November 2002 Archives
November 28, 2002
Wi-Fi in the park
Steve Johnson's excellent weblog links to a great story in the NY Times about the free Wi-Fi network in Bryant Park. I remember the park as a gorgeous place to have Sunday brunch and read the papers, but that was before 802.11b. Bryant Park (right behind the NY Public Library if I remember rightly) was once so dangerous and run down it was literally boarded up. Wi-Fi didn't save the park but it does now enrich the its complex ecology and will probably make its regeneration more robust.
Resource wars
John Gray in the New Statesman says we're entering the era of 'resource wars' and that our starry-eyed faith in technology or in central planning has blinded us to the huge risks:
“The belief that resource scarcity can be transcended by industrialism unites many seemingly antagonistic political standpoints. When neoliberals announced that the collapse of communism meant the end of history, they showed how much they have in common with their Marxist opponents. They assumed that once the struggle of capitalism with central planning had ended, so would geopolitical conflict. In the global free market, as in Marx's vision of world communism, there would be no shortage of the necessities of life.It did not occur to these breathless missionaries of the free market that worldwide industrialisation might trigger a new and dangerous kind of conflict. Like Marx, they took it for granted that wars of scarcity are relics of the pre-industrial past.”
November 27, 2002
Migration Watch UK – not much think, mostly tank
Migration Watch UK is a shabby pressure group masquerading as a think tank. The group's neutral-sounding name masks its real concern with immigration. The group's founder, Sir Andrew Green - a former Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, quoted at BBC News Online - isn't trying very hard:
“You get on the Tube and you can barely move. London is stuffed with people. Under the present regime the numbers are going to keep going up and up and up.”.
Continue reading "Migration Watch UK – not much think, mostly tank"
November 26, 2002
3G auctions revisionism
Paul Klemperer, auction guru and advisor to the Government on the 3G bids, mounts a point-by-point defence of the much criticised 3G spectrum auctions:
“In retrospect, of course, the licences look expensive. But in retrospect, shares or houses sometimes look expensive. Like any other market, an auction simply matches willing buyers and willing sellers - it cannot protect them against their own mistakes.”He's right. With hindsight, the damage done to the sector by the huge 3G licence payments looks trivial next to that done by over-capacity, incautious acquisitions, huge borrowings and straightforward venality (or combinations thereof). As Klemperer also points out, encouraging big businesses to write huge cheques payable to 'HM Treasury' is an extraordinarily direct and efficient way of funding Government activity. Maybe we should come up with some more resources to auction? Airspace? Ocean? Mineral exploitation rights?
November 25, 2002
Am I intruding?
My extensive research (I scrolled all the way down) reveals that Carl Steadman's proto-blog Tilde Carl was five years old last week. Five years. No archive. One very long page of such delicate self-illumination that it feels rude to link to it at all...
A new library of Alexandria
In the future, there will be statues of Brewster Kahle. I never cease to be humbled by his ambition.
“Technologists have promised the digital library for decades. In 1945, Vannevar Bush, who was technology adviser to several US presidents, wrote an article in The Atlantic magazine outlining how computers might one day augment libraries. Then in 1960, a young graduate called Ted Nelson got sidetracked from his masters degree in sociology at Harvard into writing text–retrieval software. He published his ideas, and coined the term "hypertext" in 1965. So in many ways the digital library is long overdue.”He's preserving the web – all of it – in parallel libraries of hard disks, one of which is in Alexandria. This is an unconditionally noble project, on a truly grand scale. Any arguments?
By the way, why is it New Scientist that carries interviews like this and not to the Internet press? Come to think of it, is there an Internet press?
Movable lunch
My friend Lenny Barshack has a Gourmet Deli in NYC. They deliver, natch, but they do it cleverly. If you order lunch from the office, registered co-workers will be told so that they can get their order in too. If you're planning to visit the deli, you can check in to see things are not too busy. It all sounds scarily prelapsarian to me but, hey. It might just work.
I'm just going to say it...
It's fashionable – compulsory in some circles – to knock Big Brother. In fact, the show is one of a handful of genuinely indigenous forms thrown up by television. It's important for all sorts of reasons: it wouldn't be possible in any other medium, it adds much to existing formats, it changes the terms of the relationship between viewer and subject...
The celebrity variant is absolutely compelling stuff. If you've been avoiding it because you think it's lowbrow, get off your high horse and tune in (and while you're at it, think about how you might integrate a blog with the house... Should the producers add a 'blog room'?)
November 24, 2002
Anti brand campaigners need context
Anti-sweatshop campaigners have launched a campaign for a Christmas boycott of The Gap's stores worldwide.
"Gap is encouraging the exploitation of workers in six countries, the activists say. They presented a New York conference yesterday with documented evidence of "abusive working conditions" collected from interviews with 200 people in more than 40 factories making Gap garments in Cambodia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Lesotho, El Salvador and Mexico for the company's global network of more than 4,000 shops. "The problem with these attacks is that they come from an intrinsically anti-business perspective. It's impossible for the critics to see the progress the mega-brands are making and – worse – to imagine the brands ever making a positive contribution to the well-being of workers or economies. None of the press coverage (BBC, Newsday, WNBC NY, Guardian) for this new boycott can supply any context – what would Lesotho's economy look like without Gap? What is the average hourly wage in Cambodia?
A rational approach to the brands would use their massive economic clout – within the developing economies and in home markets – to effect change. In China, Reebok (after decades of pressure from campaigners, naturally) is actually organising labour against the wishes of the authorities – using market clout to defy a repressive government. Nike, Gap, Levi's et al have invested millions in monitoring and compliance. Many now work locally to improve conditions by bullying governments and entrenched power. Businesses, unlike some other institutions, are not monolithic – they can and do change.
November 21, 2002
Liberal email
Is this how you take the pulse of liberal America? From technoculture I learn that the NY Times publishes a daily list of the 'most emailed' articles from its online edition.
November 20, 2002
NHS Obscure
Is this Britain's worst web site? No. That would be an exaggeration. NHS Direct Online could be Britain's least useful web site, though.
Trying to find out what the normal temperature range for a two year-old is, I search for a lot of different terms with no luck. Searching for 'temperature child' brings me 461 results, the first 55 of which are the same entry (about vomiting) repeated over and over again. The FAQ section, which sounds promising, is risible. The section labelled 'First Aid' contains one question ('what should I keep in a first aid kit?'). The section on Ambulances, one question ('when should I call an ambulance?'). I could go on... The telephone service is good. We've used it lots of times when the kids have been ill. It's dreadful that it's let down so badly by the web site, especially when the site could really lift the load for the qualified nurses who staff the phone line by handling routine enquiries like 'what's the normal temperature range for a two year-old?'. By the way, what is the normal temperature range for a two year-old?
Previewing books
The thing with book reviews is you're supposed to wait until you've finished reading the book before you review it but sometimes I just can't wait! The latest exciting volume to hit my desk is Peter Spufford's Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe – a big, beautifully-illustrated survey of economics, trade, infrastructure, manufacture and custom in the middle ages – all the stuff that came together to make what we now call capitalism.
A blogging injury
I've got some kind of RSI – pressure on a nerve in my neck makes my left arm numb (I've pretty much ruled out a stroke). My neck hurts and I can't pick anything up (although my 28Kg son begs to differ). I've sort of fixed my stupid working posture and now I'm just waiting for it to get better. In the meantime, these things don't work. They're supposed to be mega-painkillers but they give me about an hour of relief maximum. This would be fine except I'm supposed to take them every eight hours. Worst of all, I think this might be a blogging injury. Incidentally, if you search for the words blogging injury at Google, you'll learn quite a lot about Robert Schumann's perplexing 1832 injury to his hand, caused by a 'home-made mechanical contraption' designed to strengthen his hands. The injury prevented him from becoming a concert pianist.
November 19, 2002
Freedom of the road
This German charity is teaching Afghan women to drive. What a breathtakingly practical way of helping a downtrodden group get going after decades of oppression. According to The Economist they have taught 100 women the theory so far but the practical element is more difficult because they only have one car! Sounds like a great Christmas PR opportunity for a car manufacturer to me.
Are you a Baconian or a Cartesian?
Freeman Dyson quotes Bacon in his NYRB review of a book about the importance of amateur astronomers:
“All depends on keeping the eye steadily fixed on the facts of nature, and so receiving their images as they are. For God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.”He contrasts the Baconian amateurs – focused on systematic exploration and minute observation – with the Cartesian professionals – always with their eye on the grand theory and the cosmic problem. By the way, did you know that Patrick Moore discovered Mare Orientale, "the biggest and most beautiful impact crater on the moon"?
November 18, 2002
Notes on Work Foundation conference
Diligent attendees at last week's Work Foundation Social Software conference (part of a larger research project) have published their notes. Very useful. Thank you!
Distressed information architect
Matt Jones is the subject of a long and quite serious interview about information architecture for news at Online Journalism Review. This is all very interesting but the best thing is that they've used one of my accidentally distressed photos taken at XCom 2002 to illustrate the piece! I hope this has now become Matt's standard publicity shot.
Problems with Azeem's BPL idea
Azeem's BPL idea will encounter many obstacles on its way to the mainstream:
1. How far downstream does the BPL go? If you require content and app developers to embed the BPL in all derivitive product (as the pure GPL requires), there is no limit. This will alienate businesses who don't want their work to inherit the BPL. It would be better to allow developers to use BBC material without publishing their own source – a sort of one-way GPL that would permit bigger, more conservative organisations to play.
2. The whole thing is going to be extremely hard to explain to almost anyone, let alone to BBC Governors, management, regulators and media. It's easy to imagine the project going nowhere if entrenched interests succeed in characterising it as something geeky, something to do with computers – or, worse, as some kind of weirdo collectivism, detached from reality – "meanwhile, back in the real world." How would it play in The Daily Mail and the rest of the Conservative media, already hostile to the Beeb?
3. Competitors – many badly knocked around by the crash – will only approve if the effect of the BPL is to reduce the BBC's overall share of audience. The scheme should be engineered to achieve this, not to cement the BBC as the sole source of quality content and code in the UK or as the hub of an emerging content network.
4. As a starting project Digital IDs are tricky. Anyone issuing hard IDs like the ones envisaged by Azeem will be perceived as an arm of government. No one would believe for a minute that there were no Government-mandated back doors. It might be better to stop short of hard authentication and start with credentials: 'I'm over 18', 'I live in the UK so I'm entitled to get BBCi content for nothing', 'I'm under 14 so I can enter the CBBC Chat Rooms'... These simpler IDs, if widely adopted, would be a trojan horse for the real thing.
Redefining 'Public Service' at BBCi
Azeem thinks we should try to apply open source thinking to the BBC. He thinks the Beeb’s online content and code should be freely published under the GPL – the radical constitution of the copyleft movement. The effect of this – if it worked – would be to bring into being a thriving new ‘creative commons’ downstream of the beeb, built on the BBC’s stock of content and application logic. This might just be the boost that UK Online needs to beat the bust and overcome the natural pessimism produced by nearly three years of market misery. More important, it might also represent the first serious attempt to update the definition of ‘public service’ for the networked era.
So why is this interesting? Isn’t open source just a geek fad? Actually, I think it might help us advance the debate about the BBC in the digital era. Arguments about the BBC’s role – the charter, the license fee, public service vs ratings etc. – are especially dry and boring these days. With Dyke in charge, Labour in power and OfCom barred from regulating the Beeb directly, the corporation is more-or-less bulletproof. Even Rupert Murdoch’s ‘untouchable’ outburst struck a plaintive note. Open source might short-circuit these old-world arguments and help us get a productive argument about public service in the twenty-first century going again.
Azeem’s idea is focused not on ownership (privatise it, usually – yawn) or on output (cut it back to an explicitly public service core, privatise the rest – double yawn) but on creation. By promising to stimulate the online creative economy in the middle of the nastiest crash in recent history, an Open Source BBCi might bring to life a whole new ecosystem – like the independent TV production sector that rallied around the new Channel 4 in the eighties. If it works, we’ll have ourselves a useful model for the redefinition of public service in other areas of the Beeb’s output and perhaps for Government investment in interactivity – ‘Broadband Britain’, UK Online and so on – in general.
November 17, 2002
W3C Web Services standards
Werbach links to the W3C's draft web services standards.
November 16, 2002
Motorists out of control
Catherine Bennett, in The Guardian, asks "who dares to stand up to the motorists?"
“The motoring lobby had been protesting, like so many schoolboys banned from baking their conkers, that concealed speed cameras were a rotten swizz. Or, as the AA put it, "unfair". The Sun said they were "sneaky". They did not, drivers complained, give them a "sporting chance" of slowing down, before speeding off again.”Forty years ago Jane Jacobs showed how speeding traffic destroys street life (in The Death and Life of the Great American Cities) and also how you can win it back by slowing the traffic down. In those forty years we've learnt nothing. Worse, we've surrendered our streets to the cars entirely and now we have to put up with their owners whinging continually about 'hidden' speed cameras while the pedestrians cower, stranded on the pavement.
Making of the Macintosh
I've used and owned Macs since 1985. Although they're pretty hip again these days (after a miserable decade or so of nasty, beige things), the core of the Mac userbase is like me: old gits with hair growing out of their ears. We're stuck in our ways and we can't change now so that's that. The nice people at Stanford University Library are attempting a proper history of the machine's early days (as part of a larger project documenting Silicon Valley itself). There's some genuinely fascinating material here – memos, early sketches, engineering drawings, first person recollections. Thanks to LinkMachineGo for linking to The Making of Macintosh. Incidentally, I learn that, over the years, I've owned five of the Ten Worst Macs Ever. I'm selling two of them: an ugly all-in-one Performa 5320 and a lamentably underpowered IIvx.
November 15, 2002
Bioinformatics links
From an overview in last week's New Scientist:
Cytoscape, National Center for Biotechnology Information (US), European Bioinformatics Institute, Gene Ontology Consortium, Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure Consortium, The Center for Advancement of Genomics
November 14, 2002
Proof for posterity
Via warmbrain and Karlin Lillington I learn about a marvelous idea from supporters of Project Guttenberg: Distributed Proofreaders. It's got to be worth a few minutes of your day to proof a page or two of OCR output for the utterly worthy archive of out-of-copyright literature (whose collection is receding into the past as fast as the US Supreme Court can push it). Incidentally, I remember writing about Project Guttenberg in 3W Magazine about nine years ago.
November 13, 2002
Mememap
Er... Something tells me I'm a bit slow off the mark here but this mindmap of current memes looks pretty useful. I was just struggling to name the 'space' described by the map but, of course, the map pretty much takes care of that itself and, like all good maps, is irreducible. So I won't bother. I bet you could plan your next business venture/career change using this.
November 12, 2002
Grocery heroes
The people at Ocado seem to have got it about right. With the help of a substantial investment from Waitrose, they've built a home delivery service that doesn't require you to know exactly how to spell 'brocolli', that delivers for nothing if you spend over £75, that allows you to book slots in one hour increments and that delivers at 10 p.m. if you forget about Olly's football practice and can't be in when you said you would...
Better Booth
Thanks to Quinquireme, for a much better and more searchable Booth site at the LSE (I mean better than the one I used the other day)
November 11, 2002
The Economist on migration
I've just finished reading The Economist's blockbuster survey on migration. More very good work developing the newspaper's line on the liberalisation of migration as a benefit to both nations (receiving and sending) and peoples (likewise). As I have said before (in August and in September), this issue is more important than we think and we allow the politicians to hijack it to meet their short-term (very short-term in this context) needs at our peril. Europe's population is about to enter a very long decline. Even the new entrants from the East cannot slow the long term fall since their birth rates are already too low. Meanwhile, the only Western nation bucking the trend, the USA, could easily have 500 million inhabitants by mid-century. The economic implications are obvious.
While the USA and the emerging economies grow strongly, slow-growth Europe can only fall further and further behind. You don't need to share The Economist's free trader stance to recognise the stark stupidity of turning away willing, young workers at the border while our economies stagnate. We can only hope that the penny drops for European Governments before the current flow of eager migrants has lost interest and moved on to more attractive destinations. Reversing a nation's (or an entire economic bloc's) stance on immigration is not easy with the emotional stakes so high but the implications of getting it wrong – a shrinking and ever-more-irrelevant European economy – are too grim to contemplate.
November 09, 2002
Touring Machine
Via Matt, I learn that Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, Dutch computer science pioneer, recently deceased, achieved in his lifetime two citations in the OED – for first use of the words 'vector' and 'stack' in a computing context. I also learn that his beloved VW Camper Van was called the 'Touring Machine'.
Architects and housing
The last time professional architects were allowed to design housing on a large scale in Britain they did more damage than the blitz, snuffing out historic street patterns and fracturing communities in their fervour to 'improve the lives' of the poor. That anyone is seriously thinking about letting the architects have another go is testament to the urgency of our need.Experts (demographers, mostly) tell us we're going to need 3.8 million new homes in the next couple of decades. Old people and single person households are to blame. We're currently replacing our housing stock so slowly that every house that's currently standing will need to keep doing so for about 1,000 years to cope even with current demand.
An exhibition at the RIBA shows a dozen or so medium-to-large housing projects designed by a new breed of 'architect-planners', people sensitive to social and human context as well as to the purity of form. Keywords for the projects on show are 'sustainable', 'flexible', 'self-organising', 'human scale'.
The signs are encouraging: there's nothing programmatic, ideological or arrogant about these schemes – although inevitably much that is fashionable. Mistakes will still be made but in this more modestly-scaled work, they should be self-limiting. Feedback loops will be short enough to encourage constant revision of the master plan and prevent the decades of blight that overcame the huge post-war housing estates. Some projects are even flexible enough to be continuously reworked in response to new demands – walls can be erected to add rooms as kids arrive, a lift punched through the ceiling as occupants age and can't use the stairs – all without planning permission or a structural engineer.
A new house building boom is about to begin and, on the strength of this exhibition, it might turn out to be a renaissance for the professionals.
November 07, 2002
Azeem Azhar is out of control
Azeem is developing his BBC GPL idea slightly more quickly than I can read all the words. For the time being I'll just link and trackback to shut him up. This is essential reading, people! Comments later.
Break up BT?
Last night I spoke at the launch of Demos' latest report 'The Politics of Broadband'. The authors have been bold in their conclusions (and perhaps incautious in their choice of sponsor) but we should expect that of a Think Tank whose average age seems to be about 19 (I make this observation because I am old and bitter). They've absorbed all the latest thinking from the US – Lessig, Open Spectrum, the 'Innovation Commons' and they want Government to get on and break up BT to dissolve the innovation log jam and get broadband roll-out moving. From the platform, Stephen Timms was nicer about this idea than I'd expected of the ecommerce minister (but it's still a 'no') and Graham Wallace, who runs Cable & Wireless (the incautiously chosen sponsor), made a good case for the break-up (but then he would, wouldn't he). From the floor, Clare Spottiswoode, who, in an earlier life, split up Gas supply for the last Tory Government, couldn't understand why it would be any more complicated to split up BT than British Gas and pointed to the wave of innovation and price cuts that followed that break-up. Wallace went further and argued that it would be 'easy' to split up the giant incumbent because of the elaborate system of interconnect agreements already in place at the telephone exchanges. There was no consensus, though. Robin Mansell, Professor of New Media & The Internet at the LSE, was against – too complicated and disruptive by far. The most cogent argument against came from Claire Enders: the capital markets will have the casting vote, since they'll have to fund the break-up, and they're still on strike so we might as well forget it. I think it's unwise to bet on apocalyptic infrastructural change to help us get Broadband Britain rolling while the tech and comms economy is still deep frozen. We're going to need to be more tactical and less scornful of 'incremental change'.
Information about energy
Matt Jones has been worrying about information and energy lately. Here are some energy links for him. According to New Scientist (you can get a free 7 day trial for the NS archives or, if you subscribe to the magazine there's no charge) Eric Schneider and James Kay think the biologists (and the rest of us, for that matter) have got it wrong about life. We're not here to reproduce, we're here to tear up energy, to accelerate the rate of increase of disorder. All of life is just a big entropy machine. This sounds like one of those ideas that'll be orthodoxy in twenty years. Meanwhile, also from New Scientist, chemical physicists in Australia have shown that, at micron scales and over periods of time as long as a couple of seconds, the second law works in reverse. Blimey.
November 05, 2002
Fireworks therapy
So after two or three hours running up and down the garden in the fine drizzle, lighting fireworks of every variety (including some huge roman candle bundles about the size of a fire bucket), I can confirm that my favourite is the Angry Wasps Mine from Standard Fireworks. It produces a gorgeous fountain of multi-coloured sparks for about 30 seconds and then stops... for just long enough to convince you that it's all over. The bang that follows is awesome – the percussion, even from the regulation 25 yards, is startling – a big shove in the chest that leaves everyone laughing and grinning like fools. Speaking as your doctor, I suggest you get a big box of these things and keep them handy for those slow days...
edemocracy spiked!
Spiked is run by the survivors of Living Marxism magazine, the high profile and often entertaining voice of the British Revolutionary Communist Party during the nineties. The magazine was finally steam-rollered by a law suit in 2000 but these guys were always more switched on than the rest of the hopeless hard left so it's no surprise to see them back with a stylish, readable web site and now a series of debates on the entirely relevant theme of IT after the crash.
Spiked's mission is the debunking of trendy ideas – in politics, science, business, anywhere really. But this is really just classical entryism – a subtle and accessible way of doing the important work of blowing away our 'false consciousness' and reasserting the eternal oppositions of the class struggle – labour vs capital, state vs individual etc. (I can't find a trace of the political party itself. Was it wound up? Surely it can't be this lot?).
I guess the logic of the project is that debunking is infectious: for every orthodoxy persuasively overturned there is a potential convert to the larger cause. There really is nothing so satisfying as a cogently argued rubbishing of the status quo – whether it be climate change (it's not happening), edemocracy (it's just more state coercion) or testicular cancer (it's no big deal).
As a strategy it's obviously working. If tonight's meeting was anything to go by, they're frequented by plenty of non RCP people, many of whom may have no idea what Spiked stands for and little or no sympathy with their goals (like me). More subtle still, with no actual political party to push, Spiked can rightly claim to be entirely independent and new recruits are recruits to a way of thinking rather than to a political creed. Very postmodern.
In this debate, Charlie Leadbeater, advisor to number 10 and prominent optimist, argued that informal, self-organising digital networks (like this blogging thing) might present a way of holding governments and trans-national institutions to account. Influential forecaster James Woodhuysen, for Spiked, disagreed – entertaingly, as always. edemocracy is phoney – worse, it's a barely disguised attempt to reinforce state control, provide new channels for coercion and permit governments to steamroller dissent. All of this communication is just a smokescreen, a clever distraction from the real business (in 'the real world') of production – substituting participation for real power. This programmatic emphasis of production over communication (content over form, real over imaginary) is sooo last century and, paradoxically, neglects the actual, lived reality of networked communications. Leadbeater is on the money here.
November 04, 2002
The downtown music scene after 9/11
I sometimes listen to Radio 3's Mixing It. Usually stimulating stuff – experimental music from every corner of the scene and only occasionally po-faced and a bit nerdy. This week I stumbled across a web page about their visit to NYC in August 2002. They recorded a one-off programme with members of the downtown music scene, many of whom lived and worked within a few blocks of the WTC – Sonic Youth in Murray Street, Laurie Anderson in Greenwich Street, for instance. The programme is excellent – you can listen to it in Real Audio. Some of the artists interviewed have obviously had their worlds turned upside down by the event. Others do that amazing thing that only artists and egomaniacs can do – coming through a world-changing trauma worldview, prejudices and ego intact – "yeah. It was a nightmare. And now I'm mostly working with tabla and tape loops..."
November 03, 2002
fireworks-cam
If you time it carefully and the whole thing hasn't been washed into the river by the already torential rainstorm here in Radlett, you might catch our garden fireworks display live on the Shedcam from 1730 – 1900-ish this evening. I've upped the timing on the cam and pointed it out the shed window. I guess actually catching a burst on the cam would be a one-in-a-million chance but I don't suppose you've got anything better to do this evening have you?
An Open Source BBC?
Azeem has kicked off a provocative to-and-fro from some of the big brains about the BBC's role in the post-crash Internet.
I'm a busy man - I'm nearly forty and I've never lit a firework in my life (can that be true?) and this evening I have to light lots of them. So, here are some disconnected thoughts:
1. Has the market failed? There are lot of fancy words – mostly borrowed from economics – in this debate and two of them – 'market failure' – make me uncomfortable. It's much too early to tell that we're seeing any kind of systematic failure here. A market crash is not the same as a market failure. We mustn't allow our frustrated and (admit it) utopian geek-longing for better tools, fatter pipes or social transformation to convince us that we're at the end of anything. Seriously: we probably need at least another decade before we can be sure that the current, messy mix of provision cannot deliver our nirvana of interconnection, participation and empowerment (that's not an excuse to wait ten years, btw).
2. Politics. The BBC might be the right vehicle for this laudable goal – or it might not. There's a critical difference between picking the right agency or mix of agencies and levers to deliver a social policy goal and pragmatically making use of a big, powerful, politically bullet-proof institution like the current BBC to do it. Although the latter might make sense now – especially while this kind of thinking is gaining ground within the Beeb – it might just be storing up problems – both practical and political – for future generations of citizens and market players. I happen to think that we should probably seize the opportunity of a pumped-up, inflation-protected BBC to at least make a start on the infrastructure for participation but I think we must be practical and limit our ambitions – the better to realise them fully in the future. Piggy-backing the BBC makes sense right now but not because the market has failed, rather because the market is in the doldrums and we need to make some progress while the Venture Capitalists are still on strike.
3. Government neglect. Since we may have to wait a long time to see how this all pans out, we need to get started now on embedding the goals of the 'connectivists' (or whatever we will call people of this general mindset) in the right places: public policy, media, corporate and BBC strategy. For this reason, I'll link to my alarm from a couple of months ago at the total exclusion of the net from the scope of the new UK Communications Bill and from the super-regulator OfCom. The Government at least has to be paying attention in this crucial phase. Benign neglect has had its day.
4. Long-range thinking needed. Since I'm on record as arguing for seven or eight years now that the BBC is the best-placed agency to pursue some of the goals of the connectivists, it's interesting to reverse the telescope for a minute and look at this from the BBC's perspective. I'm ill-qualified to do so but there must a nagging worry in the minds of the more forward-thinking Beebistas that this period of plenty cannot last and that, when it comes to an end, the outlook for a huge, content-focused state broadcaster may not look at all rosy. The BBC needs some good long-range thinking. This is a good start.
November 02, 2002
Digital divide – approx. 3000 miles wide
One look at this map (From the Public Internet Project via Werblog) showing Manhattan's wi-fi nodes should be enough to prove that the biggest digital divide of all is the one that runs roughly North-South down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. What would a similar map of London, Paris or Berlin look like? Sparse, I'll bet. The distribution of nodes within Manhattan also speaks volumes of the divide at ground level, though. If I remember rightly, the big, empty zone at top right is dominated by social housing likely to be light on Wi-Fi. The graphic recalls Booth's extraordinary 1889 map of London, visualising Victorian urban poverty for the first time in startling, block-by-block detail. (got this wrong yesterday and credited the maps to Mayhew who wrote about the London poor. Luckily nobody visits this weblog so I think I got away with it).
November 01, 2002
This is fun...
iTunes playlists are becoming an obsession. Here's my "sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers" list – every track that features one of those words in its ID3 tags. For some reason, these lists make for a much more provocative listen that just randomising the whole library. Click MORE... to see the list.