David Barrie

Participatory culture, Twitter and a loading gun

 

I once spent a lot of time with a senior officer in the British army who served in the Falklands War. In the heat of The Battle for Goose Green, with his commander dying of wounds, a bullet came the way of this second-in-command. In his pocket was a book by the 20th century desert mystic Carlo Carretto. He claimed it "took the bullet" - and saved his life.

Now I don't want to be over-dramatic but last week three very annoying people were collected together in the London Sunday Times to have a go at the micro-blogging site Twitter.

Psychologists Oliver James, Dr David Lewis and writer Alain de Botton said that Twitter-ers are folks suffering from a lack of identity, narcissism and the service functions, according to Alain as

a way of making sure you are permanently connected to somebody and somebody is permanently connected to you, proving that you are alive. 

Two things come to mind: "No shit, Sherlock" and "Dear Waterstones the Booksellers, please close your branch in Hampstead High Street and give these chaps something else to worry about."

However, there is a bigger point.

As the U.K. Government starts to exact a price for bailing out the Royal Bank of Scotland and the United States Government deals with a request for $21bn of additional financial support for the motor industry, the role and relationship of the state to not just the banking sector but all aspects of daily life is changing.

In England, disquiet in the ranks of the Labour Party and the Conservative Party push on localism suggests that debate over the purpose of the state has begun.

In the process of re-aligning the deck chairs, a new form of 'command and control' industrial economics and public management is taking shape.

Combined with the rent-a-quote where-am-I-in-the-bestsellers-list clever-dickery of James, Lewis and de Botton, there's a danger that the networked devolution of power that's been celebrated over the last few years and caught the attention of public managers across the world gets rubbed out.

So it may be worth just to remember what's gone on over the last decade to embed the idea that aggregation of human expression, purpose and intent is a valuable foundation for social, economic and political progress:

The rise of partnership working, public-private partnerships and local asset-backed vehicles in urban renewal has established an ethos of collaborative working.

Privatization and outsourcing of public services, the rise of ‘joined-up’ government, consumer choice and technological innovation has shifted hierarchical organisation of government to more networked forms of public management.

The rise of ‘place’ as an organizing principle of local government and city planning now acknowledges that the built environment is more than just the organisation of the interests of land-owners and users but a web of experiences and physical, social, cultural and financial relationships.

Government emphasis on citizen participation, the Third Sector, democratic governance and inclusive economics has set on record the role of the community in the provision of public services.

Social and cultural entrepreneurs have become an increasingly important part of urban development, alongside landowners, speculators, planners and architects; bringing to economic development a new cast of characters who have an acute, populist mindset and combine skills in entrepreneurship, thought leadership, stakeholder management and project delivery.

The rise of Web 2.0 and online entertainment platforms have revealed a consumer appetite for informal, purposeful and semi-visible public networks.

The increasing use of co-design as a method for originating and developing ideas – from creating a new park to the development of open source software – has revealed an understanding of the opportunity and value of sharing emotional, as well as intellectual property.

Popular participation in voting for performers on television by telephone and text messaging has revealed that people like to engage with and not just consume products and services.

And popular take-up of Crazy Frog and online ‘widgets’ mark an appetite for viral advertising and the power of marketing by word of mouth. 

Now I am not going to write this list down and tuck it in to my shirt to absorb forthcoming bullets.

But if you - like me - are committed to advancing participatory culture and helping government and the private sector enter an age of social sustainability and interactivity, it might be worth you drawing up your own list and keeping it to hand.

Or keep a close watch on what's going on - and decide whether to bin all of this as history.

Mickey Mouse pictures courtesy of Rey Misterio.

Poster boy for Urbanism

Hilarious still from Hi Mom directed by Brian de Palma, 1970.

The tagline over at IMDB.com reads:

God bless our humble upper-middle-class high-rise co-op and keep it free from smut peddlers, militants, urban guerrillas and Greenwich Village liberals.

Move over Antonioni's L'Eclisse!

Thanks to Waxin' & Milkin: A Visual Mixtape.

Digital inclusion, social inclusion and thinking outside of the bubble

Over at the Policy and Performance blog of the U.K. Government think-tank IDEA, Ingrid Koehler is brilliantly pursuing the opportunities digital media offers government.  

In a recent post, Ingrid asks a crucial question linked to the Government's recent report on Digital Britain and countless initiatives - including Digital Mentor - that seek to apply social media to the delivery of public services:  

Does digital inclusion mean social inclusion?...If you give people the tools and build the infrastructure for digital engagement, will they just engage?

One answer has to be: it depends on what the infrastructure is - and who designs it.

A Call to Farms is one of the best books I've read so far this year.

It's a series of essays linked to a journey that a group of people took in 2008 through Illinois and Wisconsin in search of the Radical Midwest: places, people, community groups, artists, social activists who offer alternatives to "business as usual" in the land of corn and greed. (You'll find the project blog here; and the Midwest Draft Flickr pool here.)

In the book, Chicago-based photographer and artist Claire Pentecost opens one of her essays saying

I live in a laptop, I live in the Internet, I live in airplanes and airports, I live in my library, in radio broadcasts, I live in my camera and often in other people's cameras.

In a sentence, she expresses the immersion but also the 'penthouse and pavement' glitz-funk of the "digital revolution".

Pentecost then goes on to think about why the news media might lead government officials to roll out terror prevention programmes in ways more informed by the antics of Jack Bauer in 24 than lofty ideas of constitutional justice:  

People in power operate in a selective and sensational media world, a spectral bubble where they cannot feel the consequences of their own acts.

Wow!

This makes me think...

Digital inclusion may enable social inclusion - but who's setting the terms?

Is 'digital inclusion' simply about extending the availability of 'tools' that allow people to create the tight, self-referential networks that the media-savvy now have - and love?

And how 'inclusive' will these new networks be if there's little dialogue between them and no-one gives a toss about life outside of their, er, bubble?

No one doubts the value, joy and urgent need to extend the 'digital franchise'.

But is there a social responsibility dimension to issuing new equity that needs a bit of thought?

Because I assume that the last thing people want is trillions and trillions of new bits of inconsequential, closed communication.  

Bubble image courtesy of Jeff Kubina.

The Return of Gustav Klimt

Is there something Belle Epoque going on?

Here's a portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (1907) by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt:

And here's a photograph by Camilla Akrans of Mariacarla Boscono in the latest edition of Vogue Nippon:

 

Here's Klimt's Fulfillment (1909):

And here's an image from a recent edition of Vogue Italia featuring Siri Tollerod:

 
Now I know there's been a Neisha Crosland decorative wallpaper thing going on for some time. The stagey formality of photographers Mert & Marcus is influential. And fashion likes grand gestures (doh).

But there are other things around, like Prada's Spring -Summer 09 ad campaign:

And Lanvin's campaign for the same season: 

Isn't there something Byzantine in all of this?

Something with no movement, no intimacy and flat rhythmics?

In Klimt's day, exoticism gave way to the First World War.

Hopefully in our era it's just a flier for a car boot sale at Harvey Nichols.

Camilla Akrans image via Alexandra's favoriter. Siri Tollerod via Childhood Flames. Ad images via Frillr.

Broadcasting as social innovation

Jamie Oliver, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Kevin McCloud: these are the names of television presenters in the U.K. who are delivering us from evil.

Historically, the purpose of television has been to inform and entertain - and the medium's been a one-way street in which the viewer has had to sit up and listen to the wisdom - or not - of producers, served up as vaudeville or reportage.

But in recent years, TV in the U.K. has begun to deal in other forms of traffic and become a place for ideas with social goals that have sought to use the medium as a catalyst to change in the real world, not just a world of fictional reality.

Live Aid was a watershed moment.

The 400 million viewers who watched the event showed the power of broadcasting to scale, diffuse and connect public experience across the globe.

And the £150m the event raised for charity showed the ability of people to link broadcast media and social action.

Since then, several forces have affirmed the connection in the U.K.:

• an enduring tradition of broadcasting as public service

• producers fancying themselves as cultural patrons not scuzzy manipulators

• the need for media to become more relevant and personal to peoples' lives

• the popularity of ‘constructed reality’ programming and

• celebrities increasingly wanting to express themselves as social activists

What's more, the growth of satellite and online media has forced broadcasters to focus on competitive advantage and the scale and ambition of the cinema has led audiences to expect epic narrative.

So the pressure has been on for broadcasting to extend its impact and reach in new ways - and find new sources of cash to do it. 

One route has been to originate ‘tiny epics’: off-screen initiatives with on-screen lives that are structured as public-private partnerships, with the broadcaster acting as an early investor or entrepreneur.

Now it might be shocking to cultural snobs but this is social innovation - a role for the media beyond that set down in a recent (and brilliant) paper published by the Young Foundation. 

Take the work of Channel 4 Television, the advertiser-funded, U.K. public broadcaster:

In 2005, Channel 4 commissioned chef Jamie Oliver to team up with school dinner lady Nora Sands and take over the direction of the state school meals service in the London Borough of Greenwich.

This 'social experiment' was designed to show how children could be fed fresh, more nutritious meals. It became a national campaign for new standards for school meals and two series of prime time television programmes. It has been responsible for investment of £280m in school food and skills and the creation of a new Government agency to do the work.

 
Three years earlier, the Board of Channel 4 decided to donate £100,000 to the urban renewal of the former coal-mining town of Castleford, West Yorkshire and help establish a project that emphasized citizen participation, grassroots innovation, co-design and networked public management.

The project became a £14m programme of capital investment in the town’s public spaces that has been credited with raising over £200m of additional new investment in the town; and it was broadcast as a series of four TV programmes.

Earlier this month, it was announced that over 20,000 people had registered on Landshare, a web platform run by Keo Films in partnership with Channel 4, that links people who want to grow their own fruit and vegetables - but don’t have a site - with people or institutions that have available land.

In social innovation-speak, this is an "enabling service" designed to foster a new network of local food production - and it was set up off the back of a series of TV programmes in which six families cultivated an acre of land provided by Bristol City Council.

All of these projects reveal broadcasting as a third-party agent of change - no accident at a time when our trust in institutions and the state is at an all-time low.   

But they also represent something more exciting – a wave that 4IP, Channel 4’s new media service seems out to capture.  

Media audiences are dispersed. Video production is now almost totally accessible. And people enjoy personalizing entertainment and information experiences on their iPods and computers, using playlists or RSS (‘Really Simple Syndication’).

In effect, the situation is now ripe for broadcasting to build on a first phase of work and evolve in to a distribution platform for dispersed innovation.

It's amazing really how long it's taken us to get here: a measure of the traditionalism, risk-aversion and dominance of an anti-hippy, post punk elite obsessed with literature, cinema and controlling the cultural agenda.  

But broadcasting as a medium for social innovation is still in its infancy - and we need to take care.

For there are certain conditions that need to be met if we're to progress to the next stage:

• the state has to be comfortable with self-organization

• the state has to be prepared to see broadcasting as a space for sharing information

• our idea of a sustainable society needs to include an effective, efficient flow of communications

• and media bunnies need to continue to believe - or continue to have reason to claim to believe - that “worthy” does not mean “dull”.

Farewell Jil Sander. Hello Snow + Rock. 

Image of TV set courtesy of craig1black. Other images sourced from Google Images.