has a blog these days."

We're urged to engage, to participate, to "get on-line". Barely a minute passes at some gathering without someone posting a snap, or pinging out some cute witticism. Torrents of quotes - all with the appropriate hashtag - are poured into Twitter for our delectation. And we rush back from wherever we've been to pen our bon mots about the experience for our readers.

It is as if we live in some place where Marshall McLuhan's words have been given speed:

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.

We zoom about communicating wildly and enthusiastically - firing out semi-shaped ideas into the ether to be snaffled by a few who send them further out into the web's wilds.  We make banal - almost specious - comparisons: "Twitter is like a pub" for example. If that's so it's the weirdest pub I've ever seen - but this familiarises the medium, making it sort of homely. So we pour ourselves another glass and carry on firing out dribble into the world.

And we think this is important. Not the individual tweet or status update. Not the singular blog posting or the particular Fickr stream. No, the idea of 'social media', the concept that this little machine in our pockets makes us more engaged, reinvents our personal social capital on a bigger canvas.

But when you look at it - poke around at what we post, we see very little that is profound and almost nothing that is change making. Bloggers like Guido Fawkes crow about how they are faster to the story than the papers, how they fill the hole vacated by Private Eye. And what is that gap - it serves only our love or gossip, of tittle-tattle. For each exposure of 'wrong-doing', we get a flood of who's in and who's out, petty little bitch-fights and endless self-aggrandisement.

We love it too. We've always loved gossip - it's why we invented the newspaper, it's what journalism is really about and it's what keeps the wheels of social interaction turning. If there's no-one to talk about, no drownings or shipwrecks, no scandal, nothing to laugh at - then there's no conversation. But this gossip does not change anything any more than screaming mobs change anything - other than their poor victim's lives.

Words change things - they inspire change when they say something to our soul. Ask yourselves when you last read - or heard - something that changed what you did, that altered how you see the world, that made you do something differently? I don't mean switching coffee brand or how you wear your hair, I mean really changed how you thought about something?

So - if what we say is more important than where we say it - why do we bother more about the means of communicating than about the content of our communications? Why do we eschew poetry in preference for doggerel and prefer the rant to fine prose? As a councillor I can communicate with residents by email, by tweet, through facebook and via a blog. I can fire up Skype, create forums and even send a letter. But is this enough - should I give more attention to what I'm saying than to the media I use to say it? Do residents not deserve better than; "reported potholes in South Street, council acting on it" or a blog post explaining how many meetings I've attended and how easy it is for residents to reach me? Is it really either needed or helpful for residents to know how I'm charging about "on their behalf" all the time?


All this frantic activism rather destroys the idea that we're about more than making sure the Town Hall loo has soft paper. That we might want to consider bigger issues, to philosophise, to ask questions and to seek answers. Maybe we can do this best with our mates and a beer in our hand. Or out for a long walk with family (or even the dog). But we need to do more of it, to challenge our own beliefs, to ponder on the ideas of others and to consider what we think is the right thing to do.


Our obsession with the medium - the way we communicate - represents a sort of 'triumph of the geek', a rejection of the idea that what we say matters. It is enough to say a lot, regardless of its banality.

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of you hand
And eternity in an hour

What we say really is more important than where we say it.

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Some Councils just don't get it, do they!

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Wrexham Council has banned a local journalist from sending tweets during a council meeting:

The shock move came this morning when reporter Steve Bagnall attempted to live tweet from a Wrexham Council meeting set to discuss school bus price rises. Steve was asked not to tweet as it constituted a form of broadcast.

This is ridiculous - and probably wrong (although the rules say that the Chairman of a meeting can stop most stuff if he's grumpy enough). But why on earth does this Council think that stopping Mr Bagnall tweeting helps anything at all?

Stupid. Worse, stupidly arrogant.

Update: Comment from Carl Minns - former lead of Hull City Council - on the matter provides some more background - which you can read on his blog - as to how these bans are a misunderstanding of the law (what a surprise!)

There is nothing in this clause the prevents the council from allowing people from tweeting at meetings. I would actually go further and say that given the technology of 1972 this clause is clearly meant to cover broadcast and photographic mediums. I don't think Ted Heath's government thought about banning the transmitting of the written word out of the Town Hall. Clause 6 C actually implies this

(c)while the meeting is open to the public, duly accredited representatives of newspapers attending the meeting for the purpose of reporting the proceedings for those newspapers shall, so far as practicable, be afforded reasonable facilities for taking their report and, unless the meeting is held in premises not belonging to the council or not on the telephone, for telephoning the report at their own expense.

So, the framers of this bill clearly intended for newspapers to be afforded facilities to get the word out of what is happening at meetings. It is not a real leap of imagination to conclude that non members of the press can report proceedings but they just can't be "afforded reasonable facilities"

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Is Lord Leveson stupid?

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He's certainly giving a good impression:

The competition from bloggers and tweeters, "may encourage unethical and potentially unlawful practices to get a story"

This is providing crap journalists (who are remunerated for their work) with an excuse: "it was those nasty bloggers, m'lud, they made me do it".

And what on earth makes m'lud think that bloggers don't know we're:

...subject to the same laws as print and broadcast journalists.

(Although some like Eoin Clarke only find out the hard way).

The problem is that Lord Leveson wants to introduce laws that only apply to journalists and the newspapers they work for - not tweeters, facebookers or bloggers: just journalists in traditional newspapers. Stupid.

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"Reining in Twitter..."

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....seems to be the big challenge for Leveson today - and what a challenge!

Senior MPs have said that Lord Justice Leveson must find a way to stop people from wrongly identifying people using social media channels, after Lord McAlpine was falsely accused of being a paedophile.

And what a silly "senior MP" - one Conor Burns:

"We are going to have to bring Facebook and Twitter under the same laws as libels committed by newspapers or television channels.”

Er, Mr Burns. Facebook and Twitter - as well as this blog and your secretary - are already subject to the same libel laws.

We elect these people but who selects them?

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I'm not sure social media do 'nuance'...

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How on earth can we include uncertainty, conditionality and nuance in an instant gratification medium built around popping 140 characters into a box on the Internet? Twitter isn’t an equivocal medium, it is a place for the definite, the certain.

Even those who have managed to order the system so as to create doubt and an open-ness to other positions cannot buck the medium. The reader – or most of the readers – arrive perceiving twitter as a place of absolute certainty: “god is dead”, “abortion is wrong”, “Tories are scum”, “Arsenal are shit”. A veritable cacophony of conviction, a place where “I’m not so sure about that can you explain” doesn’t really have a place.

This soup of competing but equally unconditional truths worried some folk. Here’s Peter Beaumont writing in The Guardian:

Because of the measures of success in the new online world, including how many comments are attracted and the number of page views, it has been inevitable, some argue, that the loudest and most partisan voices seem attractive. Which leaves a burning question unanswered. How to quantify what all this means for those engaging in public debate, including bloggers, writers, journalists and commenters.

Part of Patrick Ness's argument was that the often brutal nature of the online world has started to impose a culture of self-censorship as some have sought to avoid inevitable flame wars. Other writers have remarked the opposite to me, describing how, in reviewing his writing, he had gradually used fewer qualification in his arguments.

We see here two competing responses: “I don’t like the game in that sandpit, so I’m not going to play there any more” and “I don’t like the game in that sandpit but everyone I want to play with is there so here goes”. Both are correct but define the person – there is no requirement to ping out tweets all the live long day, to record every last second of your life on Facebook or to scribe angry little pieces on a blog read by seventy people (on a good day). Yet in the discourse about the Internet – or more specifically the social aspect of the Internet – no-one states the obvious: you don’t have to be there.

At the same time, we should be able to distinguish between styles of communication and how places (if we can truly call Twitter and so forth: ‘places’) change the nature of our speech. The way I talk to a bunch of mates down the pub will be very different from the manner in which we talk at work. How often have friends and family rung you at work and been surprised by your ‘posh work voice’? And have you ever been shocked at bad language from someone (like a teacher or local councillor) you’ve only ever heard in a formal context?

Places like twitter are growing up as the users get to understand them. The etiquette, the behaviours and the language evolve. Not from some heavy-handed set of rules but from the manner in which that community polices its own behaviour and defines its own boundaries. Indeed, when heavy-handed rules crash into social media we get the nonsense of the ‘twitter joke trial’ or the lunacy of arresting some kid because he offended a celebrity.

The other part of Peter Beaumont’s worry is equally confused – sectarianism. By this he means, I guess, the tendency of humans to cluster into idea-reinforcing and like-minded groups rather than Orange Order marches or Glaswegian football violence. Beaumont suggests – in referring to the work of US academic, Cass Sunstein:

...while the internet was efficient in bringing together virtual communities of interest, it also encouraged participants "to isolate themselves from competing views... [creating a] breeding ground for polarisation, potentially dangerous for both democracy and social peace".

In other words, virtual communities, unlike physical communities that are under constant pressure to compromise, are at risk of a tendency to organise around confirmatory bias.

It seems to me that this is perfectly normal human behaviour. For sure, the Internet provides more opportunities for that ‘confirmatory bias’ but we have always sought out places and things that confirm our position, that affirm our world view. Perhaps the liberation lies in the fact that a young conservative in Grimethorpe (there may be one) or the budding Marxist in Steppingley can engage with respectively other young Tories and emerging Marxists. The assumption that on-line engagement means a new universalist idea evolving from some primeval internet soup may indeed appeal but surely it is nonsense?

Finally – and this really is important – there are more people on-line who prefer chatting about the X-Factor, football or the simple minutiae of an ordinary life. Perhaps Beaumont’s assumption that on-line activity is all about politics and media is simply his own form of confirmation bias?  While there was plenty of robust debate around Julian Assange on assorted social media channels, I’m prepared to bet that there were more pictures of cute puppies and kittens posted on various social media sites than coruscatingly insightful remarks about wikileaks. And this is how the world should be.

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Glamour, social media and technology - thoughts on magic

Magic is a tricky, rather contested idea. Not something to be played with idly. Yet a useful metaphor nevertheless if somewhat over used.

The big problem with magic lies in what we mean by it – is it the mysticism and spells or the shaman or is it a hyperbolic expression of transformation or occasion? When we say the wedding was magical we don’t mean it was presided over by a magus chanting spells (whatever we may think of the Church, its spellcasting is ever so English and not remotely mystical) but that the event was wonderful, exciting and filled with delight.

This of course brings us to Facebook and what Damien Thompson calls the “magic of social media”. And, as we find with clever pundits much of their magic is wrapped in the deliberate confusion of meaning. Here we find both meanings of magic intertwined – first we get the Arthur C. Clarke quotation without which any comment on technology is incomplete:

“...any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

By which the sage understood that we (the users of technology) had no idea how the stuff actually worked. I recall a conversation between a senior IT manager and an engineer wherein the engineer explained as follows:

“You know how to make computers work for you but I know how computers work.”

Into this trap our pundit tumbles – carrying on from Clarke’s quotation:

He was writing in 1973, and I’m not sure it’s true any more. Young people everywhere are far too tech-savvy to be baffled by technological wizardry.

Somehow I’ve a feeling that the typical gadget-strewn twenty-something may know all the buttons to press on his or her iThings but has only a tenuous grasp of how it is that those iThings weave their magic. Clarke was right; the iThing is a magic item – Galadriel’s ring or Elric’s sword – rather than a prosaic tool akin to a hammer or a spoon.

Social media are a consequence of magic not magic of themselves. Such things as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Yammer are faerie glamour – the illusion not the magic itself. We have all obtained these iThings and use them to craft vast magical empires, places to chat, to play, to work and to learn. But the magic we wield is outside our knowledge, we do not know why we can download films or upload photographs (indeed we will mostly struggle to explain how the films and photos come about) merely that we can do so and that the results are “magical”.

For Thompson – adopting the doomsayer’s cloak – this is not good, such empires of illusion are dangerous:

This is exciting, but not necessarily in a good way. Accelerating change will tie economic activity ever more tightly to fragile charisma.

The success of magic – of technology (and Thompson confuses Apple who create new magic items and Facebook where people play with those items – the first in Clarke’s terms is magic, the second merely glamour) – is, Thompson says, down to that charisma and to the idea of cult. Thus technology businesses like Apple are akin to Pentecostalist preachers driven by the founder’s magical presence rather than by the real magic of technological innovation.

Now I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg set out to create a massive social media monster when he created Facebook. But what he and others did was to remove the stopper from a magic bottle releasing a veritable horde of djinni. Whether they will survive remains to be seen – at some point us users of the djinni will have to pay (there is always a cost to using magic) or lose the power.

However, this relates only loosely to the real magic – the robots, the computers, the little metal and plastic slaves that do things we could but dream of a few years ago. Watching colour images beamed back from Mars or hearing of nanotechnology allowing the most delicate of brain surgery. This is where Arthur C. Clarke’s magic is now.

Damien Thompson sees the pretty things built by magic and believes them to be the magic. If those pretty things are sometimes designed to deceive they just reflect humans – the deception is just the same as those Pentecostalists with their laying on of hands, speaking in tongues and preference for showmanship over devotion. But this is not the magic – we must look instead to the things we don’t understand but take for granted. Televisions, computers, mobile phones – all the paraphernalia of modern living – these are the magic.

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Lord, save us from "researchers"!

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We will all be addidcted - to the demon interwebs with their social networks!

Resisting the urge to check social networking sites for updates is more difficult than turning down a drink, according to a study of people's everyday desires.

Something must be done before the economy grinds to a complete halt while everyone alive checks their tweets and amends their status!

This is the sort of research that, you know, gives research a bad name. And the main finding about daytime desires:

The survey of 250 people found that sleep and sex were the two things people most longed for during the day...

So we're all regular and normal after all!

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Twitter and recruitment - an interesting observation

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From HR.com's Geoff Newman:

Many companies - particularly those involved in the media - are putting a premium on candidates with strong social media footprints when it comes to the recruitment of new staff.

The case has been highlighted by the recent poaching of the BBC's popular chief political correspondent - and avid Twitterer - Laura Kuenssberg by ITV. Kuenssberg has a 60,000-strong army of loyal Twitter followers, and executives at ITV said that it had been a noted "additional benefit" when they were looking at recruiting her.  

Bosses at the commercial broadcaster said that her strong harnessing of Twitter as a means of engaging with her viewers was an excellent example of how they were trying to get their correspondents to engage with social media.

Very interesting.

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Is this how Councils should encourage members to make use of social media?

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From Bradford Council's Standards Committee:

Resolved –

(1) That the Monitoring Officer be requested to consult with the officers responsible for provision of IT equipment to Members to draw up a protocol advising on appropriate usage for issue when the equipment is first provided.

(2) That the Monitoring officer be requested to draft a brief guidance note for Members in respect of the potential pitfalls of all forms of communication, including electronic, and that this be presented to a future meeting of the Committee for comment.

They didn't think to ask us about how we might want to make use of technology merely to control and manage the manner in which we do so. Ridiculous.

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Sorry, Dame Stella, but you're wrong about children reading - and about social media

Dame Stella Rimmington, former head girl and ex-spy is chairing the judging panel for this year’s Man Booker Prize. I suspect that part of the job description for this chairing role is to say something controversial about literature or reading or the general state of the world through the eyes of bookish folk. And Dame Stella has obliged with a gentle rant about twitter:

Dame Stella said that while she was confident a market for fiction would still exist in 100 years, she feared many children were not growing up to be book lovers. “I think much of the Twittering and emailing and texting and all that sort of stuff that children go in for now may be taking their eyes off reading fiction. When I was young we read more than the average child reads now.”

Now I don’t wish to be too critical of such an eminent lady but she’s talking nonsense:

In the UK, the value of publishers’ sales of children’s books actually increased in 2010 by 2%, to £242m. The report shows that the value of publishers’ UK sales has been increasing year on year over the last three years, from £236m in 2008.

And this represents some 60 million books sold which makes for five books on average for each of the UK’s roughly 12 million children. OK, the kids aren’t devouring hundreds of books in the manner that Dame Stella doubtless did as a girl but they are definitely reading.

More importantly however social media – all that twittering, emailing and texting – means that children are doing something we never did (and which I suspect Dame Stella’s contemporaries didn’t do either). Children are writing to eachother. OK, they’re writing in a language that only just approximates to English and is replete with acronyms, shortened words and peculiar codes but it is written communication.

If – twenty years ago - we’d have said that the most common form of communication between young people would be written communication, the experts would have looked at us, shaken their heads and called for the men in white coats. Yet that is the reality – we have replaced the verbal communication, whether directly or via the telephone, that was the dominant feature of the decades from the 1960s to the 1990s with a mish-mash of written forms.

It seems to me that, regardless of the oddity of language involved, the growth of social media forms – facebook, twitter and so forth – makes a positive contribution to the literacy levels of young people. After all you can't play in the sandpit of social media if you can’t read or write can you!

Dame Stella’s comments reveal yet again the extent to which the literary elite are out of touch – not just with the facts about books and literacy but with what interests and excites young people about reading and writing. Yet again much chatter will be expended on the Man Booker Prize – chatter that will sail completely by the majority of folk. Why?

Because the literature involved presents an impenetrable arrogance that covers up the deeper truth – it is indulgent literary fiction that is dying out not reading. And this is because the books promoted by the literary elite are not what most people want to read. If the Man Booker Prize is to mean more it has to break out from the narrow genre into which is has crawled – it has to embrace popular fiction and recognise that just because a book doesn’t use three words that aren’t in the Concise Oxford Dictionary on the first page and has fun things like spies or wizards or vampires in it, that doesn’t make it a bad book.

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Bradford Council's budget...plus a thought about tweeting!

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The deed is done - the Council has set a budget. For most folk the most important thing about it remains the answer to the question: "so how much is my Council Tax going up by?" I know, I know - the real story is about the cuts - either spiteful and targeted at vulnerable people or forced onto innocent and efficient Councils by the evil monster Pickles. But when - in about an hour - I arrive at the Club ready to win the quiz, I know it will be the Council Tax question that gets asked.

Don't get me wrong here, the 'cuts' are important - especially important if you're the poor soul who has lost a job or no longer get a particular service. But in the round taking £56m out of a £1.2bn budget isn't going to make the wheels fall off the wagon - especially if, as in Bradford's case, the Council anticipated the scale of reductions. Nevertheless the decision today included decisions to cut services - closing small libraries, removing off-highway rural bin collection and dramatically reducing the budgets for maintaining highways, parks and local facilities. These decisions - for all the talk of equity and equality from the Council's leadership - disproportionate affect people living in rural parts of the district.

So when I'm asked why I voted against the budget it isn't because I could write a better one (although I could) but because the Labour Party chose to target cuts directly and deliberately at the people I represent.

And I shall be telling those people about that decision.

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Partly related to this is a comment from that rarity - someone in the public gallery during a council meeting - who asked why I was 'playing with my phone'. In truth I was tweeting - commenting on what was being said by members during the budget debate. To do this I have to listen to what's being said!

And it means that a load of people who might not be able to or want to come to the actual meeting are able to get a flavour - albeit coloured by my bias - of what's happening. Perhaps a few hundred people knew something - certainly more than would be the case in past years - about our budget deliberations.

I don't consider that to be disrespectful but to be an enhancement - its extending our engagement and people's involvement in the processes of democracy. I was able to give response and comment on things people were concerned about - care for the elderly, children's services and support for the arts - as decisions about those very things were being discussed.

So no, I wasn't playing with my phone. I was enhancing democracy - something more Councillors should do!

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Social media, politics and the capacity of our gobs!

Yesterday saw the last in our CllrSocMed tour of Yorkshire (and that oddity of a place “The Humber”) during which we’ve talked to – and with – around 80 councillors from different political parties about that strange old beast, “social media”. From my perspective it has been an education and, I hope, those councillors who came along got some value from my inanities, prejudices and bad jokes.

It seemed right to reflect on the whole “social media” thing – on its ups and downs, on the way in which it has caught a few politicians out and how it just might be pretty useful. One thing though that is abundantly clear is that the political party panjandrums neither ‘get’ nor like social media (or indeed the idea of a ‘blogosphere’). All they see are problems – councillors, MPs, candidates opening their gobs and inserting size 10 hobnails, gangs of opponents bombarding the world with attacking comments and, above all, something that can’t be controlled, can’t be put into a tidy communications grid.

Unfortunately the genie is out of the bottle, has a headache and isn’t about to be bossed around by former journalists and lobbyists employed by the big political parties. And here’s why:

• There are 500 million people worldwide using Facebook, 175 million on Twitter and hundreds of thousands blogging. Add in MySpace, Flickr, YouTube and other places and spaces and you have a mob environment that cannot be directed or controlled by the politicians – other than by stopping or blocking.
• The game has changed – we’re right back to response, interaction and engagement and away from message management, targeting and mass communications. Success will come from understanding what makes people respond positively rather than from repetition and saturation.
• Whether something or someone is ‘liked’ has become important – as significant as message content. And being liked comes from exchange and interaction not from polish and presentation alone. While being tall and having good hair still matters, it is joined by being witty, responding to those around and not being an obsessive or a bore.
• Politics is boring – for plenty of people it has always been boring – and most folk don’t like it. While the charmed circle of Westminster controlled debate this didn’t matter but now boredom has triumphed. The bloke outside Number Ten can be – and is – ignored as we seek our information and pleasure elsewhere.

There are some changes that still need to happen – political parties need to be less obsessed with whether something someone once said was “offensive”. The next generation – a generation brought up with Facebook and Twitter – will not be either interested or impressed with the singling out of an unfortunate tweet or slightly off Facebook photo. The current approach of trying to remove all media risk not only doesn’t work but is crass and ridiculous. It is ironic that our kids have grown up in this respect – can accept and forgive the odd social faux pas – whereas us older folk remain “offended” and “appalled”. There is surely a good case for political party bosses to grow a sense of humour and to learn what the words, “I’m sorry” mean. The public – the folk on Facebook and Twitter – get this, it’s about time our lords and masters did too.

In the mean time I’ll leave you with Simon’s “How not to do Twitter” for politicians:

• Attack the man not the ball. That’s right go for the jugular folks, forget about honest debate and go for your opponent on the basis of where he was born, the colour of his hair, the car he drives or what he said ten years ago when he wasn’t a Councillor. The audience will love all that, they’ll think you a really nice, pleasant person who they’d love as their Councillor or MP!
• Tell risky jokes – you know the ones about wishing Maggie were dead or Mandelson’s dog. You’ll get a laugh – lots of people will send your jolly witticism round the airwaves which will be great. Except you’re not Jimmy Carr or Frankie Boyle are you? They can do it because they’re comedians – you’re not are you!
• Swear a lot. Well everyone does, don’t they? The twitterfeed is full of cussing, of ‘c’ words and ‘f’ words competing for space. If you swear a little it shows you’re normal but look at the fuss when Cameron said “twat”! You don’t need to swear to get your point across and, if you do it right, other folk will do all your swearing for you anyway.
• Call people names. Somebody tweets about housing and you respond with a pithy comment capped off with “you idiot”. Now that will work won’t it, you’ve put the other side firmly in their place. A bit like Barnsley’s chief executive calling Eric Pickles a ‘clown’ – not exactly the best idea really!

Now before you all go crawling through my tweets, let me say that I’ve done all these things – sometimes in the heat of the moment, sometimes with malice aforethought. This changes nothing and I don’t set myself up as exemplary or even especially expert – the advice is what it is, gleaned from having sent 30,000 tweets a handful of which, in the glory of hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have sent.

Whatever you do, don’t ignore social media – it is too important for that. But understand that when you, as a politician, are using social media you are ‘on parade’ not in the pub with your mates. It’s a forgiving parade but, as someone once said, don’t tweet anything you wouldn’t want your mum to see!


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Why do we do this?

There has been much debate - and a modicum of understandable schadenfreude - at the departure of well-known "right-wing" bloggers from the scene. Most recently has been the departure of Iain Dale mostly it seems to me in preference for other more interesting and more lucrative activities.

I was struck by this little comment from Paul Evans, where I think he comes close to understanding why bloggers find it hard to sustain their activity especially when it is subject to constant attack by those - from all sides and with a range of motivations. With the compulsory (for left-wing bloggers) snide sideswipe at Nadine Dorries, Paul says:

Tom H, Nadine and Iain have distinguished themselves by being more-active-than-average online. None of them have been able to do the useful things that social media allows them to do - at least in part -because the personal engagement crowds out the political / policy conversation (though I suspect Nadine would just be a little puzzled by the concept in the first place). If you place yourself in full view online, you leave yourself open to disruption. Keep quiet and you don't.

The question for those in the 'public eye' is whether to take the risk of conversation - the whole point of social media - or remain aloof. Most politicians and political celebrities do not engage with the process - they give their opinion (very carefully) and refuse to engage beyond that point. Blogging allows the conversation to take place but, as I often point out about this blog, politicians cannot take the risk of allowing a conversational free-for-all since your comment on my blog is as likely to offend, upset or be exploited as my own thoughts.

To be quite honest we do this for selfish - rather preening - reasons. As a politician I am opinionated - indeed an unopinionated politician would be decidedly oxymoronic. Blogging and social media provide a platform for me to get my opinion across - whether that opinion's about the national debt, the clearing of snow or the winner of X-Factor. More importantly, having an opinion is what I'm good at - it is my special talent and the world is better for everyone to have the chance to hear my opinion. Or maybe I'm just an arrogant git with a big mouth!

What I do know is that something may come along that grabs my attention, engages my interests, even excites...and then, like all those others who have quit blogging, I'll be off. Until then I afraid you'll have to put up with me!

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So will social media make us more tolerant (at least in public)?

Today I spent a thoroughly enjoyable day in Scarborough speaking with Councillors about social media. Alongside all the usual subjects – how to do it, what the risks are, how councils get in the way of local councillors making best use of social media and how it’s all so scary – was a subject that I find quite fascinating. This is the distinction between public and private – the whole question of our media profile and the degree to which we are tolerant of perceived societal sins.

There are plenty of examples of these perceived sins – threatening in jest to blow up airports or stone journalists, dressing up in WWII German uniforms for parties* (and, of course, the dreadful ‘Nazi salute’) and our back catalogue of misbehaviour.

We’ve seen how the misdeeds of Cameron and Osborne are used as a stick to beat them with (especially as a great deal of such bad behaviour involves dressing up in penguin suits and wearing embroidered waistcoats – a sin of terrible poshness). But the question for future generations of politicians – if you like, the ‘Facebook’ generation is just how we will deal with the silly antics, the photographs of semi-naked dances in fountains and the louche photographs of drunkenness and seeming debauchery. All great fun for 19 year olds enjoying university or 25 year olds on the office Christmas night out but what about those who go on to be cabinet ministers, bishops or diplomats?

Will we as a society still drag out photos from 20 years ago – or even newspaper reports from ten years past – as the basis for active, current political campaigns? Will we still say that such and such a politician should be sacked or has bad judgment because of some drunken photos that appeared on Facebook twenty years previously? Or will the fact that Facebook – and other social media – provide such a public record of everyone that the response will be “so what”?

I suspect we won’t grow up. We’ll still seek political advantage from other past pranks and misdeeds. The apology will be ignored and the opportunity to look at the whole person ignored in the search for a clever comment, a good spread in the papers or a cutting blog post.

…but I can hope!

*Always wondered why it was OK to dress up as Stalin, Moa or even Pol Pot but not Hitler?

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Why can't folk just accept an apology?

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Today I'm off to sunny Scunthorpe to speak with councillors about social media - twitter, blogs, facebook and so forth. And with all furore around the #twiterjoketrial and Cllr Gareth Compton's rather ill-advised attack on a well-known left-wing journalist, there will be plenty to speak about.

However, it seems to me that we have lost our sense of perspective in all this. I'm not passing judgment on either case except to say that, as ever, the law is an ass. But I do think that the protagonists in each case, as well as others involved, would not have taken this approach were we a better cultured and more civil society.

However much I respect and admire folk like David Allen Green and Robert Dougans for their efforts to minimise the law's ass-like nature, it seems to me that a society which turns instantly to law in order to resolve the insults inevitable in discourse is a truly decadent society. The lofty ideals of free speech, chivalry, decency and tolerance that we ought to treasure are cast aside as the insane literal-ness of the legal process crashes through the doors of our culture.

I listen to the fake offence being taken by people involved in these sort of cases. I scream silently as another person hides behind race, creed or gender to make indefensible accusations of their protagonists. And I seeth with anger when I see people who dish out ad hominum attacks every day respond to the mildest of criticism with an appeal to the law.

In a truly civilised society we would not need to conduct expensive court cases and appeals over jokes on twitter. The offender would put his or her hand up and apologise. The authorities would stand there and say:"don't be such an idiot again" - and their advice would be heeded.

In a truly civilised society the first response to causing offence should be an apology. Followed by that apology being accepted by the offended party and a shaking of hands. A lesson learned.

Instead people lose their jobs, their careers are ruined and their health is destroyed.

All because some folk are too grand to accept and apology or too rules-bound to do anything but prosecute. Or motivated by the opportunity to destroy someone's life so as to gain a temporary political advantage.

Next time...

...just accept the apology!

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