Internet and democracy: all articles

An OurKingdom conversation [History: Jeremy Gilbert > Rosemary Bechler > this post > Rosemary Bechler (part one; part two) > Jeremy Gilbert]

Tom Griffin (London, OK): The first edition of the Carnival on Modern Liberty, compiled, by James Graham, is now up at Liberal Conspiracy. It covers a very busy week which includes the Obama inauguration, the Government's u-turn over Freedom of Information and the launch of the Guardian's Liberty Central.

Next week's blog carnival will be hosted here on OurKingdom. If you would like your article to get a mention, you can submit it via this page.

 

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Two key figures from Barack Obama's election campaign visited London last week, offering advice for progressives about what they can learn from Obama's successful use of new media on the road to the US Presidency.

The prospect that Labour might replicate Obama's formula has been greeted with scepticism both by those, like Guido Fawkes, who have contributed to the right's perceived ascendancy in the British blogosphere, and those like Sunny Hundal, who are contesting that dominance.

Tom Griffin (London, OK): As the Guardian 's Michael White notes, the leak of the BNP's membership database raises many of the same issues as recent losses of personal data by the Government. If anything, it has provided a much more dramatic illustration of the potential impact on individuals.

The episode has also proven to be a true 'wikileak', in the sense that it has highlighted the power of Web 2.0, with a Google Map of the data briefly appearing before its creator decided to take it down in favour of a somewhat less informative heatmap.

openDemocracy's own Tony Curzon-Price has produced an analysis of the titles of individual BNP members which provides an interesting social snapshot of the party:

Number of BNP members by Title

Mr    11688
Ms    556
Mrs    1419
Miss    410
Prof    1
Rev    5
Sir    1
Cllr    74
Capt    2

 

Clare Coatman (London, oD): I am working on a Convention on Modern Liberty (announcement forthcoming) and I came across a very interesting Google map displaying a selection of infringements of human rights and civil liberties ranging from the worrying to the bizarre. Watch out for stories near you!

Guy Aitchison (London, OK): The battle for privacy in the digital age is being fought on many fronts (a point last night's seminar on the database state - reported on below by Tom Griffin - made abundantly clear). Some of these battles are being fought more publicly than others. I've been aware of Jacqui Smith's Orwellian plans to permanently store the whole population's electronic communications, including browsing history, in a huge central database since the summer thanks to No2ID flagging up the plans here on OK. But only today was I made aware of Phorm, a sinister new behavioural tracking technology currently being trialled by the country's biggest Internet Service Provider, BT.

Phorm is the subject of a must-read exchange between Peter Bazalgette, formerly of Endemol, the producers of Big Brother (yes, the headlines write themselves), and Becky Hogge of the Open Rights Group. In a speech at the LSE (published this month by Prospect - excert in the FT), Bazalgette argues that by campaigning against Phorm, and other technologies which capture web browsing habits for the purposes of advertising, privacy groups like the ORG are helping to prevent the full economic potential of the web from being realized:

Guy Aitchison (London, OK): This little nugget from the latest NO2ID email:

A website launched by the government in July to find out what 16-25 year olds think of the national ID scheme has been closed. Visitors to the site are now greeted by the message "Site off-line: The mylifemyid community has now finished. Many thanks for your contribution. We will post a notification here when the report is published". Most of the comments posted on the site, that cost £76,249 to set up and maintain, were against ID cards and the National Identity Register so it will be interesting to see the promised report...

What I love most about this is the name the Home Office bods (or whichever private consultancy firm the 76k went to) came up with to try and make ID cards appealing to people of my age group. You can just imagine them - "The yoof love MySpace don't they? How about calling it 'mylifemyid'?"...only to be swamped by a tsunami of hostile comment, most of which was probably unpublishable. Makes yer proud, doesn't it?  

Celia Hannon (London, Demos): In April 2007 charlieissocoollike, a 16 year-old vlogger from Bath joined YouTube. So did the British Prime Minister. Since then Charlie has amassed 70,000 subscribers. The Prime Minister has 5,000. These figures betray a very naked truth - young people are not flocking to listen to their presidents and Prime Ministers when they talk to them via internet videos. Instead, they are seizing power for themselves; taking on roles as reporters, distributors, commentators and artists. It seems that while their parents and grandparents won their freedoms by challenging governments, this generation of young people would rather find their ‘route-around’ existing institutions and forms of media.

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Three young British Muslims convicted on terrorism charges this week, possessed the "biggest computer library of extremist material ever seized by British police," The Guardian reports.

Over at our sister-blog terrorism.openDemocracy, Tim Stevens examines the resulting focus on the internet as a conduit for radicalisation:

As the British government seeks to strengthen its stance on stamping out home-grown terrorism, it has zeroed in on the internet as a target for regulation and interdiction. Such an approach suggests both a misunderstanding of the internet itself and of the role that online behaviour plays in radicalisation and, ultimately, the creation of dangerously violent individuals. Wrong moves against wrong targets will eventually prove counter-productive.

Happy Man: Well, gosh, the Prime Minister has wised up to the tiny amount of UK residents who know what twitter is, and has launched number10.gov.uk, the official website of the Prme Ministers office. Or, as it was apparently billed for a while:

“10 Downing Street website, the official website of the British Prime Minister Tony Blair”

Oh dear. That link, by the way, from Dizzy Thinks, whose comprehensive coverage is better than anything I'll manage. As he hasn't deigned to use a convenient tag, here's the litany of fail:

Beth Forrester (Unlock Democracy): “Smart, successful, single young woman seeks intelligent, attractive and culturally relevant website to combine her interests in fashion, music, celebrity and most of all politics and current affairs. “

In the UK this has been a familiar plea for far too long. While our counterparts in the USA have long been actively reading, browsing and debating on Women on the Web, female focused British portals have remained rare. This is not to dispute their quality or popularity, with The F-Word, Feminist Fightback and Female First all very popular but relatively narrow in appeal.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): There is a significant post by Sunny Hundal over in Liberal Conspiracy about the success of the campaign to back the HFE Bill and roll back the assault spearheaded by Nadine Dorries MP. In particular, he asserts that the right wing bloggers have been evasive and silent, toeing a party line they are uncomfortable with personally. (Bang to rights!) It has been both a fact and a stereotype that the right are much better bloggers than the left in Britain. Is this changing? I think it is, and Sunny is playing a key role in this because he links generously. The right is much better at supporting each other than the left - which tends usually to go for silos and sectarianism rather than curiosity and solidarity. I could go on - but that would sound like winging. The wonderful exception is LC and its sister site Pickled Politics. There are some other factors as well. The campaign was a defensive one against an outrageously marketed attack - much easier to collaborate on exposing this than exploring a way forward. But the experience is hugely positive.

 

Guy Aitchison (Bristol, OK): The Downing Street e-petitions site has been a neat and popular little tool for people to voice their concerns on all sorts of issues and, though constitutionally toothless, it has caused at least one embarrassment for government over fuel pricing. Historically, however, Westminster has been the proper site for petitioning and since we're still pretending we have a sovereign parliament (rather than an executive monarchy) it seems only right we should be able to petition and embarrass them too. Well, pretty soon we'll be able to do if the Commons Procedure Committee has its way. They have just published a report recommending the introduction of e-petitioning through the Parliament website. They recommend that the constituency link be retained with the petitioner's MP acting as a "facilitator". The e-petitions would be presented in Hansard and sent to select committees and Government would be expected to reply within a few months. They also suggest that three times a year certain e-petitions would be debated in the Commons in Westminster Hall.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): There is an important, almost audacious article by Jackie Ashley in today's Guardian on the collapse of the presence of influential women in British politics today. I agree with her. There was an encouraging moment when women made a wide-ranging dent in British politics after 1979. It has gone. Ashley does not discuss what I think is a big contributor, at the heart of New Labour there was active hostility to women as equal leaders. Strong and able female support and judgement was encouraged - but not leadership. Gays yes, women no. That flash of hatred shown by Jonathan Powell to Helena Kennedy I blogged a while back had a gender aspect to it.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK) Just over a week ago Avaaz launched its petition in support of the people and monks of Tibet. We backed it on openDemocracy. Over a million signed in the first seven days, the fastest ever internet protest. We want to make it two million in time for the international day of protest on 31 March. If you have not signed it, please do so NOW, HERE then send on the link to all your friends:

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): While suffering from a bad cold I got a very interesting long email from David Marquand who started with our Networking Democracy initiative, and said

I like the idea in principle, but the tone of the comments both on the OurKingdom piece and on your Guardian piece is so deeply depressing that I have to say I doubt if anything of great (or even any) value will come out of the exercise. The trouble with internet communication is that people blast off the first thing that comes into their head, without thinking through a coherent argument. There is a discipline in writing for print publication which the internet loses; and the gains in spontaneity and freshness (which are real) are outweighed by the loss in responsibility and accountability. The more I see of it the more I feel that internet communication is rather like a conversation in an overcrowded pub, where everyone is shouting so loudly that they can’t hear anyone else, much less think about what other people (or for that matter they themselves) are saying.

Guy Aitchison (London, OK): It's one of those moments when the peculiarities and contradictions of our current system are truly brought home. A group of peers have started a House of Lords blog which they're calling "Lords of the Blog". It will feature regular contributions from nine peers on the business of the House and their activities in and around the chamber. It is being organised by the Hansard Society with the aim "to help educate, raise awareness and engage with the public on a range of issues relating to the role and business of the House of Lords." They seem to be mostly crossbench or Lib-Dem peers with Lipsey for Labour and Norton for the Tories.

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I am in an openDemocracy, Polis, MacArthur seminar on credibility and the news. It's terrifically interesting with a great mix of people from the US and Russia especially and we are just listening to Flemming Rose of Jyllands-Posten who published the famous cartoons of Mohammad in Denmark. Earlier we heard Steve Herrmann of the BBC. He told me over coffee that over 27,000 people emailed the BBC about the earthquake and how it was for them. It seems to me that the Corporation has covered how the press responded to the quake much better than it has reported on how its own citizen correspondents did. The first reports of the event were emailed into the BBC news room, the BBC has relatively strong local coverage. What happened? Does the fact that it moderates all its mail and publishes only a little mean that we don't realise how many turn to the BBC to tell it what is happening on their street?

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): David Wilcox over at Designing for Civil Society picks up from Guy's recent OK post on Michael Wills Citizens Summit speech and adds: