Benchmarking: Missing the point

Because there are now fewer barriers stopping anyone from contributing their thoughts and evidence, there is a huge potential for web-savvy organisations and individuals to improve the quality of their policymaking.

In the past, politicians, civic leaders and business people have had to rely upon a relatively small group of professional advisors – think tanks, polling companies, civil servants and so on.

But now, to paraphrase Clay Shirky, everyone is here to help you. And contrary to what many web-evangelists may tell you….

• You don’t need to change any of the processes that you use to fix policy
• You don’t have to allow yourself to be dictated to by individuals with an agenda
• You don’t have to be bullied into adopting policies against your better judgement
• You can break the monopsony of advice provided to you by civil servants, pressure groups and think-tanks by going over their heads and asking the public to describe and model issues for you

So put aside those awful experiences you’ve had with e-petitions and make sure you don’t have any more of them. Forget that brutalising experience you had when you wrote something for a weblog and got called all sorts of rude names in the comments thread.

These are not managerial tools. They’re not for benchmarking. Their prime users aren’t the Sir Humphreys of this world. They are, however, good political tools. They are great for creating human connections.

Most of the good ones are free of charge and you don’t need to be a techie genius to work out how to use them either.

Slugger Consults can help you to simply put yourself where the public are already and encourage them to share their intelligence with you in a way that you will be able to make use of it.

The benefits are simple:

• You will make better policies
• You will hear new perspectives that you were unaware of
• You will be able to raise your personal profile
• Your policies will be approved of by the public a good deal more than they are currently
• The public well feel consulted and involved in your thinking

You don’t need to be a geek to do any of this either. Call us – we can help you with this.

I began by arguing that we bloggers have won, or rather we have won the argument over the ‘irresistible message being carried by the medium’. In the process we have changed the behaviour of commentariat. Many Commentators are rapidly becoming substantial bloggers in their own right: Paul Waugh at the Evening Standard; Clive Crook at the FT; Robert Peston at the BBC; and Dan Hannan at the Telegraph.

And on the other hand, people like Iain Dale and myself write for mainstream papers. It was Google that ripped the revenue from news and cut the amount of money available for big journalism. But bloggers started a party that has proved irresistible to the mainstream.  Spread-ability is the new currency, and for that you need both a personal audience and to be ‘pre-connected’ to a larger community.

So what are the main differences? There’s more of us. But, on the whole and pound for pound, they are better writers. Yet, there are many more of us. And wider our networks are a great deal larger than our discrete audiences.

Our sources are not always inside golden circle and are not always the best behaved witnesses. We, the larger of us, tend to be entrepreneurial. And since we are not obliged to fit with someone else’s brand, we are also brand builders.

The ‘Commentariat’ by and large earn a great deal more from their writing. Although Guido says he “couldn’t take the pay cut” of going inhouse to a big media operation, bloggers tend to earn their money in other ways. Iain Dale makes his publishing and other media work. Myself through writing and offering consultancy in strategic counselling and digital mentoring.  But there are also Doctors; lawyers, policemen, and any number of men and women in various walks of life, all blogging, and all earning both transient and residual value in the wider conversation.

Bloggers are less bound by the opinion and mores of the metropolitan elites. For instance, Iain Dale and Tim Montgomery and their Tory netroots’ revolution have tapped into a disgruntled feeling that lies way beyond the norms of the metropolitan consensuses’. For the longest time they were the only backers of Project Cameron whilst the Tory leader remained largely unloved (or at least mistrusted by the National press.

Bloggers, counter-intuitively perhaps, are generally more trusted by their audiences. That’s something Iain Dale disagreed with me on; but in this case I think he’s wrong. It’s not because we are more accurate (even at the top of each game, I don’t believe we are) or even reliable (though speaking for myself, I try to be, and I really don’t mind putting my hand up for mistakes).

But it’s because we are perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be outside the power loop. And, on the whole, we converse, and are challengeable. Our readers have the measure of us; much more than the distant and sometimes aloof members of the ‘Commentariat’.

They’re bringing with them a cultural change. Since the range of raw data and opinion available online is vast, readers are becoming their own navigators. We’re moving away from ‘trust me, I’m an expert? (Or I work for the Guardian)… to a ‘show me’ paradigm. That to some degree explains the bluntness of net communication, which often arises simply because Commentators don’t engage directly with their readers (and sometimes it’s because when they do, there is a concerted attempt to wind public figures up and get them to lose their cool).

For a chunk of the debate we got caught up on the erroneous view that bloggers somehow think they are above the law. My own view, (voiced last night) is that anyone who thinks they are is a fool. The more important point though is well made by Chris Applegate on his blog today:

Letting your lawyers, rather than your community managers, be the arbiters of what is considered acceptable behaviour and participation, is just one symptom of this culture; dismissing blogging out of hand or demanding anonymous but lawful bloggers be unmasked.

Afterwards, chatting to an old friend Adriana Lukas who now works almost full time as a consultant and who rarely blogs these days, noted that what’s still missing, despite all the forward movement in UK newspapers’ online offering, is this sense that they must start from the beginning again to earn new capital with their online peers in this hyper-connected world.

In the real world, people want the inside track, and we’re giving it to them sometimes in real time. Our audiences may be smaller, but in aggregate terms, they are also smarter. Smarter, because of who they are: the media and other opinion formers, and, erm, other bloggers who not only read but share their own opinion with the wider world.

Technologies are driving change in the way things are done. So its not a competition as such. But journalism is already “rebooting” (you know, that thing you do when your computers too tired and overwhelmed to start it over again), and the latest news or insight is as likely to come from a Twitterer you don’t know as a tried and tested blogger or mainstream commenter. As Jay Rosen puts it, we are all participants:

“Culling and editing and trying to find to find out what’s going on?

At the heel of the hunt, this is about disruption of traditional distribution channels. “The medium is the message” wrote Marshall McLuhan during the last great technological one, when TV was taking off in the 1950s. This one is bringing pain to traditional trades of all descriptions, journalism being just one amongst many. Bloggers are not required to come up with an alternative to the traditional means of news gathering because it is not, and in most cases never was going to be their day jobs.

That’s not to say that it will not happen. It would be a puzzle to me that given the appetite people online have for politics and I’m thinking of the way we were able, at a moments notice to crowd source incredibly detailed turnout figures from polling stations across Northern Ireland on the day of the election itself, that that willingness could not be put to good (perhaps, non profit making) use.

David Aaronovitch was dead right when he said during the debate that the bloggertariat would look very different in future to the way it looks now. The unmentioned (on the night at least) second clause of that proposition is that the Commentariat will similarly reform itself (not, I hope, disappear) under the relentless economic pressure of technological change.

These and other matters will be the subject of PICamp London when it convenes at Reboot Britain on July 6th… You can follow news of the next PICamp on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/picamp.

Oh, and if you fancy nominating someone in one the categories for the first Comment Awards, go for it! It’s an opportunity to get some strong nominations in there from the Northern Ireland space since they are asking for supporting materials.

Cross posted from the original on Slugger O’Toole…

As though Ireland was a nation of casuals whose docks were full to the brim with cargo, with no end of work and cash and new and bigger ships ever coming in…

The reality, as Dan O’Brien noted in his commentary on last October’s budget for the Irish Times, was rather different:

A majority of euro zone members have registered a narrowing of budget imbalances since 2006. Ireland has not only bucked the trend, but the deterioration in its public finances has been far worse than that recorded in any euro zone country over the past quarter century.

If this extraordinary failure was a one-off failure, one could possibly make the case that the lessons of today will be learnt and not repeated. But it is no such thing. It is the second time in a generation that the country has inflicted upon itself such harm.

And he made a suggestion that’s been elaborated upon in today’s paper, by Eoin O’Mally. O’Brien pointed towards the fact that the electoral system has a bias towards choosing men and women who are popular members of their own community; but who have more often than not only the slimmest grasp of the higher powered world of finance:

School teachers, publicans and small-town accountants are deeply rooted in their local communities and ensure the political system avoids the kind of disconnection with voters that many other mature democracies suffer. This is the enduring strength of Ireland’s system. But it is also its greatest weakness. Such people are rarely even remotely qualified to run a finance ministry.

How to maintain the strengths while curing the ills? The answer is to depoliticise aspects of fiscal policy in much the same was as has been done with monetary policy across the world. This would allow qualified people to have a far greater input into the management of the public finances and curb the sort of “If I have it, I’ll spend it” insanity that has led to the current predicament.

That Brian Lenihan is a lawyer ‘by trade’ does little to blunt the argument. O’Brien goes on to make three suggestions which he argues would not interfere with the essentially political balancing of setting tax and expenditure rates; and all of which boil down to outsourcing key analytical functions currently be carried out inside the Department of Finance. He suggests: moving forecasting out to ESRI and evaluation of spending to a new independent institute. Then beefing up the powers and resouces of the Comptroller and Auditor General in the auditing of spending afterwards.

O’Malley continues the theme today when he argues that Cabinet oversight of increasingly complex and intertwining policy areas may now be obsolescent. So, he asks:

What could we do to ensure that policies are exposed to a thorough interrogation by a diverse range of interested parties and experts? Well, sponsoring departments could be required to publish their memorandums in advance of government meetings, not 30 years after! If these proposals could state the purpose of the policy change clearly, and why it would be expected to work, this would remove sole governmental control of policy analysis. Poor policies would be less likely to sneak under the radar.

In fact there is another means of beefing up the wider interest in the hard core issues of government. That is to simply free the data. In Britain a political revolution has been taking place simply because one newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, got hold of 1.5 million documents relating to the expense claims of MPs expenses. It’s a genii that will not now go back into the box. In fact, George Osborne’s office has been poring over of volumes and volumes of data from National Audit Office reports looking for things they can cut when they come to power, and promising when the Conservatives come to power they will publish every single item of expenditure over £20,000.

But it does not have to be that radical. Nor does it have to be argued for by trenchant Opposition politicians or newspapers with the immense resources of the Telegraph.

Anthony at the Public Enquiry blog, highlighted details of the massive spend on the private property market by local authorities around the Republic. Then Gavin (Anthony’s nephew and along with John Handlaar the moving spirit behind Kildare Street), chips in a Google graph generated data gathered from the Central Statistics Office which demonstrates just how madly central government has been spending public money, allegedly fulfilling social housing need, whilst in fact throwing good money after bad by buying housing stock at the full market rate…

The extent to which many of those costly properties still lie empty is an indication of just how pressing the need was in the first place. That they bought them off developers rather than as a planned policy of clearly identifying and then tackling real housing need serves to bolster O’Malley’s point that “much of our current monitoring of government strives to discover that monies weren’t misappropriated, not whether they were spent wisely.”

It seems to me this is a case of new wine bursting old bottles. The share scale of the boom left Ireland’s plodding bureaucratic government, civil servants as well as politicians, a long way out of their depth. But the capacity of new technologies to smarten the public debate can only be grasped by a government which has sufficient confidence in its own abilities to allow the public into areas they’ve never been allowed see before… Yet it’s not an alien concept either.. The art of the Meathail is the sharing of the ownership of common problem.

And the time for sharing has to be sooner rather than later…

I love the Radio 4 producer who put the one presenter who knows nothing about blogging (John Humphrys) to the task of interviewing two bloggers (Robert Hamman and Kate Bevan about the difference between Twitter and, well, er, blogging. It sort of made Humphrys quaintly endearing rather than stirring the other emotions he regularly provokes around our neck of the woods. Rory Cellan Jones sparked the talking point by picking up a piece from Wired suggesting that blogging was so over.

Here’s the money shot from Paul Bouton at Wired:

The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths.

Now, to some extent this is true. The still relatively small band of Twitterers are having the kind of unfettered conversations that first impassioned the writers of the Cluetrain Manifesto (“Don’t tap on the glass because it just annoys the animals”) to outline the principles of the flat market over 10 years ago.

In truth, blogging was first taken up by those who understood its potential for interactivity by individuals who were not themselves particularly interactive as people. Early blogging was, undoubtedly, more dominated by geeks than it is today. As the market has grown, it is slowly being populated by people who wouldn’t know a piece of computer code if it sat up and spat nails at them, but who are both intelligent and genuinely interactive. It’s an increasingly socialised, as opposed to a socialising, technology.

Take my own blog Slugger O’Toole. In recent months we’ve attracted talent like Brian Walker, formerly a reporter and editor on Newsnight. Understanding the freedom and the mutuality of the blogging form, he’s quickly learned to exploit his own capacity for human interaction in ways that many in the mainstream seem reluctant to.

And this rising intelligence is replicated amongst the less well-read denizens of the online world. During last year’s Northern Irish election campaign, the one resource that had experts feeding from it time and time again was the anonymous blog, Sammy FB Morse has a posse which delivered 18 constituency guides unsurpassed in their quality and depth by anything the Irish MSM could reproduce.

Absolute numbers matter much less than the quality of the engagement. Though one is likely to follow the other, numbers are not always a pre-determinant of a good blog, and neither is a good blog always guaranteed good numbers. And as Niall Harbinson points out, the mainstream media is not always the best place to draw readership from.

Slugger is a case in point. In absolute terms it is large in Ireland, tiny in the UK. Yet in terms of penetration of its base market, Northern Ireland, Slugger has stolen a march on all other UK political blogs.

Slugger may be cross-party and multi-denominational, but over the last six years the blog has fumbled its way into a political mission of its own: making politics in Northern Ireland work. That means avoiding the dysfunctional relationship that blogs and newspapers have with politicians elsewhere. The increased political decentralisation that we see everywhere is, at least in part, the product of a media that is obsessed with the politics of personality, gossip from the “Westminster Village” and a focus on politics rather than policy.

At Slugger, we’ve promoted projects that are designed to raise the profile of local councillors and make them more interactive. Our reader-driven awards aimed to encourage good quality local journalism. Where elsewhere blogs are seen as a force that is antagonistic to representative democracy, we’ve tried to position Slugger as its candid friend. Not a fawning acolyte, but not a jaded oppositionalist either. As a result, more Northern Ireland assembly members read Slugger than any other media (including Northern Ireland’s newspapers) – precisely because of its interactivity, and the absence of the compromises that the mainstream media has to make.

Such penetration has enabled Slugger to do things that are as yet almost unimaginable in larger polities. For instance, our reader driven Slugger Awards handed prizes (hand-drawn cartoons by this paper’s excellent political cartoonist Martin Rowson) to those whom they considered the best MP, MLA, councillor and local journalist of the year. All but one of the 10 prize winners (the first minister had to be in Westminster on parliamentary business that evening) came in person to collect their awards.

But the real value of any and all of these interactive tools lie in making real connections and making things happen out in the real world. This is getting better and it’s happening more often.

Thus the blogger Slugger readers deliberatively chose this year is one I expect few people reading this blog will ever have heard of before: the North Antrim Local Interest List (Nalil), written by a retired teacher with a sharp eye for highly local detail and which despite its diminutive size and profile played a critical part in one of the biggest political stories of the year: the resignation of Ian Paisley as first minister.

Cross posted from the original at Comment is Free

There’s a potentially highly educative spat in progress over an article in this month edition of the NUJ’s off line house magazine, The Journalist. The author of Web 2.0 is Rubbish, Donnacha Delong, has made the original available here. Martin Stabe has more detail of the research it was based on.

Shane Richmond then picked it up with an equally combative piece entitled The NUJ doesn’t understand Web 2.0. But the most spectacular outcome from the orginal article, is the departure of Professor Roy Greenslade from the NUJ. Greenslade is not resigning over one article, but because he sees it as the NUJ making itself redundant. Jeff Jarvis expands his argument:

…it occurred to me that if you’re a union representing journalists today, you probably don’t know which way is up and who’s the enemy and what you’re fighting for. All the old reflexes and relationships are archaic. Unions are structured to fight The Man but now that Man is no longer all-powerful, requiring the joining together of its workers to balance his might. Now the Man is quivering in his loafers, less powerful, poorer, smaller, unsure where the world is headed. Battling The Man could weaken the only guy who is, if not on your side, at least in the same boat with you. Do you really want to go throwing the deckchairs overboard at a time like this?

Suw thinks the NUJ’s intervention is unhelpful to its members. There is also an excellent and lively discussion over at the Media Guardian hosted by Matt Wells And there are round ups from Shane and Laura.

For my own part, it is worth saying that I don’t believe that Web 2.0 is a doctrine, although some of its ‘adherents’ may come over with the smug and irritating zeal of a convert. Rather it’s a rough and temporal attempt to describe what technology is doing to human communication.

For instance, I found out about this article from my news feed on Facebook. Shane’s one of my friends. I then did a 6 degrees of separation search on Donnacha and it turns out we are connected at just 2 degrees of separation through four different people. It’s an order of knowledge you might have had to wait years for before the invention of such sharp applications.

Another Facebook story. I wanted to speak to one of the candidates running for my local Westminster seat, to get an idea of how the ‘ground war’ was going in a key marginal. On Tuesday, I bumped into the local chair of that party as I was going into the paper shop, and told him what I wanted to do and promised I would email him my details.

I was snowed under and didn’t get a chance. Tonight, through a friend on Facebook, I was introduced to someone in the candidate’s party, and lo, the local candidate turns up as a friend of this new Facebook friend. I messaged him via Facebook, and now we’re having coffee in the local Costa next week, when I get back from Belfast.

That is web 2.0. It’s not about journalism. It is about how technology is helping people meet, converse and do commerce, in the widest possible sense of that word. At huge speed. As a professional that speed has some implications for the aesthetic of how and the speed at which some things get done. Although not everything has to be cast in that time frame.

The problems the NUJ research highlights, at least according to Martin Stabe’s critique of it, constitute a failure to understand that if you don’t engage with these technologies, audiences will just talk past you, and accordingly getting their news quicker. And from somewhere other than your paper.

These are problems of newspapers which have not worked out what’s happening. Stoic endurance is not a useful response.

I’ve been blogging for over five years. In that time nothing has happened to blunt my appetite for good journalism. In fact the capacity to pick and choose what I and others of the ‘great unwashed’ want to read, rather than have an editor make that choice for us has sharpened rather than deadened my appetite for journalism.

Good journalism that is. And that’s where the professional competition is coming from. Not the newly articulate and increasingly intelligent ‘commons’ itself.

Cross posted from the Original on RSA Networks blog…

Tony Blair is the fourth politician I’ve heard on this tack recently. Michael McDowell, Ireland’s former justice minister complained last year that “most media, and many new political movements, implicitly or explicitly prefer some form of plebiscite – through polls, or mass rallies, or audience figures – to the voting of representatives”.

More recently, Gerry Adams complained about journalists asking stupid questions, and his party colleague Jim Gibney followed up with a more lengthy argument that public service broadcasters should more accurately reflect the electorate’s democratic choice in its output.

Finally, Bertie Ahern, in his recent hour of victory, took a pop at most of the Irish media, for downplaying his party’s chances in the last election, suggesting they were paying too much heed to editorial direction and not trusting their own journalistic instincts:

If you are earning good money and you are told what you have to say and, right, you have to do it. I mean, I suppose that is what happens in the world: you don’t want to lose your job and I would not expect any right-thinking journalist who has a very good salary and expenses to throw it all away.

If you want proof of the media’s sensitivity to self criticism, check this out. This panel discussion on Tony Blair’s speech on Newsnight the other day, Andreas Whittam Smith of The Independent affirmed that “[unlike others] I am not a self-hating journalist”. What irked him more than anything else was John Lloyd’s line about how the media’s decision to withdraw from serious reporting of the deliberations at the heart of government has as much to do with what has become a dysfunctional relationship:

No one has excluded parliament more than us. The newspapers simply stopped reporting parliament. We withdrew from parliament far before the government. If a government lives or dies by parliament, we no longer report it.

It may be dry, boring and repetitive, but in there is the detail (along with the devil) and the context for the big decisions are found. More often, the weakness of a law or glaring contradictions are missed in the mainstream, because no one has been bothering to cover the basics. Hansard is full of fine detailed scrutiny that is the blessed antidote to government spin. It’s where the killer questions arise from, not the bodyline bowling (Blair’s own fitting description of the average PM briefing or press conference these days) of senior political hacks, who increasingly subsist on lobby briefings and Westminster gossip.

Which brings us back to the often self-serving complaints of journalists about government spin. To paraphrase Paxman, “if this lying bastard really is lying, then catch him out”.

It is undoubtedly true that Blair’s charm offensive was often badly misplaced. Just read Piers Morgan’s The Insider. But don’t tell me that significant parts of the British media have not spent a large chunk of journalists’ time and effort looking for “something nasty in the woodshed” to dish out on Tony Blair for the following day’s headlines.

Politicians alone cannot offer the solution to this prisoner’s dilemma. As Peter Preston has argued, politicians’ and journalists’ roles are separate and adversarial. But journalism must face up to its own complicity in what has become a power play between the third and fourth estates. Few salaried commentators have put that dilemma more succinctly than CJJT after Martin Kettle’s blog on the subject:

I defer to no one in my dislike of Blair and New Labour, but he is clearly on to something in this speech. The symbiosis between the media and politicians is corrosive, and much more damaging is the incessant hyping of anything “off-message”. All we end up with is dissembling drones, paranoid of the latest media witch hunt.

Cross posted from the original at Comment is Free…

Kevin March, Editor at the BBC College of Journalism, employs Onora O’Neill’s Reith Lecture formula to identify a major flaw with lobby journalism: it is a prime piece of non-assessable communication. Why? Marsh writes:

The formula: “the minster said this … but what he really meant was this …” is such a familiar formula in political coverage, we journalists don’t even question it. Nor have we questioned sufficiently often and self-critically what it’s done to the concept of political truth-telling. The sense that national politics is another world conducting its business in an alien tongue with a mendacious vocabulary is one of the (many) reasons why potential voters remain just that. Potential and not actual.

He also hints that in inhabiting such a never never land, journalists run the risk of making themselves redundant, or at the very least irrelevant to the relationship between the citizen and the political elite:

I suspect the average voter’s knowledge of what politicians are doing in his/her name derives more from interviews (press as well as broadcasting), speeches, appearances, articles written by politicians themselves and non-Lobby journalists than it does from the Lobby.

Direct, unmediated and assessable communication ought to be a good thing … except that it’s routinely glossed by Lobby journalists with the confident nose-tap of one-who-really-knows. The reality is, the clarity of an interview on Andrew Marr’s show or The World at One is subsequently fuzzed by the Lobby journalist’s translation – a translation as often as not ‘tweaked’ after a quiet word with a special advisor.

Finally, it’s worth revisiting O’Neill’s contention that transparency alone is not enough to engender trust:

If we want to increase trust we need to avoid deception rather than secrecy. Although some ways of increasing transparency may indirectly reduce deception, many do not. Unless there has been prior deception, transparency does nothing to reduce deception; and even if there has been deception, openness is not a sure-fire remedy. Increasing transparency can produce a flood of unsorted information and misinformation that provides little but confusion unless it can be sorted and assessed. It may add to uncertainty rather than to trust. And unless the individuals and institutions who sort, process and assess information are themselves already trusted, there is little reason to think that transparency and openness are going to increase trust.

One interesting aspect in the wash up to the Republic’s election was a minor furore over alleged anti government bias in the Irish media’s coverage. It was sparked by Bertie Ahern’s comments on the Friday count night, that journalists had had a job to do “in return for good pay and expenses”, implying that undue editorial direction had caused them to not simply to consistently underestimate Fianna Fail’s potential in the election, but to question him relentlessly in the early part of the election about what were in the context of the time fairly minor breach of personal probity in the early 1990s. The controversy reached ignition point when Eoghan Harris walked out on a two hander with Fintan O’Toole on Today FM.

Harris, as he notes here, was furious at the oppositional stance the majority of the Irish media had taken to the taoiseach throughout the campaign, and named just four commentators who had expressed any support for him in the Irish press.

Much of his apparent anger was directed at Vincent Browne, one of the few senior Irish journalists who have attempted a serious analysis of the media in Ireland. However, it is Browne’s consistent analysis that ownership is key to what he sees as the Irish media’s core anti left bias. In particular, he consistently offers Independent News Media’s Tony O’Reilly as Ireland’s media manipulator in chief. On election night, Browne’s most damning piece of evidence that there was a compact between the government and INM, was a meeting between Fianna Fail’s outgoing Minister of Finance, Brian Cowan and O’Reilly himself.

It’s not a new accusation. Indeed it is so routinely made in left leaning circles to the point that it is widely repeated as though it were unchanging, empirical fact. Other big publishers are constantly under similar suspicion. Rupert Murdoch’s alleged manipulation of both journalists and politicians is currently the subject of hot gossip in the US, where his primary media business assets are now based.

Yet, Harris provides persuasive evidence (here, here, here, here) that if there was a deal, it certainly didn’t trickle down to the journalists at the Irish Independent, and he cites several stories that reflect, if anything, an anti government bias in their overall election coverage. Or, at the very least, he demonstrates that when it came to throwing heavy punches, it appears not to have pulled them.

It is always somewhat unnerving when government ministers begin handing out lectures to the media. Ahern’s lecture hardly figures alongside the arrest of journalists in the developing world or the closing of television stations in Venezuela, but it is nevertheless important to continue to keep a taut line between the role of politics and the media in a representative democracy.

Perhaps what this election has proved is that for all the much feted power of the media, when it comes to elections, it is politicians, their policies and the healthiness (or otherwise) of their connection to the base that matters, regardless of what journalists think of them.

It is useful to imbibe a hefty dose of astringent every now and again, and when it comes to the hyped up blogosphere, Oliver Kamm is often the man to deliver it. George Osborne’s speech to an RSA event (sound files here and here) in March provoked Kamm’s ire when the shadow chancellor lauded the changing rules of engagement between the state and the citizen: “In politics and in the media we’ve both assumed that we do the talking and the people listen. Now the people are talking back. It’s exciting, liberating, challenging and frightening too.”

Oliver takes a neatly contrarian view that “bloggers ought not to be listened to, but, like any other lobby, politely discounted”.

To an extent, it is close to something I argued in response to Osborne on the day. If bloggers have any value at all, it arises from their ease of entry (sidestepping the usual gatekeepers) into the ideas marketplace, their independence and the individuality of their work. In fact, the blogosphere, at least in some of its parts, has the capacity to handle complexity in ways that some of our more venerable institutions struggle to achieve. Adriana Cronin Lukas, speaking later that morning put it as succinctly as any I have heard:

The pre-internet age was the age of mass production that was based on the age of engineering. This was a time when complex problems called for complex solutions. To build a bridge is a feat of complexity. Computing and the internet have brought about another type of complexity, which is based on the realisation that a few simple rules can lead to complexity. For example, the internet is a “stupid network” with one simple rule – move packets from one end to another and then some. What we see today was built on one of the simplest architectures around, but with inbuilt flexibility and rules to allow complexity. The same applies to the social aspects of the web.

In his introduction to The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki invoked an earlier sceptic, Charles Mackay, who wrote, in the midst of that industrial age, in 1841, “men, it has been well said, think in herds. It will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only gather their senses slowly, and one by one” as a negative proof of his theory that crowds can be intelligent. Not all crowds are intelligent: neither are all conversations on the internet. In fact, as currently set up, the blogosphere does not do decisions at all. And most high-profile attempts at harnessing the collective intelligence of the blogosphere/internet have foundered – sometimes in an exceedingly embarrassing manner.

But, if it is true, as Surowiecki notes, that “diversity and independence” are prerequisites for good group-based decision making “because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise”, then the blogosphere has the potential provide this. Politicians and journalists are two classes of the establishment who, largely surreptitiously, draw insight from its multiple workings by the bucketload.

As for politicians, they should get on with the job of thinking through, examining and ultimately (because that’s what we pay them shedloads of money for) decide government policy and law. If they choose to draw on blogger-led insights, it is still their judgment in the end that counts. Bloggers are in the lobby and, as much as columnists and sundry other polemicists, are merely ancillary to and not replicative of representative democracy.

If the blogosphere has a problem it lies in the rank incivility that can run riot, even in some of its more respectable corners. Brian Appleyard, another of the speakers at the RSA debate, has identified a more fundamental problem that plagues online discourse:

Psychologists have long been aware that the more people are distanced from each other, the easier they find it to do them harm. This degrades bloggery. But, more important, it also threatens all forms of authority. All western – not just scientific – wisdom is based on identity. Advocates and their critics can be identified and their ideas formally tested. This is nothing to do with the statistics of crowds, and everything to do with the authority of the person. Take that away and truth and judgment become fictions.

The truth is that our cultural nervous system is being ripped out and rewired. The arbitrary authority that Appleyard sees as crucial to the transmission of western culture is daily being contested. Adriana believes that the “asymmetric ownership of information is breaking down” and the individual, rather than the group is becoming their own arbiter of their own cultural choices. Or in Tom Loosemore’s more New Labourish terms, “interpretation no longer sits in the hands of the few, but in the hands of the many”.

This has profound implications for society, and not all of them good. But it is far from inevitable, as Kamm argues, that it is “changing how politics is conducted – overwhelmingly for the worse”.

The supposed “hyper democracy” of the internet poll is not democracy at all, since it reduces collective intelligence to a pre-internet-age binary. Democracy that is, as the US-based Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko told a round table at Interface in Belfast last week, more like the endless labour of King Sisyphus than any recognisable method or end in itself:

“I left Poland in search of democracy and found it was more like a phantom always shifting and constantly lingering on the horizon. Once it is given to someone, it changes. In fact, it needs to be remade every day. It requires the consistent disruption of silences and the [utterance] of things that people do not want to hear.”

I’m with Krzysztof.

Cross posted from the original at Comment is Free