Tales From A Crowded Island

The Guardian has an opinion piece today from Julian Glover suggests that Tony Abbott’s Liberal Party in Australia could be a sinister foreshadowing of what David Cameron’s Conservatives could turn into. I speculated only a few days ago that one could envisage the Conservatives heading down a similarly populist route, driven by increasing public scepticism and the grassroots of the party. Tim Montgomerie, editor of Conservative Home, a popular grassroots website, said the following of climate change:

You have got 80% or 90% of the party just not signed up to this. No one minded at the beginning, but people are starting to realise this could be quite expensive, so opinion is hardening.

The same article suggests, again quoting Montgomerie, that up to 6 members of the Shadow Cabinet may be sceptics. This may or may not be the case, but I don’t feel – unlike Julian Glover – that we will see shifts in policy whilst Cameron is leader of the party; he simply has to much credibility personally invested in the issue for such a clear repudiation of current policy; it was after all one of the first issues he started his rebranding of the party with. We have already seen enviromental issues be pushed down the Tory party agenda; no longer such focus on the ‘Vote Blue, Go Green’ message that was centre stage when Cameron took the helm. I do think though, if the Tory lead in the polls continues to shrink and the election leads to a hung parliament where a Lib/Lab pact keeps the Tories out of power, that Cameron could go and the next Tory leader is likely to start to change the party’s language on climate change.

Just a brief follow up on my previous post on climate change, I found this article by Ben Goldacre in my bookmarked for later list. It was written at the time of the Copenhagen summit and explains succinctly some of the reasons why the science of climate change is hard to sell to some people. I especially liked this section where is talking about combating our natural psychological aversion to making sacrifices in the present:

Suggesting that personal behaviour change will have a big role to play, when we know that telling people to do the right thing is a weak way to change behaviour, is an incomplete story: you need policy changes to make better behaviour easier, and we all understand that fresh fruit on sale at schools is more effective than telling children not to eat sweets.

This very much echoes some of the thoughts of thinks like Thaler & Sunstein, who’s book Nudge has become essential reading for wonks and politicians in the last couple of years, advocating policies which create a ‘choice environment’ that almost prods(or nudges, for those who prefer a ’softer’ prompt) people in the direction of socially positive outcomes without them realising it. It also echoes policy making based on a firm understanding of what motivates and persuades people to take action, based on the thinking of people like Robert Cialdini, who’s work breaks down the different ways individuals can be influenced and then applies these to public policy.

Last night I saw a tweet from one of the left of centre blogs in the UK; it suggested that those sceptical of climate change should not cause of a fuss by being labelled ‘climate change deniers’. This debate about the validity of the  prejorative terms used for those not in agreement with the scientific consensus is a bit of an aside, but it is indicative of the problems of how to frame the discourse with the broad church of sceptical views. Personally, I am uncomfortable with tagging those people who remain unconvinced ‘climate change deniers’. Whilst it might be true that some of them do literally deny, either that climate change is happening at all, or that it has a manmade component, the choice of the term ‘denier’ remains problematic for me. The liberal left has long argued about the importance of language and how it can be used to reinforce certain stereotypes or power structures, so it is ironic to see many on the left so eager to use terminology that so obviously draws a parallel with those sickos that deny the Holocaust.

Such comparisons are doubly unhelpful when we start to think about who are these ‘deniers’ and what exactly do they think. This post resonated with me:

I think the left have a tendency to vilify and patronise the sceptics. Climate change scepticism is not a top-down conspiracy by the Lawson dynasty and the oil lobby to manipulate opinion. Most ordinary sceptics would struggle to identify a high-profile ‘denier’ other than Jeremy Clarkson. I suspect it is more the instinctive reaction of a society that traditionally values scepticism of all sorts, much as it does eccentricity, and is mistrustful of officialdom especially when it is asking them to make painful sacrifices for a far-off greater good.

I think this is a fair characterisation of some of the sceptics I know, most of whom are not ‘deniers’ as such, but are just unconvinced. Why are they unconvinced then? Why don’t they just go and look at the science? I think it comes down to inclinations in the end; some people are just predisposed to being more sceptical than others; after all it is not like those people that DO support the consensus view on AGW have ‘looked at the science’ for the most part, they are just more instinctively trusting of the thrust of the mainstream media message for the past few years.

Even if a layperson in good faith did set off to ‘look at the science’ what do we mean by that? What we actually mean is for them to go take a look at the science WE find convincing and then be illuminated. The problem for more enquiring travellers is that one can read the IPCC report and be convinced of the case for AGW, but equally one can read many rebuttals of the report in its entireity and very detailed, technical sounding attacks on specific elements of the AGW thesis. If you have no life and any willpower left, you could then go and read the rebuttals of the rebuttals (you can see how circular this gets), and the kicker is that they sound convincing too. This is the problem with trying to convince people based on an idea that is highly complex and requires specialised understanding; even after they have ‘looked at the science’ they may only end up more confused and really left with their gut instinct to make a decision anyway. This is why the public tend to be so media led on this issue and why the recent Climategate and IPCC debacle could prove to be so corrosive, and equating sceptics with Holocaust denial, or just dismissing them as stupid hicks, is unlikely to be helpful either.

Politicians have benefited so far from a broadly supportive public on the issue of climate change, forging a consensus across party lines that this is something we need to take seriously and do our bit to resolve. A poll today suggests the public mood is becoming more sceptical of AGW. This maybe a temporary shift in the wake of the failure of Copenhagen, the scandals mentioned above and the recession, but if it takes hold, especially on the back of populist ‘tea party’ style coalitions, then it is going to become difficult for politicians to ignore climate scepticism as a potential vote winner.

BBC Newsnight had a segment on last night about the politics of climate change in Australia, specifically the rise of scepticism as a viable mainstream political position. The video can be seen here (UK Only), but essentially it was about how Tony Abbott, leader of the right of centre opposition Liberal Party, was increasingly aligning his party with a sceptical view of AGW, and that this was rapidly becoming the more populist position. The Labour government’s climate change bill is currently being blocked in the Senate, which risks triggering an election where climate change would be one of the major divides between the parties. Prior to this point, the parties supporting the AGW consensus have had the more populist rhetoric, capturing the public imagination with warnings of the consequences of climate change, but does what is happening in Australia signal the start of a sea change? Certainly it is not too much of a stretch of the imagination to imagine such populist sceptical movements taking hold here in the UK, supported by a Conservative Party which still has a vociferous sceptic element in its grassroots support. In America one can the energised Tea Party movement setting their sites on Obama’s enviromental policy after downing his healthcare bill, as part of their wider narrative of resisting ’socialist taxes’.

It is going to be difficult for proponents of the consensus to win the public back to the need to make lifestlye changes. Ratcheting up the fear through alarmist proclamations will be seen as scaremongering. Calling opponents stupid, or equating them with Holocaust deniers, is now much easier to cast as merely trying to close down debate. What we need from our politicians is a more open discourse that acknowledges a large number of people are not sold on the idea of AGW and makes some attempt to understand the reasons why; this will certainly get us further than gung ho proclamations of war against deniers.

First came across Aereogramme a couple of months back when I was listening to a Spotify playlist of indie music someone had linked on Twitter. They are now defunct, but they were a Scottish three piece seemingly, who recorded 4 albums between 2001 and 2007. So far I have only purchased the last album they did, 2007’s My Heart Has A Wish That You Would Not Go, but on the basis of what I have heard I may be persuaded to buy more. This is my favourite track of that album, it’s called Barriers.

Another example from last week of socia media being used to harness disparate complaints and dissatisfaction, this time the target was the Toronto Transit Commission(TTC), where a picture of a napping worker went viral, acting as a focal point for issues that customers already had with the company. I find these types of new social media viral complaint to be quite and interesting phenomena; I wonder how they will develop and how companies may shift their strategies to combat and also make use of these new public spaces.

Writers like Clay Shirky have identified the power that social media now gives the ordinary person against the might of big institutions. In his book, Here Comes Everybody, he cites several examples of the use of social media to challenge corporations and seek redress for grievances. Social media has certainly reduced the boundaries to association that people used to have; it is relatively easy now to set up a Facebook group or to use Twitter to gather followers to your cause, and once you have a nucleus of people you can start to crowd source skills that can help your campaign. These campaigns still have a kind of chaotic feel to them, often sparking from one expression of disgust from an individual. Just look at the example cited at the beginning of this post; the customers of TTC already had a simmering anger about fare hikes, but what ignited them was one tweet of a sleeping TTC worker; without this trigger that customer anger would most likely have remained dormant. We all understand the power of imagery, and having the right kind of image can be crucial to the success of these bottom up campaigns. It is fascinating though that the advent of cheap digital image and video capture with social media has placed the ability to influence large numbers of people through images in the hands of the man on the street, whereas it was once the exclusive preserve of the media and government.

Here are a handful of ways I can see this developing:

1. Companies will increasingly move into the social media space. We already see this with Facebook pages, company blogs and viral advertising, but I think companies will increasingly try and tackle campaigns such as the one highlighted above on the social media platforms themselves through identificable company representatives and also customer advocates (paid or otherwised).
2. These types of campaign will become more structured and as people learn what works they will try and replicate what now happens spontaneously by design. Imagine a particularly disgruntled commuter deliberately trying to capture pictures over a period of time of a companies employees, waiting for that perfect image that they know will spark a Twitterstorm.
3. Social media and social networking are a novelty for the mainstream media at the moment, so campaigns like the TTC one often grab media attention that is disproportionate; I think this will slowly decrease, which will make it harder for such campaigning to get traction.
4. Companies trying to create Twitterstorms to ruin the reputation of competitors? Or trying to influence online sentiment about their own brand.
5. Social media used to make firms accountable for the changes they say they are going to make.
6. Social media to provide increasingly better support for campaigning on local issues
7. I am reading a book by Julian Baggini at the moment called Complaint, which is a breezy overview of the history of complaint and an attempted dissection of the types of complaint. Baggini argues that the culture of litigation and entitlement have given complaint a bad name (what is in it for me?). Expect campaigns on social media to have an increasing focus not just on poor customer focus, but on financial redress and we might even get the same firms that take on all those accident cases, pimping their business via social networks.

What developments do you see? Or is this just a fad?

The Conservative policy on tax breaks for married couples may well prove to be inconsequential by the time we get to the election (ever more likely to be May), but I find it one of the most irksome policies of any of the three main parties. Tory thinking, informed by the work of former Tory leader Ian Duncan Smith, seems to be:

Social breakdown is bad – A good deal of social breakdown is caused by family breakdown – We need stable families as they produce the best outcomes for kids and minimise social breakdown – Evidence shows that married couples provide the most stable family structure – We need to support marriage, so lets give them a tax break.

I have always thought that the thinking here is very flawed. Are stable relationships the result of marriage, or that people that are already in committed stable relationships tend to be the kind of people who get married? It should not be surprised that married couples provide the most stable family units; by virtue of the fact they have normally survived or not been subject to the normal ravages that have prised apart other couples. Although we do not have the details of the tax proposal yet, it also seems strange that a married couple without kids should get a tax break, whilst a cohabiting couple with kids would not. I know tax is all about these types of choices, but those anomolies it throws run contrary to both the stated intent of the policy and the need for fiscal responsibility that the Tories have been stressing.

As much as we possibly can we should try to minimise governments interferance in peoples personal relationships; by all means eradicate the elements of the tax and benefit system that penalise married couples compared to those who cohabit, but lets not swing in the other direction hey? We need to make sure we support all those families providing a loving and nurturing environment for their kids, not just the ones that decided to get married. Here is an excellent blog post at the Financial Times that explains why the policy is incoherent and fiscally reckless.

We all have our little quirks; our irrational dislikes and likes, usually based on little else than gut instinct and some indefinable background noise. In any event, one of mine was always Facebook, which for some reason I was always bizarrely proud of the fact whilst the rest of the sheeple were signing up for it in droves (or herds?), I had remained above the ovine stampede, pure and untouched by the stigma. This is kind of like the social media equivalent of refusing to admit to liking pop music on the basis of whatever is popular with the masses cannot possibly be good. Well, sometimes, very occasionally, pop music can be good, so why not Facebook?

My other reasons for not wanting to sign up were based on more of a drip drip of negative news stories about Facebook over the past couple of years. Security concerns, dictatorial changes to Terms & Conditions, poxy people you went to school with tagging you in old and embarassing photos and employers going on there and finding out you are a drunken twat. Such things didn’t fill my head with positive images of Facebook. All of this was not aided by other peoples descriptions of it; lots of games, bizarre sounding groups and scrawling on walls, all of which don’t particularly appeal to me. So why join then, especially after being so scathing in the past? Two reasons:

1. Some friends who avoided my social networking platform of choice (Twitter) were resident on Facebook. I didn’t know Andy was in a relationship until Lee tweeted me and told me his Facebook relationship status had changed. Well I could hardly go on missing critical pieces of information like that could I?
2. The family trip to Australia contained a fair amount of ribbing of my Uncle for being a stick in the mud and social networking-aphobe. I could hardly maintain such a critique whilst maintaining a similarly high-handed view of Facebook. I should at least try it, with an open mind, and then draw final conclusions on its worth.

Sign up I did; then I spent a good few minutes looking at the screen and around the settings thinking ‘what next?’. Started adding a few friends, most of whom immediatly said, ‘What are you doing on here?’ and then over the next few days I started to get to grips with it and what I might use it for. I have been using it for about a week now and here are some initial positive and negatives.

Positives

• Keeping more in touch with friends who are not on Twitter.
• The iPhone application for it is really nicely put together and gives you access to more or less the full range of features.
• Tweetdeck, which I already used for Twitter, also integrates with Facebook, which allows me to simultaneously update Twitter and Facebook.
• It’s good that you can comment on all the different types of content that you can see from your friends, and that you can ‘tag’ friends into status updates.
• There is good integration with some other applications I use like Flickr, Qik and Audioboo, along with the facility through add on applications to run RSS feeds onto your page.

Negatives

• I find the entire interface very messy and confusing. Some of this is my own lack of understanding and familiarity with it, but for a novice Facebook does have several concepts that seem to overlap. There is your News Feed that can be viewed as the straight News Feed or the Live Feed, and contains the activity updates for you and your friends. There is then Status Updates, which is like a strimmed down version of the News Feed giving only, as the name suggests, Status Updates for yourself and your friends. However, not everything you do appears in your Live Feed; for example, if you happen to join a Group, this doesn’t appear in your News Feed (curiously if Friends join a Group it does), so you have to click into your Profile to see your recent Group joining history. That’s before I have even got to the messy world of Groups vs Pages and whatever the fuck Boxes are!
• It has an annoying habit of suggesting potential friends to you ALL the time. This easy access to mutual friends seems like a good idea at first when you initially want to add people, but does it have to do it all the time? When it is not suggesting friends to you, it decides it might try recommending Groups your Friends have joined instead: I am not interested OK?!
• Some of the applications you can add to your page are not altogether intuitive to get working. It took me a while to understand the setup of the Social RSS app for example, so I could ensure blog updates here flowed through to my Facebook page.
• Friend mining. I have not experienced this yet, but from chatting to people on there, due to these recommendations that get made about mutual friends, you can soon have people from your past turning up and requesting to be friends. These were people that you have the most tenuous associations with in alot of cases; quite often people who went to the same school as you or worked briefly in the same place. This entire process is supported by groups based around every school, all of which feel like complete Friends Reunited style nostalgia-fests.
• We all like our share of inane memes, but Facebook seems to produce them in large numbers in the form of bizarrely named Groups or Pages. I have seen ones with surreal names like, ‘Don’t You Just Hate It When You See Any Group That Starts Its Title With ‘Don’t You Just Hate It When..’ (well maybe not quite that, but you get the picture), which seem to attract thousands and thousands of people, whilst the official RSPB Group for example has a few hundred.

Twitter to Facebook is like comparing this:

Small, not particularly spectacular, but easily understandable and functional.

With this:

Complicated, with loads of unecessary bolt on parts, like it has been cooked up in the workshop of some mad professor.

After my last blog post on the unusual mementos that turn up when we are moving house, I have now come across the following photos:

A couple of our cat Amy (now sadly no longer with us)

I also found this wonderful photo of Grandad and Grandma Mantle, which was slid behind a plastic cover on a small notebook. Not sure when I got it, or who gave it to me, but the photo is great.

I am trying to place where it was took, but my memory is failing me, so any help is welcome.

Finally, I found my 1st year Student Union card at Leeds University. This would have been in 1992 when I was just 18. I look errrm..very studenty.

Moving house does give one the opportunity to go through some of that stuff you have hoarded and throw some of it out; and boy did my collection of flotsam and jetsam amalgamated over 10 years need some ruthless culling.

Whilst I was clearing out some stuff tonight though I came across something that reminded me of a trip taken to the Big Apple in February 2005 to celebrate Andy’s 30th. You can see my pictures of the trip on Flicker here. On the night of Andy’s birthday we went to eat at a place called Radio City or something like that, just up from out hotel in central Manhattan. I remember little of the night as we managed to polish off 9 bottles of red wine between six of us, before moving on to some bars. I do remember that I ordered a dish that was basically a selection of different types of sausage, after which, I don’t think I could face another sausage for a good few weeks.

My other main memory of that night was of the music. They had a jazz band on and a female singer who meandered in amongst the tables. At some point it was flagged to the band that it was Andy’s 30th and he had the next song dedicated to him, at the end of which she was perched on his knee, finishing with a cheeky “boop boop dee doo” and a playful rub of Andy’s head.

We were all impressed (especially Andy) and she gave us a flyer and told us where they were playing the following night, where they would also have some CDs on sale. Andy was flying back the next day, so we drunkenly agreed that we would go to this bar she was performing at and buy him a CD; of course when the next day arrived, all of us feeling somewhat delicate, we opted for a quieter night and never made it to the bar to see a repeat performance. We could also only remember the first bit of her name (Tira), so Andy christened her Tira Misu, after the dessert.

Tonight when I was clearing out some paperwork, I found the flyer in there, so thought I would scan it in (wirelessly) and share this short anecdote.

The website of the band she sang with is still up here. It even has a page dedicated to Tira with a link to her latest CD: maybe we will get that CD yet, a mere 4 and a bit years late!

UPDATE
Surreal. After posting this blog I went and had a look at the CD which it appeared that she recorded in 2000 with her twin sister Dhira. I then did a search for Tira & Dhira and this brought up this strange YouTube vid from 2007, part of a series documenting the lives of bohemian types scratching out a living in NYC. Considering what Andy christened her, it is amusing how she introduces herself in the video.

Leeds is currently in the grip of strike action by refuse collectors; bin men in old money (Not for the 1st time either). I am not going to get into discussing the claims and counterclaims of the council and the unions, but what I have found is, for a council that does a fairly well developed internet offer, just how little they are leveraging it to keep customers informed.

Our bin has not been collected in nearly three weeks now, although we do now have the advantage of a skip in a front garden because of the kitchen renovations; an advantage I would not be surprised to see some of our neighbours take advantage of too.

When the collections missed for the second time, I thought I would go on the Leeds City Council (LCC) website and see what information they had to offer. What I was hoping for was some kind of information portal that would be aggregating all updates relating to the strike action. I went to the main LCC webpage, saw a news link about the strike affecting several waste storage sites (tips or dumps in old money) and at the bottom of that a link to a webpage specifically devoted to the strike action. “Excellent” thought I, “this will be what I was looking for”. Wrong!

First of all I could not get on the page because it kept throwing up errors until I temporarily disabled my firewall’s privacy settings. Not a good start, but then when I did get onto the page, all it had were some bland stock answers about the strike action. Yes, there a couple of lines on what to do if you don’t get a collection, which is basically, put you bin out on your next collection day (Duh!), but nothing more specific than that. What do customers want to know in such circumstances? When they are likely to be getting a collection in their area of course, but that page offered nothing to manage my expectations. We have had some people taking their rubbish to the waste storage sites themselves, but how are we expected to judge if that will be necessary without more specific information.

Twitter seems ideally suited for LCC to get out status updates on the strike, including when particular areas are going to get collections, and LCC does have a Twitter account. It seems though that this is only used to push out information rather than engaging with customers and answering queries. A shame considering elsewhere LCC are trying to make some services available via the web.

From Twitter I looked at the Posterous site set up by LCC to post updates specifically relating to the strike. Again a great idea, but what does it actually offer customers? What information is there on there? It seems to be more concerned about taking on union claims than with providing useful updates to citizens affected by the strike.

It does seem now that the council will be using a combination of private contractors and working council crews to start to clear the rubbish for the duration of the strike. The latest post on the Posterous page does finally give some useful advice, which has also been sent out via letter over the weekend to all households, but it still does feel that LCC could be using the web more to get their information out.

I would have liked to have seen some information on where they were getting crews working on particular days, but what about trying to make use of Leeds Twitter users as an information source of which areas are particularly bad? Use of the internet as an information source during such disputes is only going to grow, so bodies like local councils needs to be more on the ball about how they use these new technologies.