When Top-Down Meets Bottom-Up

Gordon Brown's exchanges with a woman from Rochdale today are emblematic of both the decline in faith in our institutions and the root cause.

While speaking with Ms Duffy, the Prime Minister focused entirely on making his own political points rather than listening to her issues, rationally expressed, including a parting compliment on local education. And his annoyed, off-camera reaction to her persistent attempts to get a word in edgewise was to mistakenly dismiss both her and her genuine concerns as "bigoted".

Ms Duffy's personal reaction to the Prime Minister's comment was "disgusted" and "upset". "They have no idea how we're living in this country," she said.

Already, the vicious cycle of public reaction has begun, taking the government, politics and politicians with it.

Photo from Plugin.com

Will The Social Media Save Old Media?

Interesting talk by Alan Rusbridger of the Guardian last night, hosted by Olswang as part of it's +Technology initiative. At last it seems the Web 2.0 sunlight is beginning to penetrate the gloom of the traditional media board rooms. They accept the unthinkable is now reality, as Clay Shirky would put it.

Whether it's all too late for newspaper publishers has occupied many conferences in the past year, the latest being the American Society of News Editors’ annual convention, where Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, seemed to promise a way to enable them to make money but was thin on the detail.

Alan's view of the Guardian's future rests on journalists' expertise in finding, aggregating, editing and opining on current affairs. The mistake newspapers have made to date is to presume they have a monopoly on the 'news' (now a freely available commodity) and must only deal in their own proprietary material rather than being a lens on all the relevant material in the world. Successfully lighting up Twitter with, say, the Trafigura affair (something that Private Eye missed an earlier opportunity to do), is only a glimpse of a brave new world. The Guardian now casts its net more widely for content, beyond its journalists, staff critics and commentators, and tries to foster discussion amongst the experts on topics of the day. Apparently it even offers the opportunity for regular thoughtful commentators on its stories and blog posts to 'graduate' to being paid to write stories.

Alan's thoughts echo those of a post by Ryan Sholin, Director of News Innovation at Publish2 on why newspapers should link to the rest of the social media (my edits):

"1. Bring your readers the best links related to your story, and they will thank you by coming back to your news site, which is no longer a dead end but a point of connection where they can find other interesting streams.

2. If all you provide your readers is flat content that doesn’t take them anywhere else on the Web, or back up statements with direct sources, or provide resources for those who want to explore a topic beyond what you’ve been able to provide with original reporting, you’re just shoveling text into another bucket, labeled “Web.” Your news site shouldn’t feel like an endpoint in the conversation. It should feel like the beginning.

3. Because it’s the best way to connect directly with the online community. If you mention a person or organization, link to them. Bonus points if you dig deep enough into the local online community to link to relevant content created by them. Sometimes they link back.

4. The days of your news organization existing as a monopolistic source of local information are over, and your readers know it. They browse local, national, international, and topical news and commentary in more places than you call “news.” But you’re the person in town who knows everyone who knows everyone. You’ve got the sources. Bring what they know to your readers as directly as possible: Link to them. David Cohn of Spot.Us offered up the now-classic Jeff Jarvis line: “Do what you do best, and link to the rest.”

5. By opening a two-way channel to let your readers tell you what you should link to next, you’ll cut down on the time you spend looking for that next thing... you’ll make it easier for sources who know the answers to your questions to find you, and you won’t spend as much time trying to find them."

All these thoughts resonate especially with me in my role as a member of the Society for Computers and Law media board. For nearly a decade I've witnessed firsthand the SCL's growing pains from magazine-only publisher, to web site publisher, to the operator of modest groups on Facebook and LinkedIn, to blogger, to budding member of the Twittersphere. Even now, the debate continues about how the Society should best participate in the social media in ways that will add value to the modest annual subscription, e.g. by supporting members' research activities, and running insightful events that also help meet lawyers' Continuing Professional Development requirements.

One thing seems assured: the social media, not newspapers, have shaped the future of journalism.

Photo from KPAO

Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway

As a lawyer, maybe I ought not to see risk as a positive force, but I do. If I did not, I would never have ridden a bicycle, horse or motorcycle, played rugby, scuba-dived, rowed, sailed, skied, driven vehicles, flown, or become involved with start-ups. Of course, I might never have fallen off, over, into, under or onto anything either. But the risk of falling - of failure - is actually what has made all these things FUN.

I'm actually not being facetious. Sir David Latham expressed his concern about overreaction to risk in the context of the furore over the 'early' release of prisoners, in light of the Venables case:

"I'm concerned that the society we're presently living in, is becoming too risk averse. That means that society is perhaps unrealistic about the level of risk it should be prepared to accept."

Boris Johnson made a similar point in his recent article on the plague of ski helmets:

"...there is something strange here, a mutation in the Zeitgeist. I reckon the helmet mania is more than just a question of fashion or a re-assessment of the medical risks of skiing. It’s a sign of the psychological state of the Western bourgeoisie in the grip of an economic crisis. They have seen what happened to the risk-taking bankers; they have seen how the sky fell in on the insouciant system of free-market capitalism; and so they literally cover their heads as an expression of the safety-first mentality that has seized us all."

Global concern about risk in the financial markets goes back along way. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision was created in 1974. Yet even after all those years of careful work, and several Basel Accords, the Committee has been unable to prevent numerous banking meltdowns and ultimately the Credit Crunch. This is why placing further constraints on the financial markets is unlikely to work, and why I advocate simplifying them and opening them up to everyone instead. People may look upon that as a might leap of faith, but I've witnessed firsthand the way Zopa, the person-to-person lending marketplace launched in 2005, has grown nice and steadily throughout a period when the 'traditional institutions' were the ones exploding with bad debt.

Even today, we're being hectored by mainstream media interests to avoid choosing a coalition government in the UK. To hell with them all, I say. Feel the fear and do it anyway. It'll be FUN.

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Tactical Voting: Hung Parliament?

People are asking about how they might vote 'for' a hung Parliament. Well Tactical Voting suggests the constituencies between which voters could swap their votes to help produce that result, and where you might go to discuss and arrange it. The 'Voting Buddies' group on Facebook is one example. Alternatively, you could go to Hang 'em to see if you're able to vote for a candidate they suggest.

Or you could vote for a minority party that has a shot of winning your seat, or whichever of the major parties the polls suggest will take second place.

Toby Young points to scepticism about the impact of tactical voting. But it will be interesting to see whether the Facebook, Twitter and the other social media help voters unleash its potential this time around.

Hung Parliament - More Pressure?

Many people would like to have rolled out the tumbrils for the UK Parliament in the past year, but a 'hung' Parliament is of course something quite different. And 38 Degrees is rightly running a poll to see if people want to hear more about the pro's instead of being heckled by The Sun and other mainstream media about the con's. I've said that I do.

Esentially, a hung parliament exists where no political party has a majority of seats. So either several parties agree a coalition and form a majority government, or a single party must form a minority government and horse-trade with the others on key issues. If neither works on critical issues, like budget approval, there would need to be another election.

The BBC has tried to explain it, but gets mired in speculation about numbers. A short Wikipedia entry has just been created. It links to the BBC explanation and a Q&A by the Institute for Government, an apparently politically neutral think-tank, which is also concerned about the unduly negative portrayal of hung parliaments in the media:

This has been reported quite negatively and has generated predictions that unstable and ineffective government would be the result.

However, as argued in 'Making Minority Government Work' by the Institute for Government and Constitution Unit, this need not be the case. Indeed, minority or coalition government can even have advantages, though ministers, the opposition, the civil service and the media would all have to adapt their behaviour to make it work.

This sounds promising. Basically, all politicians would have to behave much more reasonably and responsibly to try and forge consensus, and the media would have to refrain from senselessly branding the process as unstable and chaotic. After all, the democratic process should be messy rather than engineered from the top down in a nice orderly fashion. A dynamic, open system which encourages broad engagement by all stakeholders cannot realistically appear neat and linear.

I suspect that the biggest driver of the negative airplay - particularly at The Sun - is that Gordon Brown would remain PM, and would be the first to be invited to try and form a government. Given his record for clinging desperately to power to date, one does wonder whether we'd ever be rid of him.

However, while the fear and loathing of Swinegate has exposed Parliament to more public scrutiny and produced a little more accountability, it seems we have a long way to go in educating the politicians that citizens come first. And a hung Parliament seems a great way of keeping the pressure on.