Insignificant Text
For most, the tinkle of a text message arriving in their pocket will be a kindly note from a friend or lover, letting them know where the party’s at, or that you must remember to pick up some star anise for that Blumenthalian delicacy you promised you would prepare. However, you’ll be glad to hear, text messaging is also being put to use in far more novel ways, particularly in parts of the world with no access to the web.
Leapfrogging
The advantages of GSM (mobile phone) networks are clear for developing countries where no tradditonal telephony exists. Telecoms companies are able to ‘leapfrog’ the hard task of building physical networks over large areas, and concentrate their efforts on providing wireless coverage. So while we have a huge increase in services available online in developed countries, similar services are being made available to the in the developing world through text messages.
The Economist reported last week that the old example of ‘ an Indian fisherman calling different ports from his boat to get a better price for his catch’ no longer goes far enough, and provides details of payments and banking systems now in operation, conducted by SMS, in different parts of the developing world.
While of course many see the uses that SMS is being put to as an indicator of a possible explosion of services when more advanced mobile data systems become available to those who previously had no web access, it’s crucial to remember it is the very cheapness, availability and accessibility of this technology which is driving its popularity.
Oh, and if you’re wondering how exactly a fisherman can use his mobile so far away from a phone mast, take a look at these ’999 with Michael Burke’ style stories of SMS survival at sea and in the air.
New article: The 2008 Digital Campaign in the United States: The Real Lesson for British Parties
Nick Anstead and I have just published an article "The 2008 Digital Campaign in the United States: The Real Lesson for British Parties" in a special double issue of the journal Renewal. The issue is timed to coincide with the Labour Party conference, which takes place next week. It contains a range of interesting papers.
Here's an excerpt from our conclusion, followed by the editors' description of the volume.
"Our analysis leads to an important conclusion for British politicians seeking to harness the power of the internet.
While it is certainly the case that British parties and candidates can learn something from the United States, precisely how they should measure their success in so doing is far from straightforward. The challenge is as much one of institutional design as it is about the adoption of the latest technology: how do we reform British politics to set free the full democratic potential of the internet? This is a long term project, but it could lead to huge rewards. Many of the issues identified in this article as significant are now frequently debated in the UK: democratising party organisations, forging links between parties and broader citizen campaigns, reforming campaign finance laws, and entrenching a culture of constitutional pluralism, to name but a few. It is now imperative that the relationship between political institutions and technology is considered in these debates.
The real lesson of Obama 2008 is that British parties need to approach this issue from two complementary perspectives. They should design their online campaigns so that they mesh with the aspects of their organisational structures and Britain’s electoral environment that they value and wish to maintain. But they should consider simultaneously how they might democratise their organisational structures and the electoral environment in ways likely to catalyse internet-enabled civic engagement."
RENEWAL Vol 16 No 3/4
A special double issue for autumn 2008 offers essential reading on the present economic, political, environmental, social, and ideological crisis. And it points to the new ideas, initiatives and alliances that could contain the right's revival and renew progressive politics.
With contributions from ADAM LENT on the excesses of the City and the crisis of civility ... MATTHEW WATSON on Gordon Brown's choice of intellectual hero... GRAHAM TURNER on the credit crunch as the consequence of unequal globalisation ... JOHN HOUGHTON on the failure of the market to deliver affordable and sustainable housing ... WILL DAVIES on the limits of New Labour's expertise ... SUNDER KATWALA on the need for a new pluralism ... JON CRUDDAS on reclaiming aspiration ... ANDREW SIMMS on the prospects for a green New Deal ... ROBIN WILSON on social democratic solutions to today's global challenges ... DAVID LAMMY on what we can learn from the US elections ... NICK ANSTEAD AND ANDREW CHADWICK on online campaigning ... DEBORAH LITTMAN on building grassroots movements ... KARMA NABULSI on mobilising to reanimate political institutions ...
PLUS.
a major essay by STUART WHITE on the economic thought of Andrew Glyn...
Notebook: LEN DUVALL on Tory London; and GIDEON RACHMAN on McCain vs Obama...
...and reviews by COLIN CROUCH on 'bad capitalism'; PAUL SEGAL on the causes of global poverty; and BEN JACKSON on the return of American liberalism
RENEWAL 16.3/4 is being sent out to subscribers now and can be ordered online from http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals.html
--
RENEWAL
Email info@renewal.org.uk
Website http://www.renewal.org.uk
Great Powers after the Bush Presidency: workshop on geopolitical narratives
Ben O’Loughlin, Alister Miskimmon (RHUL), and Andreas Antoniades (Sussex) have been awarded a Catalytic Workshop Grant of $5,000 by the International Studies Association to hold a workshop on the theme, ‘Great Powers after the Bush Presidency: Interests, Strategies and Narratives’. The workshop will take place on 14 February 2009 in New York City prior to the ISA Annual Convention.
The workshop begins an investigation of how leading world powers pursue interests in the world through the use of narrative strategies. Great powers have always gained internal and external utility from the strategic projection of national narratives. But two trends warrant a renewed focus on such strategies. First, the long-term rise of emerging powers to challenge US pre-eminence will entail narrative ‘work’ on their part, both domestically and internationally, as they each adapt to new power balances. Second, a transformed communications environment means narrative strategies must account for an extended global media ‘menu’ of channels and the unpredictable presence of dispersed, participatory media which can undermine strategic narratives. By examining how major powers project their narratives around key events through the discussion of a series of case studies, this workshop offers the starting-point for an empirically-led re-assessment of theories and approaches to analyzing the intersection of interests, strategies and narratives, to explain the forces shaping Great Power politics at the beginning of the 21st century.
Agreed participants include David Dunn (Birmingham, UK), Andrei Tysgankov (San Francisco State), Geoffrey Roberts (Cork), Laura Roselle (Elon), Kathy Fitzpatrick (Quinnipiac), Vivien Schmidt (Boston), Philip Seib (Annenberg USC), Ted Hopf (Ohio State), Hongying Wang (Syracuse), and Adrian Hyde-Price (Bath). There is also funding for a Young Scholar, to be recruited through open competition later this year.
What does radicalisation mean, part II: grooming?
Why do UK media reports on ‘radicalisation’ now include the term ‘grooming’? The latter term has migrated from stories about paedophiles to stories about ‘indoctrinating the vulnerable young’ to commit acts of violence. On what basis can we conflate paedophilia with terrorism? What the two have in common is a medium – the internet – and that both are considered crimes that are inexplicable or ‘beyond the pale’, so to speak, and associated with evil. The implicit suggestion of such media reporting is that the Internet appears responsible for enabling evil to diffuse through society. Its connectivity makes evil ever-present, proximate, only-a-click-away. Parents and government cannot control the internet. So society cannot protect its most vulnerable. Society is internally corrupted, because of the medium of the internet.
Such vague language from journalists and indeed politicians reflects the continued lack of an evidence-based understanding of radicalisation. If the phenomenon was understood, a clear definition could be used. Without a clear definition, media must piece together their own ‘picture’, so images of ‘Arabic-looking men paintballing’ or ‘handing out leaflets outside a mosque’ come to signify ‘radicalisation’. This often arbitrary and unsubstantiated picture can do little more than stigmatise more individuals in the UK, and perhaps even lead to their alienation and, ultimately, violence.
Becoming Digital
This week and next are pretty significant for the Department of Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway. On August 29 the Department and its three research centres move from their current location on the first floor of the Arts Building to a suite of offices in the College's Founders Building (the fancy big red one in all of the photos).
This is good news for all kinds of reasons. We are expanding, and there are simply not enough rooms in our current location to cope. Our new accommodation provides us with a bit more room for PhD students, a good sized administrative hub, and an academic common room. We also get to hang out in what is arguably the finest university building in the whole of the United Kingdom (Oxford and Cambridge have fine buildings, but none to match the sheer scale and majesty of Founders, though I admit it is not to everybody's taste).
Over the last couple of weeks, staff have been busy packing boxes and attaching sticky labels to things in anticipation of the big day. Many of us have taken the opportunity to chuck out some of the detritus that inevitably gathers over time. Academics are notorious hoarders. "When in doubt, keep it" is our motto, often in the vague hope that some old History and English Literature A-level revision notes (guilty) or a pile of prospectuses from 2001 (guilty again) might one day come in useful. I even found a form letter from 1989 (when I was 18), from none other than Neil Kinnock, then leader of the Labour Party, welcoming me as a member. For some unknown reason it was nestling within those A-level revision notes.
As I wandered up and down the corridor last week, I witnessed quite a few rueful smiles as colleagues landed upon dog-eared postcards, yellowing newspaper clippings, long-forgotten publishers' rejections, proudly retained student thank-you letters, obscure journal article offprints, and miscellaneous electronic artifacts, such as a Sony digital camera from the mid-1990s that actually stored images on 3.5" floppy disks. One colleague bitterly described how he had taken the momentous decision to give away - to a library in Zimbabwe - thousands of pounds' worth of legal documents dating back forty years, such was his desire to purge.
The laxative effect of the Department's move has sparked several discussions of scholarly practices in these digital times. What, and where, is the "archive", even in a personal sense, these days? I have about 3000 PDF documents on my hard disk, mostly journal articles and conference papers that I've gathered over the last five years. All of my published work, apart from a few book reviews, is stored in various file formats on the same disk. These are instantly searchable, indexed by Copernic, my desktop search engine. Sometimes I have to ferret around in directories and subdirectories to find something, but this usually doesn't take too long. The convenience is amazing. Contrast this with the eight box files of photocopies, scraps of notes, none of them searchable, that provided the raw materials for my PhD thesis, published as my first book.
But while we gain convenience we lose permanence. The dusty piles of documents, the bottom drawers of filing cabinets, even those individually-labelled floppy disks, have a fixity about them. Adobe's PDF is a standard and has been around an eon in "internet time", but will it be the same in a decade? Will I be able to read the files? Will I have lost the lot in a catastrophic hard disk crash? Don't even mention Microsoft Word, a programme that has been through several well-meaning, though irritating, file format changes in only the last few years (".docx", anyone?).
In thirty years' time, will somebody going through the office of a scholar who started out in the late 1990s be able to construct a reasonable narrative of their life's work? I doubt it. And even if they could, it would not look at all like it would have done in the pre-digital era. In days gone by, retiring professors would often deposit their "papers" with their university library, the idea being that their judgment over what to hoard had some intrinsic value worth passing on to future generations. What would "papers" even mean these days?
Librarians have pondered the problem of the digital era archive for more than a decade, but my sense is that we are still massively underprepared for what lies ahead.
Those A level revision notes and PhD box files went to the recycling plant last Thursday. They are gone forever. It felt good. And the 19 year old letter from Neil Kinnock? Sitting safely in a folder waiting to be transported to room FW114, of course.
Number 10 goes blogtastic with WordPress
Number 10 have just launched their new website and it is quite an interesting beast to say the least. It is not only powered by WordPress, but also uses a tweaked free theme (according to a commentor on Gudio Fawkes) called Network-10. On top of that it is full integrated with Flickr, Twitter and YouTube. The Twitter stream is particularly impressive, as the team running the website seem very keen to use Twitter's messaging functionality, used by inserting @DowningStreet into your own tweets, to interact directly with people (I've just sent them a tweet linking to this blog post and asking a question. Let's see if they reply).
Obviously there is a huge difference between using technology and getting it. Thus far the track record of British politicians has not been especially good. But, given its use of open source software and integration with free web services, this is a pretty bold attempt. Only time will tell how it works out.
My favourite story of the day
According to the BBC, an Island community of Monks get hacked off with dial up, so upgrade to broadband. According to Father Daniel:
"Patience is one of the characteristics of monastic life, but even the patience of the Brothers was being tested by our slow internet".Best of all is the reason the Monks need a faster link-up. They are engaged in e-commerce, selling handmade candels and sweets. The Internet is impacting people in the most unlikely circumstances.
Ghosts
What happens when material posted online such as self-made videos and blogs becomes the material of a dead person? In Speaking into the Air, John Durham Peters writes, ‘Our bodies know fatigue and finitude, but our effigies, once recorded, can circulate through media systems indefinitely, across wastes of space and time’. The words, images and voices of those not just distant but departed can reach us. A certain percentage of soldiers’ emails or blogs (milblogs) will be written by individuals who, by the time you read their words, are dead. Their presence endures. A YouTube video posted by a soldier who has died since the posting seems to be in limbo, their voices and appearance suspended in time. You can see and hear them. You can even appropriate their content, mash up their video into something new, “steal” their apparition, re-invigorating them as you see fit. How do we deal with the ethical problems this creates? Who is to decide how such material is used? Can anybody know how the original personality of the soldier intended their communications to be used? When it comes to using their material, can the dead hold us to account?
No doubt a coincidence, but my Ghosts post last week has been followed by a piece in The Guardian yesterday about social network sites' (lack of) policies for dealing with the deaths of users and what to do with their profiles. It closes with a quote from Bill Washburn of OpenID suggesting a high profile case may be needed to enable us to work through these issues of privacy, dignity and so on.
Crack legal minds
I was passing through Waterloo station today, a couple of hours of after the verdict in the big Max Mosley / News of the World court case. The Evening Standard billboard was so inspired that I had to snap it with my phone. It should be remembered that Justice Eady, who was presiding, said in his ruling: “I found that there was no evidence that the gathering on 28 March 2008 was intended to be an enactment of Nazi behaviour or adoption of any of its attitudes.”
The very clever legal minds at the Evening Standard though turned their laser like intellect onto the issue and quickly found a way around it however.