Remembering an event before it has happened

Yesterday I attended the latest seminar in the ESRC Ethics and the ‘War on Terror’ series. The focus was the human dimension of the war. Human rights specialists, military officers, a military chaplain and academics debated current experiences of soldiers and their families, of those arrested and deported under new anti-terror legislation, and explored the ethical responses open to us as citizens. One paper dealt explicitly with the role of media in these processes. Andrew Hoskins spoke of a moral obligation to remember that is often presented to news audiences around the time of memorialisations of old and recent wars and catastrophes. He argued that new media technologies have enabled a speeding up of memorialisation. While every village in Britain may have had a memorial built some time after World War I, today we remember through media, and massive digital archives and mobile media technologies mean we have an overabundance of witness testimony and moving images of recent events. Hence the 7/7 London bombings of July 2005 were memorialised comprehensively one year on, but by July 2007 there was not much left to say. 9/11 is not an event for historians, Hoskins argued; we have already had all the documentaries and retrospectives we need for us to know what happened.

But what does this mean in a war on terror context, when both that ‘war’ and the 2003 Iraq War seem to be without end? It seems we cannot wait for a point in the future that is sufficiently distant to allow for retrospective analysis. This logic was explored in an exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) last year, which invited artists to create memorials to the ongoing Iraq War – to remember an event that was still going on. So is the moral obligation to remember now one that holds before wars have ended? If so, memorialisation is not part of retrospective political debates over the meaning of events, but part of the ongoing scrutiny and contestation of how events are proceeding and how policy might be changed. The rapid acceleration of memorialisation to the point it occurs within the timeframe of the event memorialised means that very memorialisation can alter the course of the events themselves.

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This logic can be carried further. In Television and Terror, Hoskins and I investigated how media now explore how events play out even before they occur – and even if they never occur; how the 7/7 London bombings were so extensively trailed through ‘scenario documentaries’ and TV dramas that citizens, emergency services and political leaders were already familiar with the event as it unfolded. Ethical questions emerge here too: do we have a moral obligation to respond to these predicted or ‘pre-mediated’ events? Is this another way in which media technologies alter the temporality of political contestation in the post 9/11 era? And do we have a duty to debate and shape the development of media technologies themselves which are transforming politics in these ways? There is a need to explore these questions if we are to respond ethically and effectively in this new environment.

The seminar series is organised by Gillian Youngs, Simon Caney and Heather Widdows. The next seminar will be held in Birmingham on 14 March, where the focus will be multiculturalism and the war on terror.

What's wrong with John Kerry's emails?

Something quite strange is going on with John Kerry's emails, but I'm afraid I'm not enough of a techie to explain it. In 2004, John Kerry constructed a huge email list, rumoured to have 3 million members. Since then, the Senator has used the list to send out appeals to support and, in particular money, on behalf of Democrats running in key races, most notably during the 2006 midterms.

Yesterday, Kerry announced that he would be supporting Barack Obama for the Presidency and sent out a similar appeal:

Hi Friend,

Martin Luther King said, “The time is always right to do what is right.” So I'm choosing this time to share an important decision I've made, one I believe is right for this country.

The JohnKerry.com community has been very important to me and very important to the Democratic resurgence over the last couple of years, so I wanted to let all of you know my decision before I confirm it with anyone else. I want to share with you my conviction that in a field of fine Democratic candidates, the next President of the United States can be, should be, and will be Barack Obama. Each of our candidates would make a fine President, and we are blessed with a strong field. But for this moment, at this time in our nation's history, Barack Obama is the right choice.

Please join me in supporting Barack Obama’s candidacy.

I’m proud to have helped introduce Barack to our nation when I asked him to speak to our national convention, and there Barack's words and vision burst out. On that day he reminded Americans that our “true genius is faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles.” And with his leadership we can build simple dreams, and we can turn millions of small miracles into real change for our country.

At this particular moment, with our country faced with great challenges in our economy, in our environment, and in our foreign policy, and with our politics torn by division, Barack Obama can bring transformation to our country. With Barack, we can build a new majority of Americans from all regions who can turn the page on the politics of Karl Rove and begin a new politics, one worthy of our nation's history and promise. We can bring millions of disaffected people – young and old – to the great task of governing and making a difference, child to child, community to community.

Please click here to give what you can to Barack Obama’s campaign for President and help build this future for our country.

The moment is now, and the candidate for this moment is Barack Obama. Like him, I also lived abroad as a young man, and I share with him a healthy respect for the advantage of knowing other cultures and countries, not from a book or a briefing, but by personal experience, by gut, by instinct. He knows the issues from the deep study of a legislator, and he knows them from a life lived outside of Washington. His is the wisdom of real-world experience combined with the intellect of a man who has thought deeply about the challenges we face.

History has given us this moment. But we need to decide what to do with it. I believe, with this moment, we should make Barack Obama President of the United States.

Please join me in supporting his campaign.

Thank you,
John Kerry

I was on the train at the time the email came out, so read it on my phone. I thought it was quite interesting, so tried to forward it on to a few people. However, when I clicked the forward button, here's what I saw:

REMOVE THE ROADBLOCKS!

It's time to get things moving in the Senate again.

In 2008, we need to remove the Roadblock Republicans and replace them with good, progressive Democrats instead.

Click here to help make it happen!

Dear Friend,

Real short -- here's what it comes down to. Yesterday I sat down with my team at johnkerry.com and we started to type up an email detailing all the ways the Roadblock Republicans have tried to block progress in the Senate & it was quite a list.

I fought for 13 years in the minority to stop Republicans from doing bad things, we broke the bank here at johnkerry.com in 2006 to win a majority to make good things happen, but still the Republicans are standing the way.

And you already know what's not getting done. You don't need a long explanation of the tricks the Republicans are playing to block action. All that really counts is the result, right?

And you're already feeling the impact of the good things these Republicans have stopped us from doing -- on Iraq, on global climate change, on energy policy, and on childrens' health care.

You don't need another laundry list -- you just need a roadmap to changing the Senate. And that starts by changing more Senators. Repeat what you did in 2006. Grow that majority.

It's that simple, and it's that challenging -- we need to make 2008 the year we break the back of the Bush Republican Party, and give the next Democratic President in 2009 a Senate that will be an ally for change.

Where to start? Dig in to give what you can to help some great Democrats who are running to pick up Republican seats in the Senate.

Follow this link to learn more about Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire, Mark Udall in Colorado, Tom Allen in Maine, and Jeff Merkely in Oregon. They're all good, progressive voices, and if we elect them all to the Senate, we'll have gone a long way in forcing a new direction in our country.

But it won't happen just by wishing for it -- we need to work as hard as we can to do it, so please give what you can.

Thanks for your help,

John Kerry

I did actually forward the email to my account, and sure enough, this second, ghost email appeared, not the original support Barack Obama appeal. I really didn't understand what was going on, so I went and played with the email a bit in a few different formats. I use Thunderbird, and it seems that when the reader is set to plain text, the wrong email appeared. I then forwarded it to a webmail account, which likewise showed the wrong email.

It seems that the John Kerry people are using some kind of underlying template where the text has not been replaced and that, in certain circumstances, appears instead of the overlaid HTML message (if anyone can offer a better technical explanation, I would be grateful). Pretty careless of someone. It also says something quite interesting about John Kerry's email list - it is, unlike the Howard Dean or Ron Paul's fundraising network very hierarchical and doesn't, to a great degree, rely on virality. After all, if it did, surely people would have noticed the problem that occurred when forwarding the email?

Interesting developments at AOL News

While there have been sceptics, something interesting is going on at AOL News. Most noteworthy are a) the very tight integration of user interaction with the story itself and b) the ability to "switch off" user comments. The first is classic low threshold web 2.0 but the second is obviously a response to perceptions of information pollution caused by user comments. Having said that, the comments facility on the site is slick and commenting volumes on some of the stories are very high indeed.

[Crossposted at my Internet Politics blog]

Testing the wisdom of crowds

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Only hours to go until the American presidential election kicks of for real in Iowa. Anyone else excited?

Of course, it should be noted that Iowa is a notoriously unpredictable place. This is because the event being run isn't a primary (New Hampshire has the honour of holding the first one of those) but a caucus. This is a very different form of democracy - very old-fashioned, very participatory. This also reduces the turnout. Indeed, this event - which is being covered by thousands of news people from all over the world, and has cost millions and millions of dollars - will likely only have (at the absolute most) a couple of hundred thousand people involved in it.

This also makes polling very, very difficult. In 2004, the Des Moines Register got a lot of kudos because it got things pretty much right in the run up to the contest - notably picking up the late rise of John Edwards through the field. Furthermore, a recent poll organised by opinion polling blogger Mark Blumenthal found that the Des Moines Register poll, undertaken by Selzer, was the most reliable in the field. A couple of days, then, the Register published its much anticipated last pre-Iowa poll. And the results were as follows:

Barack Obama - 32
Hillary Clinton - 25
John Edwards - 24

Mike Huckabee - 32
Mitt Romney - 26
John McCain - 13

The Democratic side of the poll has proved particularly controversial, with both the Clinton and Edwards campaign issuing immediate press releases rebutting some of the findings of the poll (for example, Clinton's pollster, Mark Penn). In particular, Obama's majority in the Selzer poll is largely constructed from a very high number of independents and even Republicans who said they were willing to come out and vote for him. And when I say high, I mean high - 45 per cent of the total predicted turnout. So, the argument goes, these numbers are flawed because, when push-comes-to-shove and its snowing in Iowa, these people won't turnout. We have to be careful here, there is a lot of spin doing the rounds, but the criticism does seem to make some sense. In 2004, for example, independents and GOP voters only constituted 19 per cent of caucus goers. At the very least, if Obama wins the caucus in the way that the Register poll suggest, it will be nothing short of a seismic event in American politics.

It is the question of turnout - and the unpredictability of it in a caucus environment - that perhaps does most to explain the extreme variance across the polls. At the same time as the Register poll came out, CNN were publishing another poll, which showed this:

Hillary Clinton - 33
Barack Obama - 31
John Edwards - 22

Mitt Romney - 31
Mike Huckabee - 28
Fred Thompson - 13
John McCain - 10

So what's the alternative? In a ridiculously ambitious (and, as it turned out, moderately time consuming) experiment I thought I would it would be fun to take the pollsters on with a different method - by harnessing the wisdom of crowds. I was flicking around the web, when I noticed that the Washington Post Fix blog had published a "predict the result" column. This was racking up dozens of predictions. So I copied and pasted them into an excel spreadsheet and then calculated the averages (the last comment I sampled was hal24, posted at 3:24 pm). Actually, the Fix column also has expert predictions on it, so this is in fact a test of three methods - pollsters, expert picks and the crowd. Here's the collective outcome of Fix commentators:

Barack Obama - 31.6
Hillary Clinton - 28.7
John Edwards - 27.9
[n = 75]

Mitt Romney - 29.9
Mike Huckabee - 29.5
John McCain - 18.5
[n = 69]

(Here is the spreadsheet with the workings, plus a proper comparison with the media polls).

The crowd results lead to a number of conclusions:

  • Barack Obama will win for the Democrats, with a solid margin over Hillary Clinton.
  • Mitt Romney will see off Huckabee in a very tight race.
  • Edwards will do considerably better than the pollsters predict.
  • John McCain will do considerably better than the pollsters predict.

It is these last two predictions that are perhaps most interesting, as that is where we see the greatest divergence between pollsters and the predictions of the Fix's readers, especially in the case of John McCain.

There are plenty of reasons to doubt the ability of the crowd - they might be multiple posting, many of them will have candidate preferences, their views might be warped by who can post at any given time - but it is still an interesting experiment. We'll have to wait until tomorrow morning to find out exactly who got it right though.

 

The media hierarchy: who is borrowing from who?

Parody is, apparently, the sincerest form of flattery. But exactly who is parodying who says a lot about power and hierarchy. Once upon a time, if you logged into YouTube, you could have been sure of finding a host of parodies of plays, TV programmes, films and pieces of music, all put together by a group of amateurs. 

However, I was watching the Simpson's the other week (we are a bit behind anyone in the US - I suspect you would have got this a few months back), and I saw something interesting - the relationship has started to go the other way. In other words, old media forms (in this case, TV) have started to parody YouTube and particularly famous films stored there. This is interesting, as it shows the extent that YouTube has become embedded in our culture. It's not just that the Simpsons' writers use it, but that they know their audience will get the gag. What is most astonishing is the speed at which this has happened. Here's the original film and the Simpons clip.

 

 

PS. Oh, and a happy new year to everyone!  

BBC goes web 2.0

For an organisation that once insisted that radio news readers had to wear dinner jackets whilst delivering a bulletin, the BBC now seems to be making very brave advances into the world of web 2.0. Of course, the BBC website has been a global market leader for a number of years. However, I've always had the sense that it tended to rely on quantity of information, rather than any particularly flash web aps to achieve this (as well as piggy backing on the BBC's already well-established news and information gathering networks).

Now though, new innovations seem to really be harnessing the capabilities of the web to distribute this information in different ways. I first noticed this a couple of weeks back when I discovered that BBC Politics had set up a twitter feed, and have been regularly updating it with short banner headlines (which also link to the main story via tiny urls). It's obvious what this service has been set up to do - give people access to mobile news whilst they are on the go via RSS. And for that it is a brilliant service. 

Today, I logged onto the BBC website, and they were touting the beta version of their new website. It allows you to drag and drop different content boxes, so as select which aspects of the news your want to focus (my page will now, for example, always prioritise cricket, technology and politics headlines over others items), and receive updates from BBC journalists who blog.  For anyone who uses bloglines or even Google homepage, the features on it won't be very new. But it always seemed that lots of the web 2.0 stuff we speak about a lot (RSS maybe being the classic example) has never really penetrated into the consciousness of the mass of the population. However, with a major organisation like the BBC pushing these capabilities, it can really start to make a difference to the way media is consumed.

Media and terror: New book and journal

Media coverage of war and terrorism continues to raise ethical dilemmas for journalists and news producers. From the risk to journalists of reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan to decisions about rebroadcasting ‘citizen journalist’ footage, Al-Qaeda propaganda videos or hostage tapes, every week brings new difficulties about how to convey news in a credible way to increasingly distrustful and choosy audiences. These dilemmas were discussed on Tuesday 11th December by media professionals and academics at a debate entitled ‘Media and Terror’, at the Frontline Club in London.

Led by Dr. Ben O’Loughlin of Royal Holloway, University of London and Dr. Andrew Hoskins, Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Warwick, the debate marked the launch of a new journal entitled Media, War and Conflict published by Sage and a new research monograph by Hoskins and O’Loughlin entitled Television and Terror: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse, published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Hoskins and O’Loughlin argue that television news since 9/11 has been marked by a series of uncertainties about the representation of terrorism and war. O’Loughlin spoke about ways for news media to convey events in a form that enable news consumers to engage with distant suffering and conflict. If events are presented as open to political intervention – that policy dilemmas remain unsolved, and a difference can still be made– this reduces the likelihood of compassion fatigue, fatalism and disengagement among news viewers. However, in Television and Terror Hoskins and O’Loughlin explain why it is that just as news brings the world’s wars and catastrophes onto the West’s horizon of responsibility, it simultaneously blocks them from clear view, failing to provide proportionate analysis of whether Western interventions are succeeding or what success might mean.

Other speakers included Prof. Philip Seib of the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California , Prof. James Gow of King’s College, London , and Prof. Stuart Croft of the University of Warwick and Director of the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) New Security Challenges programme. The event was sponsored by the ESRC, Sage, Palgrave Macmillan, and Routledge.

Studies in Digital Politics: A New Book Series from Oxford University Press USA - Series Editor: Andrew Chadwick

Studies in Digital Politics

A New Book Series from Oxford University Press USA

Series Editor: Andrew Chadwick, Royal Holloway, University of London

Digital communication technologies are now central to our understanding of political, social, economic, and cultural life. Initiated in December 2007, this book series will bring together scholars with an interest in understanding the information and communication environments which shape - and are shaped by - politics and policy-making. The series will be concerned with theoretical and conceptual debates, political institutions and behavior, and policy issues. It will provide an important, high-profile publishing outlet for a range of talented authors, both established and up-and-coming.

Books in the series will analyze the politics of new communication technologies, broadly defined. Books will summarize and criticize existing literature as well as provide new departures. The field itself is currently undergoing a shift, as the impact of web 2.0, social networking, citizen journalism and related trends requires fresh perspectives.
 
For further details and information on how to submit a proposal, please download the guidance (pdf).

 

16 days of action for Darfur

A really interesting Facebook powered campaign organised by the people at Globe for Darfur. A while back they created a group called 16 Days of Action and started recruiting people to join it.  The aim of the group was to get members to engage in 16 forms of activism over 16 days, such as sending a video for Darfur, posting a blog entry about the crisis, and phoning your political representatives.

What is interesting about this campaign is that it seems to be wholly Facebook based (the only url on the press release launching it is the Facebook address). I reckon this can be interpreted in two ways (which aren't mutually exclusive).  It can certainly be seen as an inspired or powerful use of social networking to cheaply and quickly organise a campaign.  But additionally, it has to be asked whether it excludes people who don't use Facebook from participating - and in the process, overlooks potential supporters.