Local Democracy Notepad

When bloggers meet, I often find that old allegiances (be they left right, or Unionist/Republican often dissolve into a different political spilt. Those of us who imagine that we ‘get’ the read-write web against the political colleagues that we have who, we believe, fail to foresee the possibilities or the threats.

I’ve occasionally witnessed left-right-and-centrist bloggers in (non) violent agreement with each other – not about political direction, but about what is possible in harnessing the power

of the web. About how a more effective participative political culture can bring about a range of subtle changes – to reverse the broken politico/media relationship out of some of the cul-de-sacs that it appears to have stuck in.

Today, a few of us have come together to launch a project called ‘Political Innovation’. It’s for anyone who has ever asked themselves ‘why is politics brand viagra over the net still done like this?’

We’ve put a call out through our personal networks for initial contributions and we’ve already had promises of more than ten essays suggesting serious political innovations that are based upon an understanding of what interactive social media and the web can achieve. Read the rest of this entry »

It may have happened fifteen years later than it viagra lowest prices needed to, but at the annual MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival, BBC Director General Mark Thompson – and, presumably, his colleagues in the corporation have finally woken up to the real threat that the corporation faces: the downward pressure that is being placed upon the producers of TV content.

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That BSkyB have been allowed a free pass to make a fortune without giving anything back apart from cash for their allocation of spectrum (like so many other corporations, they’ve been allowed to get away with being socially useless) – and in doing so, they’ve created in impossible ecology for content-producing broadcasters to compete in. It’s a race to the bottom. Understand this and you’re halfway there to understanding how Sky’s marketing budget is bigger than ITV’s production funds.

Thompson is onto a winning argument here: The argument that we need to continue to produce locally-oriented content in the UK – and that there’s an overwhelming democratic case for doing so.

It’s been an issue that was addressed at EU level in the mid-1990s, and British regulators and media commentators appeared to spend the intervening decade-and-a-half either pretending that the regulations didn’t exist or that they weren’t needed (with honourable exceptions such as the former MEP Carole Tongue)*. Read the rest of this entry »

As Churchill* once said: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

The tool of a Kenyan plot to take over the US Government

This article in The Boston Globe makes the argument that democracy is actually damaged

by the way that people respond to being contradicted by evidence (they dig in rather than adapt to it). It uses this satirical post from The Onion to make the point that the virtue of open-mindedness isn’t a universal one;

Spurred by an administration he believes to be guilty of numerous transgressions, self-described American patriot Kyle Mortensen, 47, is a vehement defender of ideas he seems to think are enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and principles that brave men have fought and died for solely in his head.

Kyle Mortensen would gladly give his life to protect what he says is the Constitution’s very clear stance against birth control.

“Our very way of life is under siege,” said Mortensen, whose understanding of the Constitution derives not from a close reading of the document but from talk-show pundits, books by television personalities, and the limitless expanse of his own colorful imagination. “It’s time for true Americans to stand up and protect the values that make us who we are.” Read the rest of this entry »

Apologies for the light posting around here at the moment – I’ve been very busy with another blog-related project called ‘Political Innovation‘.

It’s really for anyone who has looked at politics and asked themselves “why do we still have to do it this way?” The founding premise is that interactive technology is a game-changer.

On the one hand, it has had a huge impact upon conventional politics and it has compounded many of its minor pre-existing felonies.

On the other, it creates all kinds of possibilities – ones that would be welcomed by people across the political divides – to change the way that democratic politics is done. Read the rest of this entry »

The Political Innovation project I’m currently working on (more soon!) is going to be very focussed upon the political aspects of interactivity – with the premise that more, freer, better exchanges of evidence and opinion are a public good – and that not enough is being done politically to facilitate these.

Via Norm, who offers a good summary – here’s Michael Sandel on ‘The Lost Art of Democratic Debate’, making the case against pussyfooting around difficult moral issues. Do watch it all if you can – it

runs to 20 minutes, so maybe put the kettle on first?