New article: Why don't we find politicians' claims convincing?

In the days after the 7/7 London bombings why did the British government’s representation of ‘terrorism’ and ‘moderate Muslims’ seem to create the opposite response from Muslim constituencies to that which the government intended? A new paper co-authored by myself and Giles Moss at Oxford has been published in Political Studies that tries to answer this question. There are ways in politics to make claims about states of affairs that allow those we address to engage with the substance of what we say, rather than switch off or view our address as an attack on us. We analysed speeches of Tony Blair, John Reid and others, and responses of British Muslims and British citizens more generally to their speeches. We found that citizens found the politicians’ claims about ‘terrorism’ or ‘Iraq’ to be too certain, too fixed and too direct, making it difficult for citizens to comprehend or connect to their representations as meaningful and negotiable. It was not simply that citizens mistrusted politicians or disagreed with their policies, but that politicians’ rhetoric and mode of address was interpreted as putting matters beyond debate. Citizens understand that politicians must reach decisions and respond urgently to terror attacks, but Blair, Reid and others were deemed to say controversial things and then present them as if they were beyond question. Yet even in moments of crisis, we argue, the responsibility to sustain engagement does not evaporate – if anything it becomes more pressing.

Giles and I hope to build on this article by reconsidering insights from Dewey and Lippmann that, contrary to the notion that citizens are turned off by ‘hard news’, suggest instead that it is around complex, controversial subjects in which politicians are deemed to be failing that publics actually do take an interest. We will look at public responses to the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq War as a case in point.

The floodgates are creaking

At the NPCU conference this year, I'm giving a paper on the impact the Internet has had campaign fundraising in the US and the UK. In preparation for this and to get some feedback on my ideas, I did a staff-student seminar on this late last year. During the course of the question and answer session, I made what seemed like a very rash prediction - it was very likely that the whole American public funding system would be destroyed in 2008 by the enhanced fundraising capabilities of campaigns.

In order to understand this comment, we need to examine exactly how public funding works in presidential elections in the States. The whole process is grounded on the principle (decided by the Supreme Court in Buckley vs. Valeo in 1976) that absolute spending caps would amount to a breach of the first amendment - the right to free speech. As a result American legislators have been forced to use another regulatory tool, namely voluntarism, to enforce spending caps. The mechanism for doing this has been to make the receipt public funding conditional on limiting spending.

The funding system for presidential elections is a two stage process:

• The primary system. This is based on matching for small donations of less than $250. Receiving these benefits though is conditional on taking an overall spending cap plus a number of state restrictions. Already, this system has come under siege, and is now widely regarded as defunct. A number of candidates (for example Bush, 2000; Dean, Kerry and Bush, 2004; and Clinton, Obama and Romney, 2008) have got out of the system. For these campaigns, with their huge fundraising capabilities, the benefits of public funding as far outweighed by the spending caps they have to agree to.
• The presidential campaign. Whereas the primary system is a public/private hybrid with a spending cap, the presidential election is a purely public affair. Candidates are given a bloc-grant. This is the total sum of money they are allowed to spend on the election. In 2004, each candidate was able to spend just over $74 million. As yet, every candidate to run for office since the system was instigated in the seventies has taken public funds for the presidential election (including Ronald Reagan, who actually opposed the system). This element of the public funding system has seemed pretty solid.
  

But (and this is what I meant with my comment) it is now conceivable that this system is going to come under immense strain. Think about it - Clinton and Obama have already blown $100 million each on their campaigns to entice a relatively small proportion of the electorate. Does it seem likely that campaigns of this sort will be willing to suffer budget cuts when they move to communicating with the wider electorate? 

Especially given Obama's massive level of fundraising since Super Tuesday, it also doesn't seem unlikely he would be able to out-fundraise the public grant he would be entitled to. And the indications are that he is considering it. We could be watching the death of public funding for presidential elections in the US.   

Theorising the politics of web 2.0: an excerpt from the Introduction to the Handbook of Internet Politics by Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard

As part of writing the Introduction to the forthcoming Handbook of Internet Politics, Phil Howard and I wanted to try a basic 'first take' on what web 2.0 might mean for politics. We sought to briefly define it and to tease out its broader implications for political behaviour in a way that stays close to its technological characteristics without reducing it to those characteristics. We took as our point of departure Tim O'Reilly's influential approach. No surprises there, but we were intrigued by how readily O'Reilly's technology-centric themes could feed into broader conceptual ideas and examples of value to social scientists. Here's what we came up with. We hope you find it useful, and, dare we say it, that you might like to add your comments at the bottom of this post...

[Note: This is a pre-publication excerpt from Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard 'Introduction: New Directions in Internet Politics Research' in Andrew Chadwick and Philip N. Howard (eds) (2008, in press) The Handbook of Internet Politics. New York and London: Routledge. You can read the book's table of contents at Routledge's site]

Politics: Web 2.0 

Space limits preclude a full discussion of web 2.0 here, but in this section we highlight its central features by building upon Tim O'Reilly's (2005) seminal approach. For good or ill, this is arguably the most influential discussion of the term to date.

O'Reilly is regarded as the first to publicly coin the term web 2.0 in 2003¹. This primarily technology-focused approach defines it in terms of seven key principles or themes. Some of these are more relevant to internet politics than others, and some require extra theoretical work to render them amenable to social science investigation. Nevertheless, the seven principles are: the internet as a platform for political discourse; the collective intelligence emergent from political web use; the importance of data over particular software and hardware applications; perpetual experimentalism in the public domain; the creation of small scale forms of political engagement through consumerism; the propagation of political content over multiple applications; and rich user experiences on political websites.  How might these principles work as a means—both literal and metaphorical—of sketching out a first take on new directions in the realm of internet politics research?

First, the internet as a platform for political discourse. In essence, this theme relates to the idea that the web has moved from the older model of static pages toward a means of enabling a wide range of goals to be achieved through networked software services. The archetypal web 2.0 web-as-platform service is of course Google, whose value depends almost entirely on its ability to create wealth from the interface of its distributed advertising network, its search algorithm, and its huge database of crawled pages. Two key features of this aspect of web 2.0 are particularly salient: first, the power of easily scalable networks and second, the "long tail". Easily scalable networking involves an organization being able to flexibly adapt to sudden growth surges and ad hoc events that increase demand for its services.

The theory of the long tail (Anderson, 2006) is that online commerce and distribution is changing the economics of content creation and distribution. Traditionally, movie studios, publishers and record companies tend to try to create small numbers of big hit products because the sunk costs of developing a film, book, or album can be more quickly and predictably recouped. Similarly, real space retail outlets (cinemas, city center record stores, booksellers) can only afford to sell "hit" products because the relatively high cost of providing shelf or screen space for low-selling niche products makes it risky. Online distribution significantly reduces these costs, resulting in a sales/products curve with a large "head" and a long "tail" of niches. The internet thus contributes to a more diverse and pluralistic media landscape.

These web-as-platform principles can be seen at work in a range of political arenas. Elsewhere it has been argued that the 2004 primary and presidential campaign in the United States saw the emergence of a model of campaigning that relied upon a range of online venues loosely meshed together through automated linking technologies, particularly blogs, as well as face to face meetings coordinated via the user-generated Meetup site (Chadwick, 2007; Hindman, 2005). However, nowhere is the idea more strongly embodied than in the recent shift towards online social networking on platforms such as Facebook and MySpace. The symbolic moment came in January 2007, when John Edwards announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination via a brief and informal video posting on Youtube, but the US midterms of November 2006 had already witnessed an explosion of political activity on social networking sites as well as the intensification of blogging by candidates and the long tail of amateur pundits.

The second theme of web 2.0 is collective intelligence. The core idea here is that a distributed network of creators and contributors, the majority of them amateurs, can, using simple tools, produce information goods that may outperform those produced by so-called authoritative, concentrated sources. Examples of this abound, but two stand out as having caught the political imagination: free and open source software projects and user-generated content sites. The underlying model of online collaboration that produces these vast collections of human intelligence has been much debated. Opinions differ, for instance, over the extent to which hierarchy matters in these environments. Some, such as Weber (2004) suggest that it accounts for a great deal, while others, such as Weinberger (2007), downplay its importance. These debates aside, this theme points to the growth of a deeply voluntarist model of content creation and knowledge aggregation.

At a basic level, many of the most interesting and significant developments in online collective action have been enabled by free and open source software creations. This provides a perfect example of the elective affinity between political values and technological tools. Wikipedia itself has become a political battleground, as supporters of candidates, causes, groups, movements, even regimes, engage in incessant "edit wars" over entries. Beyond this, the principle animates politics in a variety of arenas. The blogosphere has enabled ongoing citizen vigilance on a grand scale. Political actors and media elites now exist in an always-on environment in which it is impossible to escape the "little brother" surveillant gaze of citizen-reporters. From Flickr photostreams of marches and demonstrations ignored by the mainstream media to bloggers such as Connecticut Bob, who took to the streets with his home movie camera to film Senator Joseph Lieberman's off-the-cuff remarks in the 2006 US midterms, the media environment for politics has shifted.

The third principle of web 2.0 concerns the importance of data. The central claim here is that the web 2.0 era is characterized by the aggregation of huge amounts of information, and those who can successfully mine, refine and subsequently protect it are likely to emerge as dominant. Most of these data have been created from the concentrated labor of volunteers (Andrejevic, 2002) or they may simply be the by-products of countless, coincidental interactions. But the key point is that informational value emerges from the confluence of distributed user-generated content and its centralized exploitation.

When used as an analytical lens for internet politics, this principle points to the ongoing importance of long-standing controversies surrounding privacy, surveillance and the commercial and political use of personal information (Howard, 2006). The irony is that the celebrated freedom of political expression via self-publishing and the ease of connection facilitated in the social networking environments of web 2.0 also offer a multitude of possibilities for automated gathering, sorting and targeting. In the early days of the web political actors would often be heard complaining that they had "no control" over the online environment or that they did not know how to target particular groups or supporters (Stromer-Galley, 2000). The applications of web 2.0 arguably render these tasks much more manageable, as individuals willingly produce and reveal the most elaborate information about their tastes and preferences within enclosed, proprietary technological frameworks. In the realm of political campaigns, social networking sites thus offer many advantages over the open web. For governments seeking to filter or control internet content, the advantages are also plain.

The fourth theme is perpetual experimentalism in the public domain. As indicated above, the attraction of O'Reilly's model is that it captures literal, quite narrow developments in technological practice but it can also be used at a metaphorical level to capture social and political behavior. Web 2.0 applications have been characterized by an unusual amount of public experimentalism. This is most obviously illustrated by the "perpetually beta" status of many of the popular services. While this is a reflection of the requirements of building and testing scalable web applications on meager resources, it also reflects something of a value shift away from tightly managed development environments towards those characterized by fluidity and greater collaboration between developers and users.

This sense of democratic experimentalism has of course been one of the driving values of the internet since its earliest days (Chadwick, 2006: 38-48). But web 2.0 has seen it proliferate across a surprising range of political activities. Election campaigns in the United States are now characterized by obsessive and continuous recalibration in response to instant online polls, fundraising drives, comments lists on Youtube video pages, and blog and forum posts. But perhaps a better example of the impact of the permanent beta in politics is the British prime minister's e-petitions initiative, "launched" in November 2006. At the time of writing, the site remains in beta, and will probably do so for some time to come, or until it metamorphoses into another application. Adding the beta stamp to an e-government initiative at the heart of the executive machinery of one of the world's oldest liberal democracies tells us just how far the penetration of internet values and working practices has gone.

The next two web 2.0 themes – the creation of small scale forms of political engagement through consumerism and the propagation of political content across multiple applications - are more specialized but still reveal important aspects of the new politics. Many data cannot be sealed off from public use because it would be politically unacceptable, or a business model might depend upon open access. A celebrated aspect of web 2.0 is the mashing together of different data in pursuit of goals that differ from those originally intended. In political life, this practice often grants increased power to citizens. For example, British activist volunteer group MySociety have launched a number of sites, such as Theyworkforyou.org and Fixmystreet.org, that combine publicly accessible government data with user-generated input. Theyrule.net allows users to expose the social ties among political and economic elites by mapping out the network structures of the corporate boards of multinational firms. Meanwhile, mobile internet devices are increasingly important, again with a distinct user-generated inflection through practices such as video and photoblogging, as well as mainstream news organizations' increasing reliance on amateur "witness reporters" as Stanyer argues in this volume.

The final theme is rich user experiences on political websites. In the narrow technical sense this refers to the development of applications designed to run code inside a web browser in ways that facilitate interactivity and the rapid retrieval, alteration and storage of data. Most of the successful web 2.0 applications combine such capabilities with back end databases that store user generated content that can be modified by others. While valuable information is created by such actions, these are often not the result of heroic individual efforts but of aggregated small-scale, low-threshold forms of behavior: seemingly "happy accident" outcomes of thousands of individual interactions (Chadwick, 2007: 290). But these are not entirely accidental: many web 2.0 systems are deliberately designed to capture aggregated data from even the most minimal of user activities. This occurs on sites that encourage users to create original content but which also offer readers the chance to rate it. To take just a couple of examples, highly-rated pieces rise to the top of the recommended diaries feature on the Daily Kos home page, while MoveOn.org's Action Forum contains a similar mechanism for prioritizing issues.

Perhaps the most significant aspect of web 2.0 politics as rich user experience has emerged in the form of online video. The explosion of user-generated video content in 2005 took most commentators by surprise. Past predictions of media convergence generally argued that an abundance of bandwidth would make the internet a more televisual, large screen experience. There are developments in this area, with IPTV applications such as Joost and the BBC's iPlayer launching in 2007 on the basis of deals to stream large screen quality video across adapted peer-to-peer networks. However, the main event in online video to date is the user-generated site Youtube, initially an independent company established by two individuals, but acquired by Google in early 2007 for $1.65 billion. Youtube may eventually metamorphose into a fully converged large screen online "broadcasting" network, but the indications so far are that it will not. This is primarily because it has generated a huge regular user base that savors its small screen, DIY format.

In the political sphere, Youtube has made a sizeable dent in earlier predictions of the emergence of slick, professionalized televisual online campaigns able only to be resourced by wealthy candidates and their campaign teams (Margolis and Resnick, 2000). This is clearly wide of the mark when both political elites and citizens perceive that the visual genres of an effective Youtube video do not depend upon professional media production techniques. The cynical may decry the rise of Youtube political campaigning on the grounds that it is inauthentic "spin" based on manufactured folksy imagery. In the United Kingdom, the Conservative Party leader David Cameron was widely criticized by the mainstream media for this approach on his site Webcameron, launched in 2006. And yet the impressionistic evidence suggests that the method attracts members of the public, evidenced by 28,000 postings within five months of that forum's launch in May 2007 (Webcameron.org, 2007). And in important ways, each new digital technology that captures public attention quickly becomes politicized. YouTube has become one of the most popular online applications, essentially a tool for content distribution by political campaigns.

Technologies may possess inherent properties that shape and constrain political norms, rules and behavior, but these must be situated within political contexts (Chadwick, 2006: 17-21). The seven themes of web 2.0 discussed above are by no means exhaustive and only begin to provide analytical purchase on the huge changes currently underway in internet politics. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss web 2.0 as the creation of marketing and public relations. All of the chapters in this collection provide tools for making sense of the sometimes remarkable pace of these recent changes, yet they do so while also recognizing the continuities with the internet's earlier phases.

Note 

1. O'Reilly's original principles are: "the web as platform"; "harnessing collective intelligence"; "data is the next "Intel inside""; "the end of the software release cycle"; "lightweight programming models"; "software above the level of a single device"; and "rich user experiences". See O'Reilly, 2005.

References 

Anderson, K. (2006). The long tail: Why the future of business is selling less of more. New York: Hyperion.
Andrejevic, M. (2002). The work of being watched: Interactive media and the exploitation of self-disclosure. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 19(2), 230-248.
Chadwick, A. (2006). Internet politics: States, citizens, and new communication technologies. New York: Oxford University Press.
Chadwick, A. (2007). Digital network repertoires and organizational hybridity. Political Communication, 24(3), 283-301.
Hindman, M. (2005). The real lessons of Howard Dean: Reflections on the first digital campaign. Perspectives on Politics, 3(1), 121-128.
Howard, P. N. (2006). New media campaigns and the managed citizen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Margolis, M., & Resnick, D. (2000). Politics as usual: The cyberspace revolution. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
O'Reilly, T. (2005). What is web 2.0?: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. Retrieved November 12, 2007, from http://www.oreilly.com/lpt/a/6228
Stromer-Galley, J. (2000). Online interaction and why candidates avoid it. Journal of Communication, 50(4), 111-132.
Weber, S. (2004). The success of open source. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Weinberger, D. (2007). Everything is miscellaneous: The power of the new digital disorder. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

The politics of reconstruction

The devastation of the 600 year old gate building in Seoul, South Korea yesterday (left), has already led to plans for its reconstruction. Thoughts of rebuilding seem to have followed more swiftly than after the destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York City in 2001. Both disasters have political connotations, the WTC arguably symbolising liberal capitalism and US self-confidence, and the Great South Gate or Namdaemun in Seoul representing a national culture and historical resilience as the country and city faced various invasions over the centuries. Such moments of reconstruction alert us to the politics of architecture and how we use public space to comprehend and deal with our histories and conflicts.

By coincidence, I was reading a new article yesterday by Antoine Picon at Harvard*, who argues that 9/11 forced architects to reflect on the impermanence of their creations. Instead of a building as an end point or achievement, we could think of it as a site of endless re-building, as creations are built and destroyed as if on a loop. Each episode of building and of destruction will be defined by some conflict or political tension, whether the building or space is supposed to represent national glory or peaceful public assembly, and the war, conflict or catastrophe in which it is eventually destroyed. The hopes of modernist architects to create perfect, white spaces that would imbue twentieth century publics with moderation was foolish, thinks Picon.

The plans to rebuild Seoul’s Great South Gate or new towers at NYC’s ground zero (left) as if that would end the matter would suggest the application of a sealant to history, as if a loss felt must be quickly filled in and papered over. The implication of Picon’s argument is that the new buildings should instead be designed to acknowledge and make intelligible how architecture and politics are continuous, with foundations never finished but always ahead. But when devastation is tied so closely to injured national pride, this would be a hard sell.

* Picon, A. (2008) ‘Architecture and Public Space Between Reassurance and Threat’, Journal of Architectural Education, 61:3, pp. 6-12.

We're on Facebook!

 

The New Political Communication Unit now has a Facebook group. We'll use this to keep you up to date with things that are going on, events in the unit and generally to construct a network of friends and colleagues who are interested in our research and the areas we work in. The group also has a wall and open discussion forum, so anyone can throw in their thoughts. Please feel free to go and have a look, and join the group.

Quality paid for with exclusivity

Obviously, I'm reading a lot of stuff on the US elections at the moment. However, with the sheer breadth of stuff out there, it is possible to start to suffer from election fatigue - especially if you go beyond reading the columnists and start to look at the comments that many news providers now allow the general public to make on their websites. The problem is the whole flame war thing. It is horrendous. Really ugly. You have Obama supporters convinced that he is the second coming. You have Hillary supporters convinced he is a muslim. And the continual threat amongst both camps to vote for John McCain if their charge doesn't gets the nomination. That doesn't even mention both camps' attitude to the media (bias in every way, apparently). The whole thing is a manifestation of something that has been discovered again and again in research on the Internet - namely, given the chance to interact and debate with each other over politics, people don't achieve Athenian heights of deliberation; instead, the whole thing becomes more like an episode of Jerry Springer. In short, we have a loud mouthocracy.

So I was really thrilled to discover a thread of amazing quality at the New Republic this evening. The debate, from both sides, was generally really well argued. There were people who supported one candidate talking about their misgivings about their man or woman and respectfully making points about their opponents, and undecideds asking great questions and pushing those who declared a partisan allegiance. Wow! In fact, I was so inspired, I wanted to go and make my own comment*. But when I tried to set up an account with the TNR, I found this. In other words, if you want to be part of the conversation, you need to have paid for a print or online subscription to the paper. Only then will you get your password.

Well, I have to confess, my first reaction was one of outrage. What is the point of allowing comments if you are going to lock it down to such a degree that only a few people can be a part of it? Think of all the wisdom and ideas you are losing out on. And then, the penny dropped - this was the highest quality thread (in terms of the average comment and level of interaction) I had read over the whole course of the American election. It was also only open to a limited number of magazine subscribers. These two things were not unrelated. Not only is that quite thought provoking, but it raises a lot of important questions both about how we might run internet deliberation and what goals we should prioritise in doing so.

*If you wondering, my comment was going to be something like: "A lot of the comments on this board have come down to the fact that Obama's speeches tend to be about very ephemeral concepts (hope, change etc) and that he is not very specific about his policy aims (and even if details are on his website, he does little to advertise his ideas when he speaks). I would suggest these two things are not unrelated. Obama claims to reject partisan division and is casting himself as a post-ideological politician. That trick can be pulled off if you don't get too specific about policy. However, any kind of policy discussion would necessarily prove difficult and damage the coalition he is creating. I would also argue this issue explains his great electoral failing - namely, that he cannot reach out to people on low incomes. In order to do this, he would need to offer specific political positions that would help these groups. However, such policies would be the complete antithesis of the post-ideological identity he has created for himself.

Liveblogging Super Tuesday

Just a quick reminder that Nick Anstead will be liveblogging the Super Tuesday results tonight. Should be quite a night...

What does radicalisation mean?

In the UK over the past two or three years, the term radicalisation has appeared more often in public debates. But it seems to be one of those terms that get used without much thought, particularly in media reports about Islamist violence or simply political Islam. Radicalisation of youth, radicalisation in prisons, radicalisation on campuses, and radicalisation on the net – what does it mean? What exactly does it refer to? Does it always mean the same thing? Research at the NPCU is investigating how Jihadist violence is justified by perpetrators and supporters in various contexts. Such violence would appear to be lie at the end point of radicalisation processes. However, we also think the term itself needs some scrutiny. In this post I want to begin to ask what kind of concept it is.

The starting point for analysing political concepts is often ‘essential contestability’. (Skip this paragraph if you know what that means.) The concepts we use such as freedom, democracy, or radical are essentially or intrinsically contestable – their meaning disputable – at several levels. We can disagree on the internal features of a concept. Let us say democracy refers to rule by the demos and to the equal right to political participation among the demos. But to those features some people might add others, e.g. democracy features periodic moments for collective decision making (elections, referenda etc). So if we are talking about a democracy, and the latter isn’t evident, then we can argue about whether it’s really democracy we’re looking at. We can also disagree on how we judge the concept. Do we judge it against an exemplar or against an ideal, (“This democracy is not what the Athenians wanted”), or do we judge it pragmatically and contextually? And then a political concept can be essentially contested because of the ways we use it. We can use ‘democracy’ or ‘radical’ to score points against our opponent or to surprise and unsettle an opponent; the point is, concepts cannot be neutral since their meaning depends on how we use them. Note that essential contestability only applies to political concepts. It would be odd for the term ‘table’ to be used in an aggressive or surprising way, for instance. But the point is, we can unpick the various levels (features, evaluation, usage) upon which a concept has meaning, and how contestation arises at each level. Such conceptual analysis can then shed light on what people are doing with language in order to achieve their political goals.

A story on BBC News 24 last year on Islamist radicalisation in prisons referred to five features of 'extremism': extremist views, extremists’ training, extremist actions (buying bomb-making material), the extremist journey (migration/asylum, trips to Pakistan), and the extremist character (agitated, angry). The reporter was using it in a fairly decontextualised manner – Islamist extremism in prisons was not compared to far right or white supremacist extremism in prisons. The reporter presented it simply as an isolated problem to be condoned. Finally, a prison officer representative was interviewed. He used the term, and the implied problem, as a chance to ask for extra funding to provide prison officers with Arabic language lessons and training in understanding Islam. He also used extremism as a threat: if they can’t limit extremism inside, society will suffer problems outside. But we could hypothetically disagree with all of this: we could say extremism has other features, or we could judge it comparatively, or we could use the term less aggressively and not try to scare government into releasing more funds for prisons.

So radicalisation then. What are the features of radicalisation that differentiate to other processes? How does the way in which people are judging the term leading to disagreements in current political debates? And how does the way the term is used contribute to such disagreements? Witness media debates around Ed Hussain’s book The Islamist last year, or government appeals for the British public to alert authorities to evidence of radicalisation – what exactly do people mean by radicalisation? What if the term didn’t exist – would we have to invent it? Did it get mentioned much before the 7/7 bombings in 2005?

Future posts will return to this matter, but I’d welcome any comments on the origins, meanings and uses of the term ‘radicalisation’ in public debate in any country. This may begin to illuminate some of the politics of security, identity and terror we are witnessing.

My most ambitious blogging experiment... ever

  

I've been blogging now for more than two years, on my own blog and, more recently, here on the NPCU site. I guess it will be obvious that I really enjoy blogging. So I have decided to push the boundaries a bit and embark on my biggest blogging experiment yet - live blogging Super Tuesday next week.

Now we are for all purposes down to four candidates, Super Tuesday looks like it could be a hugely historic day, when either an African-American or a women will come closer to the Democratic nomination, and the Republicans move towards choosing either a Mormon or an old white guy (OK, a very old white guy). But more than that, it looks set to be a lot of fun, and since I'm going to be up all night watching and thinking about it, it seemed like it would be a good idea.

I recently discovered an absolutely wonderful web ap called CoveritLive (you can see my write up on it here). It allows for the creation of live blogs within other blogs - all you have to do is embed the code and use their interface to enter your thoughts. But you might ask, why would you want to listen to me? Hopefully that won't be all you'll get though - CoveritLive also allows for a high level of interactivity. For example, it has an instant comment button, so that readers can write a message. This then appears on the screen of the blogger, and they have the option of replying personally to the viewer, or displaing the comment on the blog. And that's the big thing that will make this even more fun, especially if we can get a bit of conversation going.

At the moment, I have the code embedded on my site only. I'm hoping to put it on here too, but our software is having a few issues with CoveritLive. But I will certainly be on my blog. So, if you are about next Tuesday night, do drop by and share your thoughts.

Update on 2008-02-03 21:09 by Nick Anstead

Keith from CoveritLive has very kindly got in touched and offered to help with the issues am having embedding the system into this post. I have embedded the code - and as you can see, it isn't really behaving itself. This is just so as the people at CoveritLive can see what the issue is. Hopefully, it will be fixed soon.

Update on 2008-02-03 22:44 by Nick Anstead

Fixed - I now have the right code for it to work on our site. So the liveblog shall be on here and at my own page. And how about that for service? The guys from CoveritLive actually came to me to ask if they could help, before I contacted them. So a huge thanks to both Keith and Bob, not just for great service but a brilliant web product.

Editorial policy at The Guardian

The Guardian's readers' editor has explained why the newspaper chose to use an 18-month old photo of Peter Hain to illustrate a story about Hain last week. The newspaper couldn't find an adequate photo of Hain looking 'under pressure' taken amid his deputy leadership financing fiasco. The readers' editor quote a Guardian colleague:


"As a rule, we prefer the news pages to use photographs which are contemporaneous to the events they describe. But if these are not available, I think file pictures can be legitimate if they help us communicate with the reader, and if they are relevant and not misleading."

There is a difference between communicating to the reader a sense of Hain under pressure by using an old photo, and communicating to the reader what Hain actually looked like amid the fiasco. In fact The Guardian could only find contemporary photos of him looking relaxed, but this didn't fit the story The Guardian along with other media chose to run with. Who is The Guardian to choose how Hain should look? This appears the thin end of the wedge in terms of accuracy in news reporting. As editors make decisions about what counts as representation, where would the limits lie? Clearly photos of UK troops under fire in Afghanistan in 1878 couldn't be used to 'communicate with the reader' the situation in 2008, but could photos of UK troops 'under fire' from the early stages of the 2003 Iraq War be used to illustrate UK troops under fire this week? Does this happen with other news organisations?