Tales From A Crowded Island

Next week is Get Online Week. Whilst I certainly don’t need any encouragement to get online more often – I already hate to think what proportion of my time is spent interacting with the virtual world – there are plenty of people who do. Too easy to assume internet access is ubiquitous when you use it every day, but digital exclusion is a real and growing issue that is exacerbated by its concentration in social groups that tend to suffer other forms of exclusion.

The One Show tonight ran a segment on BBC First Click, which is the initiative the BBC are running to support Get Online Week, particularly focusing on the older generation. In a video here, BBC tech correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones  explains why getting more old people online is important, not only from a social perspective, but also financially and to access government services.

According to the UK Online Centres press release:

An estimated 9.2 million Brits don’t use computers and the internet, and with most new jobs now requiring IT skills, government and corporate services going online, new internet bargains and cheap communication channels, being left behind technology has some serious side effects. What’s more, the problem is worse for those already at a disadvantage – if you’re older, disabled, or on a low income, you’re far more likely to be offline. The idea of Get online week is to give some of those people a chance to catch up.

That means one in seven people (roughly) do not have access to computers and the internet. Get Online Week is about giving those people the opportunity, the confidence and the basic skills to start using PCs and the internet and people can locate centres that are running events on the official website here. In addition to the events, people are encouraged to get friends or family that don’t know how to use computers and/or the internet involved, sharing skills with them and showing them the training materials that are provided online.

I mentioned a couple of posts ago how initiatives like Historypin might be used to draw older people into using the internet and I hope that Get Online Week is a success generally, but also in particular for the older generation, who it seems to me have much to gain from having easy and regular access to a computer and the internet. So if you have a spare hour or two next week; adopt a granny and teach her how to send an e-mail, OK?

The last couple of weekends I have been to two of Yorkshire’s best reserves for bird-watching: Old Moor (RSPB) and Potteric Carr (Yorkshire Wildlife Trust). It was great to see that both of the sites had new hides added since my previous visits. Potteric Carr was a large reserve when I first went to it, but the new hides and reclaimed ground stretching almost all the way the the M18 make it incredibly impressive. Both sites also have great visitor centres that serve tasty and cheap fodder for you to refuel on before heading back out to the hides.

My trip to Old Moor was my first time around a RSPB reserve with Mum and Ralph, who had joined just a few weeks earlier at Leighton Moss. The weather – a blustery, chilling wind & occasional squally rain – may not have been kind to us, but we actually notched up quite a list, including a first tick for me. We started with the hide next to the visitor centre looking out over the bird feeders, which turned out to be surprisingly productive, ticking off a Coal Tit, a pair of Willow Tits and a pair of Bullfinches, of whom, the male looked rather ropey and bedraggled.

We tried the two new (well, new to me) hides first, taking a left when we left the visitor centre, towards the main road, instead of the more usual route to the more popular hides. It was quiet too; only a couple in the first hide we went in and no one in the second. That couple proved quite useful though, alerting us to a Water Rail skulking about in the reeds across the water to the left of the hide. Alas, as Water Rails have a want to be, it proved very elusive; everytime the couple shouted it was in view, by the time we had scooted across the hide it had disappeared again. Old Moor was where I saw my first Water Rail; a extrovert one apparently, as it strutted about for a good half hour right in front of the Wath Ings Hide.

I spotted a male Sparrowhawk in the trees directly opposite the hide and we got a good view before it got chased off my crows. Ralph re-spotted it in the same tree, but due to the inadequacy of his spatial description, none of us believed him for the first quarter of an hour, in spite of his insistency “there is something there!!”. A Kingfisher made a (very) fleeting appearance, flying across in front of the hide, and to top it off, we finally got to see the Water Rail briefly just before we left the hide. On the way back to the visitor centre for refueling, we got a glimpse of a Great Spotted Woodpecker flying away from us towards the visitor centre.

After lunch, we went down towards Wath Ings, stopping off in the large L shaped hide, but seeing only a Green Sandpiper, we moved on to Wath Ings hide. It was a relatively short stay, but we saw some good stuff. There were plenty of lapwings and plovers of course, but in amongst them there were four or five Ruff. We had apparently missed some Spotted Redshank that had been around earlier, but whilst we were there a group of waders circled and dropped down amongst the Lapwings. They were mainly Dunlin, but there was a Curlew Sandpiper too (only saw my 1st one of those a few weeks back at Fairburn Ings) and two Little Stint (a 1st for me!). We also saw Black Tailed Godwits, a solitary Greenshank and a second, better view of a Sparrowhawk as it swept through, causing general chaos as the Lapwings and Plovers went up. Not a bad days work all in all.

View over the West Scrape at Potteric Carr

Better weather for the outing to Potteric last weekend with Dad and Sandra, but less to see. First hide we went into was the Duchess Hide (hide 9 on this map), looking out over Huxter Well Marsh towards the M18. There seemed to be little about at first, aside from lapwings, plovers and some Jays busily collecting acorns from two Oak trees. Then Dad noticed there was a solitary wader amongst the lapwings. I managed to get the scope on it for a brief 30 seconds before it took off at speed, but didn’t manage to ID it (I am crap at waders), so it was one to check in the book when we got back home.

I was surprised as we worked are way around to the West Scrape (closest to M18) by the sudden appearance of so many Swallows and House Martins. We heard two Chiff Chaffs singing too. There looked to be very little about aside from Greylags when we first got into the hide overlooking West Scrape, but then we had an explosion of bird of prey activity. We spotted five Buzzards circling up on the thermals toward the A6182; a Sparrowhawk tangling with two of them, before soaring upwards itself, and then a Kestrel emerged from over the woods. We got even better views when we left the hide a short while later, as a female Sparrowhawk and a couple of Buzzards flew low over us.

Oh yeah, that mystery wader! When we got back to the visitor centre, we were told by the guy manning it that the Pectoral Sandpiper had been seen on Huxter Well that morning. He showed us some pictures of on the Potteric website, but I was still not totally convinced that is what we had seen from those pictures, but having checked the books and checked a few pictures online when I got back home, I am now pretty certain it was a Pectoral Sandpiper we saw. If it was, that would be another first for me.

Short footnote on the redesign of the RSPB website, or more specifically the pages dedicated to the individual reserves. I only just noticed tonight, whilst putting this blog together, how much improved these pages are. Take the Old Moor one here for example; not only does it look much cleaner in its layout than it used to, it is also obviously trying to establish a real Old Moor community microsite. The links bar on the left contains some of the same old stuff that used to be there (facilities, star species etc), but they have added prominent, socially engaging sections like the blog, a forum and a Twitter feed. Rather than just recent sightings, the blog covers them, adding details, a dash of humour and some personality. In fact, the whole RSPB online community offering has been, well unless I missed it all previously, very much bolstered in recent times. Registering gives you access to forums, blogs and photo sharing; all of which allows you to tap into the resources and knowledge of the wider RSPB community. Yorkshire Wildlife Trust who run Potteric Carr do not have anything similar, although they are on Facebook and Twitter. I imagine that regional Wildlife Trusts do not have the funds available that a big charity like the RSPB does, but could all the regional Wildlife Trusts create something between them that mirrors the RSPB online community? Could they not even work together with the RSPB to have a shared online community infrastructure? After all, many RSPB members will also be members of their local wildlife trust, and there would be a lot of benefits from having a bigger community of wildlife lovers, not least for focusing campaigning/volunteering.

Historypin is a great idea. It is a project set up by We Are What We Do, in partnership with Google, that allows you to pin historical pictures of locations to a map. Here is some of the blurb form the sites About page:

Historypin is one in a series of projects created as part of We Are What We Do’s campaign to get generations talking more, sharing more and coming together more often. There has been a major trend in different generations spending less time together. Which is a shame. Old people know stuff young people don’t. And young people know stuff old people don’t.

What a great idea! Creating a shared sense of community history in a social and engaging way.

I like the idea of projects acting as a bridge between generations. There is a wedge driven between the young and the old these days, reinforced to a certain extent by negative media stereotyping, that sees teenagers portrayed as feral delinquents and old people as curmudgeonly moaners harking back to a bygone golden era. Many young people have no interest in history, seeing it as having no relevance to them. On the other side, with the older generation, we have these untapped resources of living history. The deaths of grandparents in recent years has really brought this latter point home to me; I can’t imagine how much history I must have absorbed over the years of listening to grandparents share stories with me of how things were when they grew up, how the place had changed and so on. Sadly, too little of it is remembered and none of it recorded, except perhaps in the few dusty photographs. Collecting those dusty photographs, sharing them and the associated stories online, could create a living record tracking the history of a community and its people.

Projects like this could be combined with initiatives run by Age UK like intergenerational mentoring or sharing of IT skills with the elderly. There are clear arguments to be made for the role social media can play in breaking down the isolation that many older people feel, so such an exchange of knowledge and skills may have other positive knock on effects too.

On a personal note, having taken a quick look around on Historypin, there are disappointingly few photographs around Chesterfield (my birthtown), but there is a good collection here of old photographs of Leeds.

It’s been a long few months since I updated the old blog, so here is a summary in pictures of a few things that I have been up to during the spring.

April saw some uncommon visitors to Leeds.

Now we are all old, after a hearty meal at the Aagrah and a few alcoholic beverages, we were forced into a (relatively) early retirement. It was the first time Lee and Jules had been in Leeds since I moved into my own place, so it was good to play host and although Oliver was not with them it does look like he had an equally fun weekend with his Grandma. We did have good weather for the visit too and on the Saturday afternoon headed out for a short walk around Swillington Ings, noting this oddly worded signpost along our route.

Does this fit the Tory narrative of a broken and immoral society? Even our footpaths are permissive. Personally though I was surprised; from what I have heard the footpaths of Wakefield have more of a reputation locally for being more errm lax.

On the lists of things not to mix up in the kitchen has to be these two

I am all for germ free and clean kitchens, but it is a bit much including Dettol as part of your food preparation as Mum did on my visit to Chesterfield in late April. Thankfully the fish she was cooking was salvaged.

Whilst I was there I had a unique opportunity to photograph an early artistic masterpiece of my brother’s, as the wallpaper had been stripped away in the lounge to reveal

In world news, the BBC made me aware that not only is homosexuality illegal in Malawi, but also the lesser known homesexuality is too

I got to visit the English Riviera for the first time in May, with a few days spent in Torquay at a work conference. Alas, it being a work trip meant I had no real time to enjoy the visit.

Mum also came to visit in May and we enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes movie, mumbling Robert Downey Jnr not withstanding, an evening stroll around Swillington Ings (see photo below) and a trip into Leeds to spend more of Mum’s money (light fittings this time).

June has been a month of getting reengaged with politics after the despondency that followed the election result and formation of the coalition government. I joined the Labour Party and on June 10th went to see Ed Miliband (one of five candidates for Labour leadership) speak at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

The weekend that followed I was at the Compass conference, watching my first Labour leadership hustings (blurred pic below) as well as speeches from Caroline Lucas, Jon Cruddas and Chuka Umunna amongst others.

Whilst attending the Compass event I stayed in the Travellodge at Euston; convenient, noisy, basic and with this advert of a porn-surfing bear encouraging me to make use of their wi-fi access.

On the Sunday before I came back from London I went here:

To see this free exhibition:

And very good it was too.

Finally, this last weekend, I met up with Dad at Far Ings nature reserve. Nestled right next too the River Humber, it has the Humber Bridge has a rather spectacular backdrop.

Sadly the weather was very changeable whilst we were there, flitting from bright sunshine to heavy showers blown on a cold northerly wind. Barring an Avocet or two and a great view of a Roe Deer stag, we saw very little else of note.

The footage below is on a stretch of the A1(M) just north of Leeds, a section of motorway I have travelled many times. I had difficulty believing it was not some film set staged stunt at the time, but it appears it is genuine and the lorry driver was unaware he was cruising along at 60mph pushing a car in front of him.

Astounding that this did not result in any serious injuries. For all it is a fuel efficient and thrilling way to travel, I am not sure it would be good for your nerves or the side of your car.

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?