The Web: enough already? - 2 comments

I'm getting increasingly irritated by articles attacking the political blogosphere (yes, blogosphere) - having covered the issue here already - online communities (e.g. Facebook), and user-generated content (e.g. the Wikipedia, and other Wikis).

Today's Observer has the latest: "Enough! The Briton who is challenging the web's endless cacophony":

Andrew Keen finds himself in the eye of a storm. The Briton, who made his living from the hi-tech boom in California's Silicon Valley, has dared to challenge the assumptions behind the internet revolution which began there and swept the world. America's massed army of bloggers do not like it one bit.

I've never heard of him, but he has a book out in June (what do you expect from a Sunday newspaper?), and appeals to authority (thanks, Wikipedia!) are just so tempting.

Keen, who still lives in California and works in technology, questions the euphoria surrounding the rise of citizen journalism, online communities such as MySpace and user-generated websites including online encyclopedia Wikipedia and video-sharing site YouTube.

First problem: he questions the euphoria. OK, I quite like the technologies mentioned, but I don't express euphoria, and have been easily able to avoid those journalists who promote it, so how about we agree to drop all mentions of euphoria and stick to how the sites are actually used, day-to-day?

Keen has been praised for applying the brakes to what seems to have become a runaway train: the idea that anyone can use technology to gain control of the media and change the world.

Runaway trains, massive influxes, rising tides... they're everywhere, nowadays.

On his own blog last week, Keen noted growing support for his views: 'It's game on. Now the fun begins.' Oliver Kamm, an author and columnist, has accused bloggers of 'poisoning debate'.

This is so, but Kamm's opener and response were cut to pieces by some of the best political bloggers around (e.g. here and here), and the remains danced-upon with hobnailed boots at Normblog:

Oliver picks me up at one point for comparing blog discussion with the public meeting, when his own comparative reference point is the press and broadcasting media; he's judging blogging as a form of citizen journalism. But blogging is sui generis. It may be like citizen journalism in some ways; yet blogs and their audiences can also be seen as micro-communities of bloggers, readers and discussants, virtual segments of the public square in which voluntarily formed collectives, with participants free to come and go, consider issues that they want to consider. What can 'overproduction of opinion' mean in this context? Should all these people stop writing and reading and commenting unless they have been certified as competent? The complaint of overproduction of opinion doesn't sit well with the theme of freedom of opinion, or with the rights of members of a democratic society to assemble as they wish for legitimate common purposes.

And no one is forced to be a consumer.

As no response has appeared, I consider that to be the end of that particular debate.

Keen's interview continues:

As the internet grows, so do reports of faked identities and stalking on social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, deliberately misleading entries on Wikipedia, virtual vandalism in online world Second Life and accusations that YouTube is a forum for either copyright infringement or mind-numbing videos of skateboarding cats. Critics believe the trends may have reached their logical, horrific conclusion last month when Kevin Whitrick, a father-of-two from Shropshire, hanged himself in front of his webcam watched live by members of an internet chatroom.

Sensationalist drivel. Anyone old enough to have been internet-savvy ten years ago - or longer - will recognise the same themes, and the same scaremongering. Everything listed above could have - and has been - done before online, albeit in perhaps a cruder and less visually exciting form. All that's changed is that a journalist has decided to spin things the other way for a change: perhaps someone with a book to promote, or an identity to find.

Keen, 47, presents a dystopian vision in which people endlessly Google themselves and expertise counts for nothing; online communities gather merely to confirm their own prejudices; internet television purports to showcase amateur talent but is dominated by corporate marketing; newspapers are driven to the wall by online advertising and news sites edited at the whimsical click of a mouse; and knowledge of history and literature becomes smothered by an avalanche of blogs from self-obsessed teenagers.

I wonder if it's significant that Keen's age makes its first appearance here, in what could so easily be a rant about "the state of modern music". Ultimately it shows a detachment with the human race: an assumption that the masses click "whimsically", and that the deep appreciation of history and literature developed during their school years will dissipate as they helplessly click from one teenager's blog to another, imbibing the self-obsessedness of each.

Maybe Keen would like to differentiate between the Bloggers4Labour Facebook group and a real-life Labour branch, because if he can spot some kind of essential difference, I can't. Perhaps one the one hand we both "confirm our own prejudices". On the other, perhaps we talk about things and change our minds, in a rather human way, and would swiftly tire and go elsewhere if we couldn't. It's a thought, isn't it?

He continued: 'I'm nostalgic for the world I grew up in where there was a clear distinction between author and audience. I'm not attracted or impressed by the idea of collapsing that distinction. It's hard to be good at what you're doing, it requires expertise. In the same way that not everyone should be doctors or teachers or astronauts, not everyone should be an author. Most people do not have anything interesting to say.'

Well, we have technical qualifications so that people who fancy having a go at being a doctor can be assessed on their competency before killing their first patient, but except insofar as other members of the public put themselves in their hands, people should try different jobs and roles in order that they can be publicly assessed on their competency. Writing - in a democratic, pluralist society - is a public good. It should be encouraged, and anyone arrogant enough to say that "most people do not have anything interesting to say" should try living in solitary confinement for a week or so.

Blogging provides an easy way for anyone to publish their ideas, and just as easy a way for people to judge them. Anyone concerned that those with talent and expertise are failing to get the attention they deserve should consider the huge head, and enormously long tail that blog traffic demonstrates.

Keen criticises Web 2.0 sites such as Wikipedia for making it impossible to discern the important from the trivial. 'Wikipedia is going to become the internet,' he said. 'It does away with the distinction between the distinguished and the ordinary and becomes a bizarre compendium of information. The absence of editors means there's no way of determining whether something is important, so you get a longer entry for Pamela Anderson than Emmeline Pankhurst. I want to learn about Martin Luther's epiphany, not the epiphany of the 11-year-old who blogs next door.

What kind of person judges the importance of an article based upon its size, or popularity? Anyone who reads the Pankhurst article will quickly realise she was a key figure in the struggle for the enfranchisement of women - a matter of concern across the world - and be directed to articles that will allow them to continue their research. Anyone happening upon the Pamela Anderson article will realise that she has played, at best, a bit-part in the major struggles of the past century, and has limited relevance to the downtrodden of the Earth, if that's how you judge "importance". Encyclopaedias cannot teach you what is important: you have to bring that with you, and if you don't have a clue, you can hardly blame the Web for taking you off down blind alleys.

As far as I'm concerned, the Web is sufficiently large, diverse, and democratic to meet the objections of Keen and others. People are smart enough to ration their own intake of trivia and escapism; curious and intelligent enough not to accept everything they read as fact; sufficiently averse to online abuse to try to push it off their own sites and contain it elsewhere; while editors who manage repositories of information are generally sensible enough to preserve its honesty and integrity. Until someone can show me that these are not generally true on the Web (or significantly less true there than off-line), I'm going to continue trying to make the most of all these new opportunities.

Update (30/04): Yasmin Alibhai-Brown also has a pop at the blogosphere (via The Daily Ablution). You can probably imagine all too well how it goes, and sure enough, it takes Keen's piece and adds the hysteria of a Daily Mail reader who hears a crash and finds an asylum-seeker's football in their kitchen sink. It's completely and utterly awful.

Auto-login / B4L Customisation - 1 comment

Anyone with an account on this site - that is to say, a login, that gives them the ability to subscribe to a newsletter, and use our widgets on their own sites - will soon be able to take advantage of new facilities that will make Bloggers4Labour more useful and customisable: for example, the ability to say that they'd rather 5 recent posts appeared on our front page, rather than the long-standing 3 - or indeed none at all.

Basically, meaningful user preferences will exist for the first time. All you'll need to do is set up an account if you haven't already, then log in once. The cookie we send you will keep you logged-in for a year. Sure, I will gain the ability to steal your credit card records, take out mortagages in your name, and watch you through your webcam, just like in Sandra Bullock's The Net, but most importantly, you won't have to re-login every 30 minutes whenever you, say, want to add a blog post to a B4L-managed clip-blog, or maintain your personal favourites/links list, hint, hint.

As an aide-mémoire, a new box with a (currently) grey border will now appear in your B4L sidebar. Please click the link to log in if you aren't already, because the more people who do, the more it's worth my while to customise the site according to your preferences.

By the way, if you have any ideas for customisation, please let me know, or come along to the meeting on Monday.

Update: I'm afraid I clumsily broke some pages in the process - these were all fixed by approximately 3.10 pm today.

Volunteers, and Participation Inequality - 3 comments

I'm on the lookout for volunteer organisers from among Labour bloggers. The target is for, perhaps, a dozen of you to give up some of your free time on a regular basis to develop our network, and boost political blogging (contra this).

What's in it for you...

• Being an active part of an organisation.
• The chance to arrange meet-ups with other bloggers.
• Incentives to succeed: the more effective you are, the more interesting life will be: more social events, better links with the political community where you are, and so on.
• A small symbol of your status is available - from central funds (i.e. my pocket).

If you don't read Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox newsletter on Web usability, you should look in from time to time. This edition, from October 2006, concerns inequalities among online groups:

All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don't participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background.

In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity. [...]

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule: 90% of users are lurkers [...]; 9% of users contribute from time to time [...]; 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions:

Jakob speculates that this situation could be improved to 80-16-4. Perhaps - it would be great: one advantage of decentralising is that it increases the chances of someone finding that key and passing the knowledge back.

My expectations of volunteers...

• You must have a vision in mind of how blogging can help the Labour Party, help society, and make for a healthier political culture.
• You should invest some of your own time, or hand over to someone who will - it's the only way. However, you'll be completely free to say how much time, and when. You'll be your own boss, in other words.
  
• You should build links with Labour bloggers in your area and make the case for (ethical and thoughtful, ideally) political blogging. You should also encourage party members you know - plus potential members and other supporters, and especially councillors and other elected members - to give blogging a try.
• As social events will help here, you should arrange and promote these (perhaps quarterly), or else add a segment to existing party meetings, perhaps getting together before or after the main feature.
• Our network can do more when we have regular, and decentralised funding: so you should encourage donations.
• You should report on progress using the forum, as and when necessary.
  

These are all things I try to do, and perhaps should do more, but I cannot hope to adequately cover the entire UK. It won't work, and (arguably) it hasn't worked. Anyone who knows me well must realise that it's only a matter of time before I go under a bus, whether on Borough High Street, or Church Road, Hove. I don't want to sound egotistical, but who would take the lead then? The least I can do is decentralise to others, and help get them up and running. The alternative is that many of these fine ambitions will not be realised, and we'll be sitting around in two years wondering why not, spending our Friday afternoons checking Bloglines, or setting up Facebook groups and websites to try to bind together something long since dissolved.

In some ways this is a problem of economics that I'm hoping to solve in a non-financial way, by encouraging "public spiritedness", rather than individualism.

"Territories"...

I would like each organiser to cover a particular region; a county; or perhaps even a city, when Labour bloggers has a strong presence there (e.g. Manchester, Oxford, London, Brighton & Hove, perhaps), and make it their own. I don't think sharing an area would work. Alternatively, a volunteer could take on the role of building links with a Labour (or allied) party from another country (e.g. Australia, Ireland).

In summary, if you're interested in becoming a volunteer organiser, or helping out in other ways, simply get in touch, or post on the forum.

Update (05/04): Nobody at all interested??

Power Bloggers II: a response - 7 comments

Fellow B4L-er Mike Ion has posted enthusiastically at Comment Is Free on the subject of political blogging, citing the extent of these bloggers' influence, and suggesting Labour's upcoming deputy leadership campaign indicates that Labour politicians are beginning to use blogging to engage ('meaningfully', no less) with potential supporters. You might be surprised to find that my assessments differ almost completely with Mike's. That's not pessimism on my part, I'm just optimistic about what can be achieved, and realistic about the value of what there is now.

I must say that if I was tasked with defending and promoting blogging, I wouldn't introduce well-known right-wing gossip blogs (with which you're already familiar) so soon into the conversation, not even to indicate the level of 'influence' bloggers have, nor would I substitute online media pundits for off-line ones by introducing ConservativeHome's Tim Montgomerie as a a "respected and influential commentator". Still, if blogging influence is to be measured by being given the opportunity to appear on Sky News at 2 am and read blogland title-tattle to a fuddled news anchorman in order to pretend one has important information the dead trees don't, then I'm happy to plough my lonely furrow - or rather, we are.

Debate is all well and good, but what this article doesn't address is (slightly going back to my "2020 Vision" points): how are arguments actually won online? How do you change minds? How can you bring the power of your argument to bear on a policy-maker? How does a politician actually assimilate 'feedback' in the real world, when talk is cheap, and voters can be strategic rather than honest? Blogging, as it stands, doesn't represent the slightest step towards a more participatory democracy: whatever progress has been made towards a more 'reasoned debate', the absence of any direct responsibility between on-line politician and blog-reading voter, and the limitations of the current blogging model - where politicians post and then respond to reader comments in the hope/belief that they are a guide to public opinion - just frustrate policy-making. Moreover the noise and anger of the most vocal political bloggers has fostered - so often - a poisonous atmosphere that prevents co-operation between people with different political views. This seems to be prevalent even among politicians as close to the electorate as local councillors - particularly so, from my experience, especially when Liberal Democrats are involved.

There have been some happy consequences of the upsurge in Labour-oriented blogging caused by the deputy leadership campaign. Activists from all sections of the party have clearly felt there is an opportunity to get their message across (at least, those with a matching candidate). It has also encouraged on-line community-building, with large Labour groups now developing on FaceBook. Best of all, activists are brought closer into the online Labour fold, as can be seen at Bloggers4Labour.

Nonetheless each glitzy deputy leadership themed blog site that appears represents tens of hours of some young designer's time that can't be transferred either to the wider movement, or to the delivery of policies. There's little evidence from around the sites of any great attempt to involve people online more substantially than the same old "post and comment" model, and I'm not at all convinced that the candidates, if polled, would honestly admit they knew what blogging was really about. Take away the RSS feeds and too often one is still looking at a "poster" site, packed with photographs, extracts from speeches delivered elsewhere, endorsements from "the great and the good", and destined to disappear or gather dust if the candidate fails to win through.

What this creates is a ghostly impersonality, when what would surely appeal more to voters is a feeling that a politician 'inhabits' the site, is watching and listening, is ready to respond honestly and frankly to questions and comments, and that the voice that responds really is that of the named politician, not that of a young acolyte. I don't want to discourage politicians from blogging, but when Mike refers it as being a "simple, efficient and effective means of engaging with [...] supporters", I think that misses the point of, and the seriousness of, the challenge - as well as being short of substantive evidence. The fact that supporters no longer need to fear email newsletters is a small prize indeed.

Blogging is a fine and worthy thing if you have a story to tell, want to explore ideas, resolve issues, crush bad arguments, and create links with other human-beings, but "politician blogging" is still in the Dark Ages. As is the 'new technology' that Mike cites (hand-coded HTML and messed-up templates in 2007?). Perhaps only when the 'web' of the future is unrecognisable, keyboards pensioned-off, and Blogger.com long-forgotten, will ordinary people be able to fully engage in an online democracy. I don't know (to use another predictable historical reference) what the "Great Leap Forward" is going to be, or how we're really going to make this democratic vision work and re-engage a disillusioned electorate, but (a) there has to be that leap, (b) YouTube clips sure as hell isn't it, (c) whatever it is, Nick Robinson will be telling us about "the mood amongst backbenchers" instead, while (d) Bloggers4Labour is as keen - on your behalf - as anyone to make it happen. We can almost touch it.

Aside: I notice Iain Dale has picked up on Mike's post. Read the comments, if you like your generalisations about "writers on the left since Orwell" broad and sweeping. And stupid. There are some nice touches from the left, though.

Update: Some sites I could have mentioned favourably: the serious-minded Ministerial blogs (David Miliband; the DWP's Pensions Reform, and Welfare Reform blogs), and My Society. Over to you, now.