Author: JP

Musing about the internet and politics

When I spent time studying change management, two aspects of the process intrigued me.

One, there was a lot of talk about “sustaining” the change of the S-curve, making sure that it didn’t decay back into the original position over time. And consultants earned a lot of money advising people how to make the change sustainable.

Two, there was growing evidence that there was a need for people who dealt with the “toxins” that emerged when “systems” (of people, processes, technology and culture) were put under the severe stress of radical change. And, as with most things consultant, a vogue phrase was created for the person who did this: the toxic handler.

Now that dates me, I’m probably using jargon that is at least 20 years old, but then that was the time I learnt about change management. But anyway.

I’m fascinated by the possibility that the internet will really start impacting people’s lives from a governmental perspective, that democracy will finally become participative. Tools alone can’t make this happen, neither can sympathetic regulation. As we found out in the world of finance, wanting individual share ownership to increase may be a laudable aim; yet, if you look at the UK, it would appear that private individual shareholdings actually declined over the last 40 years despite regulation and technology.

Why am I so fascinated by this possibility of internet-enabled democracy? I think part of the answer is because it would sound the death-knell of party politics, and I am not a big fan of party politics. I detest false polarisations, yet I am surrounded by them. And party politics tends to drive people towards these polarisations.

That’s why I was so interested in what Ivo Gormley was doing, why I was keen on supporting Us Now. It is important to discuss the art of the possible in the context of democracy and the internet, and to know what won’t work and why.

Anyway, with all this as background, I was on the lookout for detailed analysis of the Obama campaign from a post-event perspective. Was the campaign the beginning of something, or the end? Were we going to see a less apathetic, more engaged, voter population as Obama enters his presidency? Would the voters expect more from Obama as a result of the engagement they’d already had, and if so what? Would the internet continue to be centre stage amongst Obama volunteers? What would all this mean?

So I was delighted to see this piece of research from Pew Internet: Post-Election Voter Engagement. Here’s the summary:

Voters expect that the level of public engagement they experienced with Barack Obama during the campaign, much of it occurring online, will continue into the early period of his new administration. A majority of Obama voters expect to carry on efforts to support his policies and try to persuade others to back his initiatives in the coming year; a substantial number expect to hear directly from Obama and his team; and a notable cohort say they have followed the transition online.

I think all three of the findings above bode well for the future. One, that the level of engagement, particularly online engagement, will continue into the presidency itself. This is a good thing, a simple leading indicator of the sustainability of the change taking place. Two, that the voters expect to continue to engage directly with Obama. Again a good thing, shows that the democratisation taking place is not transient, has a chance of becoming permanent. And three, that the transition itself is being followed online; the internet will continue to be centre stage.

The signs of sustainability of change are good. Which only leaves me wondering about the toxins that will emerge (there is no doubt about their existence, just about their timing) and where the toxic handlers are going to be found.

In the meantime, I am encouraged. Thank you Pew Internet.

Musing about Peccavi and Twitter and accessibility

I was born in Calcutta, the city that served as British India’s capital for the majority of the Raj years, born a bare ten years after India gained independence from the Empire. British India was still very much a part of people’s lives when I was growing up, with tales, often apocryphal, of unusual events and traditions.

One of the Raj “traditions” that used to make me laugh was the insistence that the First Secretary of the Bengal Government could not see visitors until after he’d fiinished the day’s Times crossword. Never proven, but fun to think about, particularly if you were in a queue in Writers’ Building.

There were many apocryphal stories; one set (of three stories) in particular was of considerable interest to me, given my passion for words and puzzles.

  • Charles Napier, when capturing the province of Sindh in 1843, was meant to have sent a telegram with just one word on it: Peccavi.
  • Colin Campbell, similarly, is meant to have sent one that just said Nunc Fortunatus Sum when he arrived in Lucknow.
  • And, to complete the set, Lord Dalhousie is credited with sending just Vovi when annexing Oudh.

Peccavi. I have sinned. Nunc Fortunatus Sum. I am in luck now. Vovi. I have vowed.

There are many arguments as to whether any of these events actually happened, with people focusing on particular angels and particular pins. For example, it is said that a 17-year old girl named Catherine Winkworth wrote in to Punch to say that Napier should have said Peccavi, and that the Punch cartoon published in May 1844 was directly as a result of the letter, that Napier never said it.

I don’t know the answer, there is no evidence that Napier actually sent the telegram. But there is evidence that Napier was born in Whitehall, that he went to school in Celbridge in Eire, a place with a history of 5000 years of habitation, a place that had a school since 1709, that “Ireland’s richest man” then, William “Speaker” Conolly, built his mansion there at the turn of the 18th century. So there is some likelihood that Napier was educated enough to have said it. As I study the other pronouncements attributed to Napier, I tend to have some sympathy with the view that he actually sent the message, even if Miss Winkworth did write a letter a year later.

For the purposes of this post, it doesn’t actually matter whether Napier said it or not. What matters is the accessibility of the story.

In the past, the Peccavi story would only have made sense to people who understood Latin and who had a facility with Empire history and geography. A limited set of people.

Today, if Napier were alive and he used Twitter to send his message, he could have sent one that looked like this:

This ability to compress context and associate it with communication is critical. It is an example of what David Weinberger was referring to when he said “Hyperlinks subvert hierarchies”.

The implications for accessibility should not be underestimated. In the past, Peccavi was an “in” joke amongst well-read people. Now, it can be shared by all, with links providing the context and background required to “understand the joke”.

I think this is a big deal. It is one of the reasons why the web is different, the ability to associate content and communication with compressed context.

Going mobile

I’m going home
And when I want to go home, I’m going mobile
Well I’m gonna find a home on wheels, see how it feels,
Goin’ mobile
Keep me moving

Going Mobile (The Who, Who’s Next, 1971)

Pete Townshend was writing about a different type of “mobile” at the time, but that doesn’t matter, I’m prepared to exploit even the slightest opportunity to refer to one of the greatest albums ever. If you haven’t listened to Who’s Next yet, don’t waste any more time. Stop reading this and do the decent thing.

On the other hand, if, like many regular readers of this blog, you’re quite familiar with the album and its delights, then read on. For the purpose of this post is actually shown in the diagram below:

Taken from Good Magazine, it looks at the best and the worst countries seen from the specific perspectives of internet access and mobile handsets in use. You can see the original chart here.

I found three aspects of the chart intriguing:

  • One, the mobile statistics seemed far more revealing than the internet ones, overall.
  • Two, there were some unexpected names in the mobile top 10. For example, I was not expecting to see Antigua and Barbuda there, particularly when there is no other Caribbean country represented.
  • Three, the mobile bottom 10 made very depressing reading. Too high a correlation between the lack of freedom, economic weakness and mobile scarcity. There is more here than a simple digital divide argument.

I need to spend more time on it before I comment further, but felt that a number of you would be interested in the information even at this stage.

Musing lazily about catch-and-release and its application in the digital world

Some time ago I had the opportunity to go fly fishing for the first time, in the Provo, near Salt Lake City in Utah. It was an exhilarating experience, just what I needed at that particular time in my life. I hope to repeat the experience soon.

Beginner’s luck meant that I caught quite a few fish that day. Something far more important happened to me that day, though. I learnt about the joy of catch-and-release firsthand. There was something immensely satisfying about the process of making sure you took the hook out carefully, then let the fish go and watched it disappear at speed. There was a real sense of stewardship when you did it. In fact the whole experience was about stewardship. You had to be licensed before you fished, which meant there was some modicum of accountability and responsibility for the environment even before you began. It made sense that the money collected for the licence would go towards the upkeep of the environment. When you entered the water, you could see just how pure and clear it was, an eye-opening experience for someone like me, brought up with the Hooghly as the river of reference.

More recently, I was checking out how BookCrossing was doing. 735,000 members in 130 countries. Not bad. If you don’t know what BookCrossing is, here’s what they say on the site:

BookCrossing is earth-friendly, and gives you a way to share your books, clear your shelves, and conserve precious resources at the same time. Through our own unique method of recycling reads, BookCrossers give life to books. A book registered on BookCrossing is ready for adventure.

Leave it on a park bench, a coffee shop, at a hotel on vacation. Share it with a friend or tuck it onto a bookshelf at the gym — anywhere it might find a new reader! What happens next is up to fate, and we never know where our books might travel. Track the book’s journey around the world as it is passed on from person to person.

Join hundreds of thousands of active BookCrossers daily in our many forums to discuss your favorite authors, characters and books in every genre throughout history right up through current releases.

Join BookCrossing Join BookCrossing. Help make the whole world a library and share the joy of literacy. Reading becomes an adventure when you BookCross!

Then, a day or two ago, I was browsing the Good Magazine site, and I saw this article. And in it BookCrossing was mentioned, using the phrase “read and release”.

And that made me think. I can only listen to only one thing at a time; I can only read one thing at a time; I can only watch one thing at a time; I can only mash up a small number of things at the same time.

Maybe I could buy the right to hold m songs and n books and p films “in the cloud” concurrently at any given time, as a bundle. Maybe, separately, I could buy the right to fiddle around with q digital objects at any given time, on an “if you change it you must pay for it” basis.

Maybe I can check these digital objects in and out as I please, constrained only by the total I can have, which in turn is related to the bundle I signed up for.

I’m still free to buy the physical disks as normal, this is just about cloud libraries. Maybe there’s room for a small number of players to be the safety deposit vaults for these digital objects, to collect the rents for their usage and to disburse it amongst the long tail of creators, much like a library would do. Maybe the Cloud gives us opportunities to do something about new business models for digital “content” by connecting price to capacity and metering usage simply as a result. [Yes I still believe there is a long tail, despite everything I have read. People are not measuring unfulfilled intentions properly, so the exercise often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for those that do not want the long tail to be true].

All this is amorphous, poorly formed, still inchoate. There’s just something about the catch-and-release model I like, something which I feel is applicable to digital objects. Something that resonates with the “extreme nonrival good” nature of information, particularly digital information.

So why am I sharing it here and now? Precisely because it is amorphous and poorly formed and inchoate. So that people like you can comment on it, criticise it, negate it, improve on it, make it your own, do something with it. Ideas are free. So steal this book.

As I said, musing lazily.

Donald E Westlake 1933-2008

Donald E Westlake, my all-time favourite mystery/thriller writer, died on 31st December 2008. A sad day for mystery fans everywhere.

Westlake was that rare beast, an author who was comfortable in multiple subgenres, each one completely different from the rest. He wrote true hardboiled mysteries under the name of Richard Stark, giving us the Parker series. He wrote wonderful traditional thrillers taking serious social issues and giving them the mystery treatment, books such as the Ax stand out in this context. He also turned out a number of screenplays, the most famous of which is “The Grifters”. He published over a hundred books under a dozen or so names. In the process he collected a whole pile of awards, winning Edgars in three different categories.

I’ve read every one of his books published so far (there is at least one more in the works, due this April), and have a number of his books signed by him. While I liked all of them, my true favourites were his caper novels, normally referred to as his Dortmunder series.

Just what is a caper novel? Let me try and explain.

Most crime novels are whodunits, where the storyline follows the discovery of crime(s) and then seeks to identify the perpetrator(s). Where the focus is on the general environment in which the crime took place, it’s a classic “mystery/thriller”, the main genre itself. Where the focus is on the process of “solving” the crime as if it were a puzzle, you could describe it as the subgenre of “detective fiction”, a la Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe or Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Where this solving process is described from the perspective of the forces of law and order, a la Ed McBain or Joseph Wambaugh, the book gets called a “police procedural”. If it is in the vein of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason through to the John Grishams of today, it would be called a “legal drama”. Sometimes the book is written in the first person by the criminal,  in a gritty and down-to-earth “authentic” style, as in the case of the classic Jim Thompson books or even Westlake’s own Richard Stark series: these tend to be called “hardboiled”. Much of what we call pulp fiction is hardboiled crime, and I’m delighted to see what Hard Case Crime has been doing to further this cause.

In all these cases, the crime itself tends to be committed opaquely, intransparently, and the plot revolves around finding out who did it.

The caper novel, on the other hand, is something else altogether. For one thing, it is written from the viewpoint of the criminal, the person or persons committing the crime. The crime itself is carried out in the open, completely transparently, there is no mystery about the perpetrator. The perpetrators tend to be less than perfect in their skill and in their execution, but this gets balanced off as a result of all other parties involved being similarly less than perfect: the victims, the forces of law and order, even the bystanders come with human failings and flaws.

Westlake’s John Dortmunder is the undisputed king of the caper novel.

I remember nearly doing myself an injury reading Bank Shot, one of Westlake’s early caper novels, while in my teens. The plot was simple, yet absurd. It was about a bank robbery. With a big but. Instead of robbing a bank, as you would normally expect, Westlake’s protagonists steal a bank, kit and caboodle. Now of course that meant they needed to find a bank that was housed temporarily in a portacabin, but that’s what literary licence is about, creating such an eventuality. Anyway, the police give chase while the criminals desperately try and break into the bank’s safe while careering down the motorway.

At the other extreme, more recently, I found the Ax gripping and sobering. Fortysomething manager of print operation gets made redundant, then proceeds to deal with the problem his way. Startling. Challenging. Different.

Donald Westlake gave me many many hours of unbridled joy with his writing, joy in many forms, but joy nevertheless. May his soul rest in peace.